I gave a talk for Prof. DJ's class last night, and it was a blast. Mostly my old computer model of literary judgement talk, but updated and longer; and then I blathered a bit about the possibilities of tagging. And I dipped into the whole "radical fuzzy separatism" thing that i'm going to talk about at SXSWi on the blogher women's visibility panel.
Then DJ pinned me to the wall with really hard questions about anthologizing and translation. Of course I enjoyed this no end. When I walked in I was basically confident but my goal was to talk for 15-20 minutes without losing my cool and stammering, or looking like a dumbass. Er, instead, half an hour later I came up for air and realized I could talk for three hours with no problem and never run out of weird ideas. The class was... I think they were stimulated, even if I lost some of them a little bit... And there was a show of hands of people who had tried translating stuff. a lot of them! I said a few words about ALTA and NCTA - how great they are. And I realized i am at this point something of an expert on anthologies of spanish american literature because when people mentioned particular ones, I was like, "oh, that one, yes..." Hmm, this should not be a surprise to me, but it was.
What I didn't do well (and hadn't at all thought about) was getting the class in a good pithy high-participation discussion. On the way home I had a zillion ideas of how to do it with quick exercises. And also had lovely ideas about running online classes, group blogs, wikis, making everyone tag up class reading assignments and each other's contributions and criticism... and I realized I really wanted to know all their thoughts and alas did not get them because I didn't shut up and draw them out enough. Partly because DJ kept asking me more questions to draw me out. which, while it made me realize that I kick ass and people want to hear my weird theories, did not get other people talking!
I repeated the thing that David B. said at Potlatch about genre not being a box you see if things happen to fit into, but it's a collection of stuff you draw (more or less arbitrary) lines around to make a box. I told him at the con that I agreed with that in the extreme! And I liked it so much as a metaphor that I passed it on to DJ's class.
it was an effort not to lecture only to the two people who were smiling and nodding... that was interesting! just like the classic experiment. (Which I ran once in 9th grade on my english teacher, with the collaboration of my whole class -- we split down the middle of the room into frowning looker-awayers and smiling nodders, and the teacher ended up on the smiley side, talking only to them!)
The shutting-up problem is one of the things that I really struggle with. Here at work I have instituted a rule that I don't get to say something until I've written it out (at least in shorthand). Usually that keeps me from popping off about /everything/, because I hate handwriting.
I wonder where we learn tagging. I do it all the time, and I have reinforcement from all the indexing I do at work, but I have always organized my bookshelves by a tagging system, one shading into the other -- "old fairy tales" "new fairy tales" "modern novels with fairy themes" "fantastic novels" "future with magic" .... they're not distinct, but each book has a set of tags for me, and then the weighting of those tags gives me order.
Posted by: Wired | March 02, 2006 at 01:18 PM