a thaumaturgical compendium

The following is from the appendix of the Sociological Imagination, entitled “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” I recently reread the chapter, and was struck by the recommendation of keeping a journal. I reproduce these paragraphs because of how they speak to the academic’s use of a blog, I think:

What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved ine very intellectual product upon which you may work. o say that you can ‘have experience,’ means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet to be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot ‘keep your hand in’ if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience.

Mills has described, far better than I ever could, why a graduate student should keep a blog. Of course, the piece that may be missing here is the public nature of blogging. That certainly changes things in many ways. But the central idea remains constant: blogging is the process of externalizing thought, of putting form to experience.

While this may not be news to everyone who reads the blog, today it was made official. I have a new administrative position in the School: I am the Graduate Director of Informatics. In practice, I’ll still be teaching and doing research, but I will also be in charge of the Masters in Informatics program. I have plans for this program, some of them small, and some of them a bit more grand. I’m planning on moving fairly slowly — at first. But in the not-so-long run, I hope that when people think of informatics in the US, they think of the University at Buffalo, and when they think of the University at Buffalo, they think of the School of Informatics.

I am hoping that my role in this new position will be as transparent as possible. There is always risk in such an approach: it lets the world see not only our strengths but the problems that we are working on. That said, I think such transparency can only help an organization, and while there are certainly times when discretion will limit my blogging on a topic, I hope to be as open as possible in describing what we are trying to do and how we are trying to do it.

In broad strokes, I am hoping that over the next year, we will:

* Become more entrepreneurial. Part of that means importing the spirit of “demo or die” from the MIT Media Lab. I want to create an environment that encourages risk, especially of the intellectual variety, and that unites thought with practice.

* Solve problems. That is, I want our curriculum and our students to be making a practical differences for the community and for businesses. I want businesses and other organizations that share our entrepreneurial spirit to partner with us and to provide a space in which shared resources yield shared benefits.

* Tell our story. Buffalo is off the beaten track; not everyone comes to visit us up in the “silicon tundra.” The diminution of distance that technology allows is not automatic. We need to pursue the networks and connections that new technologies provide. We need to do a far better job of telling people what we are doing, and paying attention to how this might lead to new connections, partnerships, and exchanges. At the very least, we need to make sure likeminded institutions in Western New York and our neighbors to the north see value in exchanging ideas, particularly when it comes to the social impact and use of communication technologies.

It’s busy at the beginning of the semester, and I have enough projects in full swing that my time is short. Over the fall semester, I hope that we can regroup as a faculty, and decide how to make our masters program a model for other universities to learn from.

“He’s mad,” said Ryger explosively, staring at the door as though Villiers were still standing before it.

“Is he?” said Talliaferro thoughtfully. “I suppose he is, in a way. He hates us for irrational reasons. And, then, not even to scan his paper as a precaution —”

Talliaferro fingered his own small scanner as he said that. It was just a neutrally colored, undistinguished cylinder, somewhat thicker and somewhat shorter than an ordinary pencil. In recent years, it had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as the stethescope was that of the physician and the micro-computer that of the statistician. The scanner was worn in a jacket pocket, or clipped to a sleeve, or slipped behind the ear, or swung at the end of a string.

Talliaferro sometimes, in his more philosophical moments, wondered how it was in the days when research men had to make laborious notes of the literature or file away full-sized reprints. How unwieldy!

- Isaac Asimov, Nine Tomorrows, 1959.

Lady, where’s my spy camera.

- Bart Simpson, 1994

Our local community education course catalog just arrived. This online course caught my eye:

HOW TO USE THE INTERNET - THE BASICS

This is a course for “newbies” to the technological world of the Internet. It is a self paced, basic, online course that is easy to follow. Topics covered are: Introduction to Cyberspace, Vocabulary and Practice, Netiquette, E-Mail, Search Engines and How to Surf.

Am I just naive in thinking that “newbies” might not be familiar with the term “newbies” (or the term “netiquette”)? And I am all for the use of instructional technology, but is an online (only) course the best way to teach the basics of email and surfing the web?

I carefully combed through this year’s Best National Universities list from US News, seeking out our prestigious institution. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the list, where we tie with The New School and with the University of Arkansas in last (#120th) place.

Many say that the list means nothing, and is based on faulty information. Even if they just ranked the schools according to the mellifluidity of their names, there is little doubt that tens of thousands of students each year craft the list of schools to which they are applying based largely on where these schools fall on the US News list. I wish we were at most in the double digits.

I’m in California next week with Jamie; in SoCal during the early part of the week, and then up in the Bay area for the latter part. It’s a sorta-vacation, just like this blog! I already have set up meetings with some of my long-time readers. If anyone else would like to get together for a coffee|tea|beer, just drop me a note.

Over the last few months, one of the most consistent search strings for my blog, showing up in the top 20 almost every month, is “how to build a raft.” (They end up with this post, from April.) I think the desire to build something that can float and take you places runs very deep in many people. And the bigger the better.

Why not a Wikipedia of rafts, a mob riverboat? Designate somewhere on the Mississippi, maybe Minneapolis. Fix a date and a place, and take all comers. They can bring any salvaged material that is enough to float themselves and another person (and that they don’t mind never seeing again), and necessary provisions. Then make your way down the old Miss, picking up people along the way. End it with a huge party when we hit the Gulf of Mexico.

Has this already been done? It would only require a skeleton crew, some scrap lumber, and a cheap motor to get rolling, I’d think, and could accommodate as many people as were willing to give it a whirl. Maybe next June? The USS Snowcrash?