Imagine that you owned the digital data produced by your own life, Indhira Rojas asks with the help of NY Times writer Rob Walker. You know, the data produced whenever you do business with a credit card, operate your smart phone, visit a website. Other people are gathering this information and using it. A quick…

Votes are little messages that matter, but what exactly do votes say? According to Elizabeth Drew, our politicians routinely claim to know exactly what voters were saying with their votes: After an election, there’s inevitably a variety of pronouncements of politicians on what they “heard the voters say.” They and the various pundits largely “hear”…

I’ve been meaning to look back at “Recipe Redux: The Community Cookbook,” Amanda Hesser’s 10/6/10 account of working with New York Times readers to find the best recipes from the history of the paper to gather into a new cookbook. When I first read the piece in the food issue of the Sunday magazine I…

In I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s charming novel about coming of age in a time of austerity, the youthful narrator, who wants to be a writer, by the way, speaks ruefully about the slender offerings each day at the evening meal: “I thank heaven there is no cheaper form of bread than bread.” (p.…

It took well over a thousand posts to get there, but I still like the concept of blogging expressed in an entry near the end of the run at my old blog. The post starts with “Blogging is not a genre” and ends with: The mistake here is not just thinking that there are only…

The normal path for many academics is to ignore the wider uses of their research: “I saw a number of studies [at an academic conference] this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful. Yet they’re not available in forms I’d feel comfortable sending around the newsroom. In fact, I’ve never seen scholarship cited…

“All over the world serious work is being made in all sorts of unauthorised ways. Old-fashioned opinion, meanwhile, is tying its shoelaces and not noticing.” (“Mere Fact, Mere Fiction,” 4/17/10, Guardian) That is David Hare, from an essay on writing, theater, and journalism. If he’s right, then the next thing to hope for would be…

Sadly, Posterous no longer exists so the links below are dead. For those who might still want to listen in on the 4/6 Lundquist lecture about social media, literacy, and democracy, four segments of the talk are available as streaming audio with annotations giving clues to what each portion of the talk addresses. Part 1…

A talk on literacy, democracy, blogging, and Twitter The 2010 Lundquist Lecture–Ken Smith, Department of English and Master of Liberal Studies Program 7:00 p.m., Tuesday, April 6 in 1001 Wiekamp Hall (1800 Mishawaka Avenue) Reception to follow. Free and open to the public. As Franklin Roosevelt noted, education—literacy itself—is a precondition for improved democracy, as…

An episode from the April 6 talk, the story of Otto and Elise Hampel. They were trapped in Berlin during World War II and wanted to protest Hitler’s government. They had no political skills or allies, no  kind of public voice. They hit upon the idea of writing short, Twitter-like messages on postcards and leaving…