Wednesday, January 27, 2010
My Paperback Debut
During the year after I graduated from Oberlin College, while I was working for the Office of College Relations, I was able to take one course per semester for free. One of the courses I took was called "Teaching and Tutoring Writing Across the Disciplines." Aside from our own writing and discussion, part of the class consisted of working as a writing tutor for college class (I tutored Paula Richman's "Introduction to Religion").
The primary text for the class, Working with Student Writers: Essays on Tutoring and Teaching, was a collection of essays that had been written by previous students in the class, edited by the instructor, Len Podis, and his wife, JoAnne Podis. I still have my copy, filled with the enthusiastic scribblings of my 22-year-old self, who could imagine no other path than going on to graduate school and eventually becoming a professor himself.
Now, just over ten years later, Peter Lang Publishing has released a second edition of Working with Student Writers featuring the essay I wrote for that class: "The Hero With a Thousand Voices: The Relationship Between the Narrative and Academic Styles." The book is also available on Amazon
. In the essay, I attempted to mediate the tension so many young writers encounter between the academic discourse community they're suddenly expected to inhabit and the narrative discourse that they've been consuming and producing their entire lives; I did so by highlighting the commonalities between the two forms of narrative and academic writing, and by reframing the writing process itself as a narrative.
It's actually a lot more entertaining than it sounds, I swear.
The primary text for the class, Working with Student Writers: Essays on Tutoring and Teaching, was a collection of essays that had been written by previous students in the class, edited by the instructor, Len Podis, and his wife, JoAnne Podis. I still have my copy, filled with the enthusiastic scribblings of my 22-year-old self, who could imagine no other path than going on to graduate school and eventually becoming a professor himself.
Now, just over ten years later, Peter Lang Publishing has released a second edition of Working with Student Writers featuring the essay I wrote for that class: "The Hero With a Thousand Voices: The Relationship Between the Narrative and Academic Styles." The book is also available on Amazon
. In the essay, I attempted to mediate the tension so many young writers encounter between the academic discourse community they're suddenly expected to inhabit and the narrative discourse that they've been consuming and producing their entire lives; I did so by highlighting the commonalities between the two forms of narrative and academic writing, and by reframing the writing process itself as a narrative.It's actually a lot more entertaining than it sounds, I swear.
Labels: books, highered, personalnarrative
Monday, January 18, 2010
Educating Design Clients
One of my favorite websites of late is Clients From Hell, a compendium of anonymously-submitted horror stories from designers. Paging through the site, however, it becomes clear that many of the issues that arise between designers and clients could be preempted by some simple client education at the start of the design process. Many clients have only a vague idea of what it is that designers actually do, and it is the designer's responsibility to explain what we do and how. So I've compiled a list of a few articles that it may be helpful to have a client read before any project begins; I plan to share these with prospective clients as early as possible to ensure that we are both on the same page as to what our respective roles in the project should be.
Of course, if you have any other suggestions of good articles, I'd love to hear them.
Of course, if you have any other suggestions of good articles, I'd love to hear them.
- The Value of Design: Why Hire a Graphic Designer (Gizmo Design)
- Making the Most of a Design Engagement (Adpative Path)
- How to (and not to) work with a designer (Will Harris)
- 5 Things Your Clients Should Know (Webdesigner Depot)
- Working with your designer (Random Non Sequitur)
Monday, December 21, 2009
My Top Albums of the Decade
Generally, I tend to think that things like "Best of the Decade" lists are ways for lazy editors (and bloggers) to fill space, though that never stops me from doing my own year-end lists.
However, reading Paste Magazine's take on the topic led me to reflect a bit on how much my musical life has changed in the last ten years. If the 90s were the decade when I discovered music -- when the power of melody, rhythm, lyrics and live performance were first revealed to me, and I made my initial tentative stabs at writing, performing, and recording music -- then the '00s were the decade in which I began to live it. In the last ten years, I've recorded three solo "bedroom" records, as well as a full-fledged studio record with my band The Lost Cartographers, played dozens of gigs, seen hundreds more, and increased the size of my music collection by a power of a power of ten. iTunes changed the way we buy music, and made it possible for me to listen to that entire collection shuffled together (making the album itself a somewhat archaic way of organizing lists like these). And my iPhone allows me to take a large chunk of it with me wherever I go, as well as find and download new music from anywhere.
Through all these changes, the albums listed below are the ones that I most enjoyed over the past decade. I make no claims that these are the best albums produced in that time frame, but they are the ones that I would take with me to that other critical cliche: the desert island.
The Runners-Up:
5. Main Hoon Na
(2004) - Main Hoon Na is the Bollywood movie I recommend most often to those who have never seen one: it's funny and smart, worldly and rooted in an ancient mythic tradition (it's based on the ancient epic Ramayana), and the music is great. The soundtrack takes the something-for-everything approach of masala films to a global level, mashing together styles as diverse as qawwali devotional music, American 1950s rock, and Latin pop just for the sheer joy of it, and it provided a big chunk of the soundtrack for my summer in Jaipur.
4. The Avett Brothers, Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions
(2006) - While 2007's Emotionalism and 2009 major label debut I and Love and You get most of the critical attention, Four Thieves Gone gets my vote as the Avetts' best, as it's one of the few studio albums that manages to convey the frenetic joy of a great live band in all its jagged glory.
3. Solomon Burke, Nashville
(2006) - The larger-than-life "Legendary King of Rock and Soul" returns to his country roots on an album produced by Buddy Miller, and featuring collaborators from Patty Griffin to Dolly Parton. The result is an incomparably beautiful mix of soul and country, a truly American sound.
2. Old 97's, Blame It On Gravity
(2008) - Currently my favorite band of all time, the 97's had an up-and-down decade, getting dropped by Elektra after 2001's 60s-pop-influenced Sattelite Rides, returning to their alt.country origins on 2004's Drag It Up (which unfortunately obscured some pretty good songs with muddy and orerdone production) and coming back with six-guns blazing for their last album of the decade, an accomplishment that rivals their excellent late 90s albums for country swagger and pure melodic bliss.
1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(2002) - In the summer of 2002, while driving north from San Francisco in a rented car to visit friends and family in the Pacific Northwest, I stopped at a roadside mall to buy some CDs for the drive (this was a good four months before I got my first iPod). I had never owned a Wilco CD before, but the critical buzz over their new album was deafening, especially in my new hometown of Chicago (whose iconic Marina Towers also graced the CD cover), and I had heard enough bits and pieces of it to be intrigued. At that moment, driving away from the ruins of a failed relationship and toward a future that was thrillingly uncertain, the insect hum of homemade electronics, off-kilter drumming, and half-drunken piano plinking of "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" held out the promise that, for all its heartbreak, the world remained a strange and beautiful place. By the end of the achingly lovely "Jesus Etc." I knew that this would be one of my favorite albums of all-time.
However, reading Paste Magazine's take on the topic led me to reflect a bit on how much my musical life has changed in the last ten years. If the 90s were the decade when I discovered music -- when the power of melody, rhythm, lyrics and live performance were first revealed to me, and I made my initial tentative stabs at writing, performing, and recording music -- then the '00s were the decade in which I began to live it. In the last ten years, I've recorded three solo "bedroom" records, as well as a full-fledged studio record with my band The Lost Cartographers, played dozens of gigs, seen hundreds more, and increased the size of my music collection by a power of a power of ten. iTunes changed the way we buy music, and made it possible for me to listen to that entire collection shuffled together (making the album itself a somewhat archaic way of organizing lists like these). And my iPhone allows me to take a large chunk of it with me wherever I go, as well as find and download new music from anywhere.
Through all these changes, the albums listed below are the ones that I most enjoyed over the past decade. I make no claims that these are the best albums produced in that time frame, but they are the ones that I would take with me to that other critical cliche: the desert island.
The Runners-Up:
- Beirut, Gulag Orkestar
(2006)
- Art Brut, Bang Bang Rock & Roll
(2005)
- Clem Snide, The Ghost of Fashion
(2001)
- The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
(2006)
- Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
(2005)
5. Main Hoon Na
(2004) - Main Hoon Na is the Bollywood movie I recommend most often to those who have never seen one: it's funny and smart, worldly and rooted in an ancient mythic tradition (it's based on the ancient epic Ramayana), and the music is great. The soundtrack takes the something-for-everything approach of masala films to a global level, mashing together styles as diverse as qawwali devotional music, American 1950s rock, and Latin pop just for the sheer joy of it, and it provided a big chunk of the soundtrack for my summer in Jaipur.4. The Avett Brothers, Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions
(2006) - While 2007's Emotionalism and 2009 major label debut I and Love and You get most of the critical attention, Four Thieves Gone gets my vote as the Avetts' best, as it's one of the few studio albums that manages to convey the frenetic joy of a great live band in all its jagged glory.3. Solomon Burke, Nashville
(2006) - The larger-than-life "Legendary King of Rock and Soul" returns to his country roots on an album produced by Buddy Miller, and featuring collaborators from Patty Griffin to Dolly Parton. The result is an incomparably beautiful mix of soul and country, a truly American sound.2. Old 97's, Blame It On Gravity
(2008) - Currently my favorite band of all time, the 97's had an up-and-down decade, getting dropped by Elektra after 2001's 60s-pop-influenced Sattelite Rides, returning to their alt.country origins on 2004's Drag It Up (which unfortunately obscured some pretty good songs with muddy and orerdone production) and coming back with six-guns blazing for their last album of the decade, an accomplishment that rivals their excellent late 90s albums for country swagger and pure melodic bliss.1. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
(2002) - In the summer of 2002, while driving north from San Francisco in a rented car to visit friends and family in the Pacific Northwest, I stopped at a roadside mall to buy some CDs for the drive (this was a good four months before I got my first iPod). I had never owned a Wilco CD before, but the critical buzz over their new album was deafening, especially in my new hometown of Chicago (whose iconic Marina Towers also graced the CD cover), and I had heard enough bits and pieces of it to be intrigued. At that moment, driving away from the ruins of a failed relationship and toward a future that was thrillingly uncertain, the insect hum of homemade electronics, off-kilter drumming, and half-drunken piano plinking of "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" held out the promise that, for all its heartbreak, the world remained a strange and beautiful place. By the end of the achingly lovely "Jesus Etc." I knew that this would be one of my favorite albums of all-time.Labels: music, recommendations
Monday, December 7, 2009
In Which I Land on Boagworld
This past week's episode of Boagworld featured yours truly doing an audio version of my review of Prezi.com (originally featured here). Boagworld is the only web design podcast I listen to religiously and I've highly recommended it before; aside from being quite informative, the hosts, Paul and Marcus, are very entertaining and exceedingly funny... maybe it's the British accents? It's a pleasure to be associated with such a great resource for the web design community.
Labels: podcasts, recommendations, reviews, webtech
Monday, November 30, 2009
Design Lab: Infographic on Gun Control and Violent Crime
After last month's one-day course taught by Edward Tufte, I was inspired to try creating my own complex infographic. I decided to tackle a subject that comes up rather frequently in discussions with one particular family member: the relationship between gun control laws and violent crime.
The graphic above charts 4 variables: the violent crime rate in a given state in 2008 (x axis), the strictness of a state's gun control laws as ranked by gun control advocacy group the Brady Campaign (y axis), a state's poverty rate in 2008 (on a spectrum from green [low] to black [high]) and a state's "diversity index" (the likelihood that two randomly selected people will be of a different ethnic group, as determined by the 2000 census; the larger the type, the more diverse the state). I had also thought about indicating both geographical proximity (by means of connecting lines, but these made the graphic nearly illegible) and population density (though I could think of no concise means of indicating that New Jersey's population density is 1000 times that of Alaska).
Now, I am no statistician or criminologist and I'll leave the conclusions to them, but it seems to me that this graphic does pretty well at one of the jobs of a complex infographic by, well, complicating the problem. The chart shows pretty clearly that strict gun control laws do not necessarily lead to a lower rate of violent crimes, but it also shows that fewer restrictions on gun ownership also do not lead to a lower violent crime rate -- an armed society is not, as some gun rights advocates would argue, necessarily a polite society (as to the wisdom of basing social policy on the musings of a science fiction writer, well, that's probably a subject for another infographic). Nor do the other variables represented indicate a singular cause of violent crime: some of the most diverse states are among the least violent, as are some of the least wealthy states. What the graph makes clear, I think, is that there is no simple answer to reducing violent crime.
So what do you think? How could this graphic be improved? How could I add more variables while keeping the image legible? I'd love to see some of my designer friends take a hack at this same problem and come up with a different way of looking at the data (which is available here, by the way).
The graphic above charts 4 variables: the violent crime rate in a given state in 2008 (x axis), the strictness of a state's gun control laws as ranked by gun control advocacy group the Brady Campaign (y axis), a state's poverty rate in 2008 (on a spectrum from green [low] to black [high]) and a state's "diversity index" (the likelihood that two randomly selected people will be of a different ethnic group, as determined by the 2000 census; the larger the type, the more diverse the state). I had also thought about indicating both geographical proximity (by means of connecting lines, but these made the graphic nearly illegible) and population density (though I could think of no concise means of indicating that New Jersey's population density is 1000 times that of Alaska).
Now, I am no statistician or criminologist and I'll leave the conclusions to them, but it seems to me that this graphic does pretty well at one of the jobs of a complex infographic by, well, complicating the problem. The chart shows pretty clearly that strict gun control laws do not necessarily lead to a lower rate of violent crimes, but it also shows that fewer restrictions on gun ownership also do not lead to a lower violent crime rate -- an armed society is not, as some gun rights advocates would argue, necessarily a polite society (as to the wisdom of basing social policy on the musings of a science fiction writer, well, that's probably a subject for another infographic). Nor do the other variables represented indicate a singular cause of violent crime: some of the most diverse states are among the least violent, as are some of the least wealthy states. What the graph makes clear, I think, is that there is no simple answer to reducing violent crime.
So what do you think? How could this graphic be improved? How could I add more variables while keeping the image legible? I'd love to see some of my designer friends take a hack at this same problem and come up with a different way of looking at the data (which is available here, by the way).
Labels: design, projectupdate
