Fiormonte: Genetic Machines

Another great paper at the Brown conference was by Domenico Fiormonte on “Textual genesis and the writing process: The Magrelli Genetic Machine”. After giving us a background on philology and textual criticism in Italy, he showed a Flash variant machine that allows one to see manuscript and text interact. Domenico led the development of the Digital Variants site at the University of Edinburgh which has information about tools, theory, texts, and projects.
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Resources for the Humanities: Brown Conference

Online Resources for the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives was a conference that was hotsted by Brown University and organized by Massimo Riva. It was one of the better small conferences I have been to in a long time (so there will be a series of blog entries on the ideas that circulated.) As Dr. Riva put it:

We are in a process of transcribing the humanities. This involves both representing the traditional evidence of the humanities in digital form and the developing new questions and techniques which we can ask of digital evidence.

One special feature of the conference was that it brought together a number of people in Italy doing Humanities Computing with people in North America. For me it was a chance to see a breadth of activities from Italy and to talk about humanities computing in Italian.
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Rescue Tenure from the Monograph

“Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph” by Lindsay Waters in The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that we are spewing out too many second-rate books as we force new scholars to publish one or two to get tenure. His remedy is to return to a few excellent essays for tenure and to publish fewer books that are full of “gusto” (accessible and moving to a larger audience.)
The realities of the pressures to get tenure are unlikely to change, so I doubt the community can easily change course, but what if the form in which early publishing took place were changed? What if blogs, wikis, discussion list participation, and other forms of social/network writing were assessed. Early in a career is when academics should be writing with and for others in order to establish their network of ideas. Books can come later out of what has been tested in the creative common.
How would one assess quality (and quantity) for such writing? I can think of some bibliometric methods (Google as tenure tool), but they would be crude and easy to manipulate. Ideas?
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