Caveat Lector

I present this rip-roaring Unicode rant so that it gets play outside the world of the linguistibloggers.

My only added note is that this is a harder problem than in print. In print, you can hack your typesetting system all kinds of ways to get a glyph that looks right. (I can’t, personally, but I was perpetually in awe of the unlikely contortions the Penta system could be made to perform.) That won’t fly on the Web, because rendering is distinct from authorship, and because a hack that gets the glyph looking right may render it unsearchable.

Tough stuff. Glad it’s one facet of electronic text I’m not personally working on.

There’s a fantastic interview with Douglas Bowman (of the Wired website redesign) over at Digital Web Magazine.

I especially liked this bit:

As I mentioned earlier, I think an underplayed analogy with CSS is a correlation with style sheets used in print design and production. Designers and production artists have long been familiar with the concept of style sheets, popularized by desktop publishing apps like QuarkXPress. Even common word processing apps make use of global style-formatting features, and have for years. So the base concept of CSS is already a familiar one to many people.

Never had occasion to mention that connection before, me. Nope. Never. Why on earth would I ever think that typesetters and Web design people have anything at all to say to each other?

Those of us still mourning Invisible Adjunct’s departure might want to glance over at Wolf Angel, who is leaving a Ph.D program in linguistics.

WA’s painful oscillations feel unbelievably familiar to me. She’s getting out a lot sooner than I did—good on her!—but she’s also a fine reminder that length of stay isn’t necessarily a good correlator with the amount of stress on departure.

Without question, WA is doing a better job at the leaving thing than I did. So is WA’s department. She’s got a fascinating job she’ll be taking up, and she’s got at least one sympathetic ear in her department that should serve her well for such mundanities as job references.

That said, WA could use a bit more support than my sloppy help. So go on over and be friendly.

Correction: Why don’t I know any female linguists? Other than Wolf Angel, that is.

In the heyday of the card catalog, hard-pressed librarians dealing with multilingual collections had understandable trouble dealing with books in languages they didn’t know. And so was born the International Standard Book Description, a set of standard punctuation conventions and ordering for the various parts of a book description that go in a library card.

Some time later, along came MARC, which stuck everything in database-like fields and subfields, with delimiters.

Only… only… they kept using ISBD punctuation in MARC records.

Eeeeeuuuuugh. Double delimiters. How inelegant is that?

I’m being a bit of a snobby purist here—it’s not as though punctuation never causes problems in markup circles—but, sheesh, generating punctuation at the end of a given populated field is no big deal. No reason at all not to leave the ISBD punctuation out of MARC and write an output filter to stick it back in.

I warn you, however, that my opinion is currently highly uneducated, and may change once I understand the whole story better.

I’m terribly late to the party, but I want to drop a present on the table anyway.

Invisible Adjunct is hanging up her blog, to seek green pastures outside the Ivory Tower.

I’ll miss her something fierce, not least because she said with clarity and grace what I can only ever manage to say with the coarse brutality of a muckraker. She achieved what I tried and failed at: she got them talking out loud, the hurt people, the abandoned people, the shot-down people. Call it the last gasp of my personal youthful idealism—I think she has changed academia, and will continue to do so even if she never writes another word on the subject.

It’s such a big world. I’m never comfortable saying who’s going to do well in it. I know, though, that if IA doesn’t manage to prosper, it won’t be her—it’ll be the system.

I think she’ll be back in the blogsphere someday. I can see why she’d want to turn her back on it now, but now is a long way from always. I do hope that I find her again, when she returns.

On the off-chance, though—IA, if you ever want to shed the chrysalis completely, let me know. I’ll happily take the domain and its contents under my wing. Much too important to let fade.

It’s eminently possible to be too clever for one’s own good.

I did a slick little trick for Info Arch client’s site involving turning a thick border into an ersatz navigation bar via relative-positioning the list of links. After much futzing, finally got it working a treat. (Except in Firebird on Win98. Still don’t know what the heck was up with that.)

The problem was that the bar was so thick it had become the dominant visual element on the page, quite overshadowing the (very slick—I can say this because I didn’t design it) logo and the nice swooshy sidebar.

This, one of my groupmates pointed out to me gently, was not good.

Well, okay, I can slim the bar a bit… maybe cut the font size… wait a minute. This is silly. Start over. Start OVER.

Five seconds later, I’d dumped the border and the relative positioning and redone the bar with thin top and bottom borders and the same unobtrusive background color as the navigation sidebar. Much, much better-looking and more reliable, though oozing much less cleverness.

Hey. Maybe the gray instead of the green for the borders there, since the page is so green-heavy… I’ll see. Either way, less cleverness meant a better-looking page.

Eventually I shall be clever again, I’m sure. Fear me…

For once, I’m not using CavLec as a bully pulpit to trash academia. What I’m trying to do, in my discursive and dilatory fashion, is figure out how to get SLIS what it wants—videlicet and to wit, me or someone like me teaching Things Markuppish—while neither depriving myself of things I want nor being forced into things I don’t want.

So I’m kind of wandering aimlessly around the problem at the moment, trying to look at it from different angles. The question I’m asking myself now is how the practical stuff gets taught, in the university at large and at SLIS in particular.

I come up with two models. One is the class-project model, which often (but not always) includes a world-outside-classroom component. We don’t just hear about surveys and focus groups in Use and Users—we have to go out and do ’em. We’re not just talking about Information Architecture—we’re trying to make it work for somebody. In my role as SLIS Library Committee member, I’m currently reading funding and management recommendations for the SLIS computer lab that were researched and drafted in last year’s management course.

This is a good, functional, useful model. I strongly approve of it, pace the well-known distaste of SLIS students for group projects. There’s really no way to walk away from such a project not having learned something, unless you’re a project leech (which does, unfortunately, happen).

But it only works in the context of a bona fide offered class, which is a difficult thing for a department to commit to, especially in the absence of a reliable source (a tenured or tenure-track professor) of tutelage. I’ve already advanced some suggestions as to why appropriate people are hard to lure into the teaching fold.

The other model is the workshop model. Come learn PowerPoint or Lexis/Nexis or Access or Factiva or HTML in 75 minutes!

Problems with this? Legion.

• Nobody has to come to a workshop. Frequently, that means nobody does. It’s extra, though the skills it’s teaching may be valuable or even vital. This leads to the disconnect often lamented by the SLIS library/lab people: when surveyed, students say loudly and clearly that they want to learn XML. When I give a workshop, however—nobody comes. And students then graduate complaining that they didn’t learn anything practical; that’s the number-one complaint levelled at library schools.
• There’s no institutional support for workshops, other than providing the venue. I’ve never heard a professor tell (much less require) students to go to a particular workshop. What the institution doesn’t emphasize, students will blow off. Why should they do otherwise? They’re there to get the institution to credential them, after all.
• It’s a scheduling and time-sink burden on students, both to take and to teach. I’m working on scheduling a CSS workshop now. Assuming it’s the same 75-minute deal as before, that’ll be six hours of workshop time I’ll have done this semester. (Would have been seven and a half if the XML workshop had flown.) Add in considerable planning and travel time, and I have given a lot of energy to SLIS for zero financial, academic, or future-employment return. (Not that I’m complaining. I’m just saying.)
• It’s divorced from context, lacking the urgency that a real project stirs. I can’t seriously expect people to hack up a web page starting from zero in 75 minutes!
• No continuity. I can’t reliably do workshop sequels that assume attendance at a previous workshop. Nor can I easily make myself available as a consultation resource for student projects. It’s critically difficult to build advanced practical skills in people with a workshop model.
• There is no quality control whatever on presenters and presentations. What’s to stop me from teaching EAD despite knowing almost nothing about it? Nothing. (Which isn’t to say SLIS presentations have been bad. The ones I’ve been to, as opposed to teaching, have been excellent.)
• There’s competition. There’s already a group on campus that does technology workshops. They won’t be tailored to a library student’s needs, of course, but they meet all the other criteria. Does SLIS really need to be in this business?

One could suggest band-aid solutions to some of the problems. SLIS workshops are likely to go to a registration system soon (as opposed to announcements of “come if you feel like it!”), which might help people commit to attending. I can say for myself that since I started sending out emails requesting RSVPs, I’ve had better workshop attendance.

Professors might push and shove their students into workshops, sure. Or the SLIS workshops might get folded into the main campus workshop group.

That still leaves the context problem, the divorced-from-real-world problem, the competence problem, and the continuity problem. I’m sorry, but as long as the model is workshops, these problems go nowhere, and to my mind they call the whole enterprise into question.

So what’s the answer, Dorothea?

I dunno yet. But I’m taking a hard—and rather less jaundiced than usual—look at tenure in academic libraries. Why not raid these people for SLIS teachers? Why not create dual appointments between the academic library and the library school?

Isn’t that the ideal pairing? Instead of teaching-and-research, we have teaching-and-practice—which is exactly the pairing that would make both SLIS and me happy, seeing as how SLIS isn’t interested in the kind of research I would want to do. Joint school-library tenure means that a good teacher/practitioner won’t vanish, either from the library or the school. And researchers could teach research, and practitioners could teach practice, and everybody (including students) would be happy.

Where does my logic fall down? Really. I want to know.

I’m supposed to hear about the NASIG conference grant by April. I haven’t heard. I have no idea whether this is good or bad.

Well… crud.

A SLISmate pointed out another possibility to me in email: the practical projects that get done in academia because industry doesn’t want to pay for them.

Ah, yes. Fiefs and the fiefdom system. I know those. The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies was a fief, though it died when its lord left it. Brown’s Scholarly Technology Group was one—I say “was” because Brown has since gutted it. It exists still, but as a shell of its former self; again, its feudal lord Allen Renear left, and nobody else could fight effectively enough to keep it alive. Allen’s been getting another fief going in his new home.

I sorta work on a fief now, actually, strictly at the serf level. The Puerto Rican Census Project is a fief belonging to a few history and sociology professors.

Yes, the fiefdom model gets some good things done, no question about it; my flippancy as regards naming the system doesn’t mean I lack respect for it. But take a closer look. What do the academics who build and maintain fiefs actually do?

Let me be clear on one point: Some Ph.Ds who work in fiefdom are not academics—that is, they’re not hired as tenure-track teachers and researchers with responsibilities to an academic department. Their sole allegiance to the fief. I’m not going to talk about them. I’m talking about the garden-variety tenured or tenure-track dudette who builds a fief on the side. Why? Because if I were to go the route that SLIS wants me to, combining it with fief construction to further my own interests, that’s what I’d be.

Academics with fiefs manage them. Hire and fire. Write grants. Suck up to industry to get handouts. In the time left over from this and a teaching and research load, they might be able to go to some conferences, do some work of their own. Wish I were kidding, but I’m not. I haven’t dared talk to Allen in months (though I missed his wise counsel last week, I’m telling you!) because he is busily working himself to death, has been since the EPRG got off the ground.

I tell people I’m lazy. Often they don’t believe me. They should. I am a lazy wench; I’d never take on the amount of work Allen has. Especially not for the crumbs of actual work-type work he gets to do, as opposed to all the overhead stuff he must do to keep his fief alive. If I’d had a burning desire to be a grant-writer, I’d not be in library school; I’d be in the work world learning and practicing that honorable trade.

And just to get as far as building my own fief, I’d still have to survive the Ph.D. Not to mention paying for it—I don’t see SLIS finding me a free ride. (What did I say about them making me jump through hoops so that they can get what they want? It feels just as silly now as it did last week.) Sure, sure, PAships, yadda yadda—I did this for half my twenties, and I’m doing it now. I hope I won’t be tagged as too terribly venal if I say that it’s time and past I earned something vaguely resembling a full-timer’s salary.

And then I’d have to earn tenure—it’s dangerous for the non-tenured to put their whole hearts into a fief, because (have I said this before or something?) fief-building is not published research, and published research is what wins tenure.

So, yeah, it’s a nice niche for those Ph.Ds who can land it. Where it falls down for me is that I’d have to go through the whole Ph.D-and-tenure rigmarole first (and even then there’d be no guarantees), and once that’s over I wouldn’t even be doing the part of the fief’s work that I’m interested in.

Here’s the kicker. Academic libraries have this style of fiefdom too. Digital-library fiefs are sprouting up all over; there’s at least one here, and plenty more elsewhere. I’m staking a fair bit of my future hopes on one such fief wanting a text geek of my general description—and jobs I’ve seen posted indicate that I have my head somewhere other than the clouds.

I’d be doing the work I love. And I shan’t have to spend years more of the only life I’ve got doing the Ph.D-and-tenure thing. Sounds like a deal to me.

Well, I suppose I have to turn in my Future Aunts of America membership card now.

Welcome to Nora Patricia Salo-Markowski, a downright human-looking little critter despite having been born a mere five days ago. She and her mom and dad are healthy and happy, and long may they remain so.

Bum that I am, I still have to figure out what to get ’em…