Worth Reading Recently

• Bob Braun asks why it is okay to defame teachers.
• Poly Styrene, Punk Prophet & Science Fiction Priestess.
• Mass Effect, Personal Identity, and Genocide.
• Audrey Watters on the history of The Learning Channel.
• Cory Doctorow's You Are Not A Digital Native: Privacy In The Age Of The Internet.
• Bob Mackey on Captain N: The Game Master.
• Emily Nussbaum on Inside Amy Schumer.
• Matt Reed on extra credit. JUST. SAY. NO.
• Jill Walker-Rettberg on wondering if the world can change.
• Roger Ebert on Do The Right Thing.

Books Read In 2013

1. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
2. For Love Of Evil by Piers Anthony
3. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
4. Bloodfire Quest by Terry Brooks
5. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
6. Homeland by Cory Doctorow
7. Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow
8. Falling Man by Don Delillo
9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
10. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Carolyn Maddux
11. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
12. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
13. And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life by Charles Shields
14. Freedom by Daniel Suarez
15. Kill Decision by Daniel Duarez
16. In Defense of Terror: Liberty or Death in The French Revolution by Sophie Wahnich
17. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
18. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
19. Conversations With David Foster Wallace
20. Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner
21. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities Anthology

Books Read In 2012

1. Being A Green Mother by Piers Anthony
2. The Tent by Margaret Atwood
3. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
4. Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort
5. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
6. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
8. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
9. The Mind of Italo Calvino by Dan Cavallaro
10. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin
11. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
12. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
13. Crossed by Ally Condie
14. Noir by Robert Coover
15. Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
16. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow
17. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue
18. Football The First Hundred Years The Untold Story by Adrian Harvey
19. My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles
20. The Map & The Territory by Michel Houllebecq
21. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard
22. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
23. Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James
24. Fifty Shades Freed by E. L. James
25. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
26. The Life & Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson
27. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
28. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
29. The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason
30. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
31. Batman The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
32. Batman Year One by Frank Miller
33. Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
34. Paradise Lost by John Milton
35. Batman-The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
36. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
37. The Watchmen by Alan Moore
38. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabakov
39. King Lear by William Shakespeare
40. Authors In Context: Virginia Woolf by Michael Whitworth
41. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
42. The Quran (Sher Ali Holy translation)
43. Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
44. The Tel Quel Reader

Replacing Google Reader With Newsblur

With the coming demise of Google Reader, I have spent some time recently trying to find a good replacement for the RSS reader. Despite all of these idiotic proclamations that RSS is dead and apps like Youtube and Instagram not even offering easy access to it anymore, which is beyond frustrating, I am still an ardent user of RSS.

My usage of RSS has evolved over the years; previous to the past few years, I used RSS for almost all of my online reading. With the mainstream popularity of Twitter, I have been able to move a lot of my day to day reading to tweets. Apps like Flipboard let me read more frequently updating websites at my own leisure. These days my usage of RSS is for infrequently updates websites and for tracking various things, like certain Tumblr users I want to make sure I all their content.

After trying out a number of RSS readers including Net Vibes and even going back to the old Bloglines, which still exists, I have settled on Newsblur for my RSS reader. Newsblur is a modern app that works on the desktop, phone, and tablet. It syncs nicely and is constantly updating and getting better in both performance and appearance. Hoping that Newsblur will stick around, I even put down the $24 for a yearly premium account.

Cory Doctorow is also moving to Newsblur, which I take as a really good sign about its promise. Audrey Watters also has some good thoughts and goes through a long run down of various RSS readers.

Podcast-A Threat To The Known: The Unknown Descendants Of Print Culture Part One

I have wanted to do this for awhile and finally have the time this summer. Inspired by what Cory Doctorow does with his writing, I am going to create podcasts of all my published works. I will try to release these weekly at least for the time being. It should take me awhile to catch up on everything.

I thought the best place to begin would be my Master’s Thesis, which I completed in May of 2009. It is called A Threat To The Known: The Unknown Descendants Of Print Culture. You may have read about it back then from time to time.

I will release my reading of it over a number of weeks. Hopefully, people are into this idea.

Books Read 2011

1. Beowulf & Other English Poems
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
3. Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
4. With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
5. Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
6. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
7. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
8. Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
9. Incidents by Roland Barthes
10. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
11. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
12. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
13. High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
14. High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
15. The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
16. Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
17. Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
18. The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
19. Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
21. Matched by Ally Condie
22. Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
23. Makers by Cory Doctorow
24. With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
25. Ten Plays by Euripides
26. Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
27. H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
28. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
29. The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
31. Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
32. New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
33. Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
34. Piers Plowman by William Langland
35. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
36. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
37. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
38. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
39. Plato-Euthyphro
40. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
41. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
42. Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
43. Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
45. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
46. The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf

ThatCamp Philadelphia: Small Scale Publications & Digital Editions

The Stockton family ran a number of sessions at ThatCamp Philadelphia, including Deb Gussman’s session on small scale publications and digital editions.

• Gussman is doing a digital edition of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
• Deb’s steps of a digital project: Strategy and Approach, Scope, Content, Design, Development, Testing, Support.
• Collaboration is very important. Need to find others who have skills you don’t have.
• There are no guarantees that apps, websites, etc will work in a year.
• I suggested the use of emulators ala what is done in modern times with classic interactive fiction.
• Deciding on what app/website/cms to use can often come from other colleagues/friends.
• I brought up the work of Cory Doctorow and how, by releasing his work under a Creative Commons license, readers can create versions of his works for different platforms.
• It is helpful to be familiar with remix culture in general.
• A great idea from John Theibault: in grant applications, include money for development of emulators for later editions when platforms become obsolete.
• Creative Commons licensing allows others to care more about the preservation of your work than you do.
• A lot of Gussman’s work with Sedgwick is coming from Google Books.
• Theibault’s students digitized Philadelphia’s directories.
• Back in 2003, I worked on the digitization of the American Weekly Mercury in one of Tom Kinsella’s classes.

Deb leading the discussion.

Adeline Koh, John Thebault, and Rebecca Goldman listen to the discussion.