MUNACA, McGill’s union of non-academic professionals, went on strike yesterday at 6am. MUNACA members do a great deal of the work that keeps the university running. Our department has three MUNACA staff, and I depend mightily upon them as a faculty member. In my time as grad director and then chair, I got to know …
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Yesterday’s New York Times had a story on sports figures with temporary vocal cord paralysis–announcers Joe Buck and Dick Vitale, and referee Mike Pereira. The piece more or less exactly describes my own difficulties. Here’s Pereira talking about himself and Buck: “You have to reach more into your diaphragm to get the vocal cords to …
Continue reading “Speech Impairment: in the news, in the booth, at some parties, and in situ”
When I arrived in Canada in 2004, I was blown away by the mere existence of Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe. Here were two politicians who spoke the truth, had roots in labor and consistently and unambiguously promoted left values. Layton was of course frequently red-baited by both the liberals and press (a fact conveniently …
Continue reading “Yet Another Layton Obit (upon reading today’s Globe & Mail)”
For our last lunch in LA, we go find the Korean Taco Truck. It’s delicious and not the kind of thing you’d find anywhere else. While we’re eating the Quizno’s across the street calls the police, who come and chase them away. Then some enraged lady accosts us ranting about how “we have rights as …
Continue reading “The Quintessential Los Angeles Experience”
Thursday’s talk at the NEH/Vectors institute by Alex Juhasz raised some interesting questions for me about online argument. Humanistic thought has, for hundreds of years, operated in relatively linear and long-form arguments. Even those works that challenge linearity (I am thinking here of the standard stable of poststructuralist critiques) exists with reference to it, and …
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There’s a lot of talk in Digital Humanities about “born digital” content. But what we are really talking about at this point is different kinds of digital, and the politics of competing standards. My project for this institute is to create a digital companion for my mp3 book. The purpose of the site is to …
Background: 0.1. Existing digital humanities work has largely reproduced visualist biases in the humanities: work with images and audiovisual texts has been thus far assumed to be more primary than work with sound as a text. And yet, sound is one of the major areas where huge gains could be made in digital publication. As …
Continue reading “Audio in Digital Humanities Authorship: A Roadmap (version 0.5)”
