a thaumaturgical compendium

Congratulations go to Chheng-Hong Ho, who successfully defended his thesis Negotiating Motherhood Using ICTs in Taiwan-US Transnational Households this morning, at the University at Buffalo. (I was chair and Mary Cassata the second member of the committee.) The work consists of interviews of members of families using IM and chat to communicate between the US and Taiwan (overseas students), and disucsses this both from the perspective of transnationalism and domestication of household technologies. He presented an early version of this research at the IR6.0 in Chicago last year.

I think this is the last thesis or dissertation I will chair at UB. Chheng-Hong has continued his studies by entering the doctoral program at York University. I’m sure we will be seeing more from him as his studies progress.

I recently went to see Avenue Q, which features a great number on Schadenfreude. It was a little chillier in Manhattan today, enough that we closed the windows last night. In Buffalo, they are snowed in. They closed the airport–which never happens. There are motorists stuck out on the interstate. And as much as I want to be sympathetic, there is a piece of me that is singing “sucks to be you!”

On the other hand, my chair invited me and the other new guy, Quinn Saunders (Ontario?), out for drinks yesterday and informed us that Connecticut winters are neither the picturesque snow of Vermont, nor the rain of New York, but sleet and slush. Oh, what fun.

Congratulations go to Paul Visco, who presented his MFA project to his committee (Josephine Anstey [chair], Loss Pequeño Glazier, and me) today. The project, which I’ve written about before, is the Elmwood strip community site, which has existed in various incarnations since 2002. The initial site was started as part of a Virtual Communities class, and has grown to become a large, influential, and interesting site over the past few years.

It’s interesting because it has grown up largely outside of the blogging phenomenon. It’s a bit like LiveJournal in this respect, but to an even more extreme degree. Paul made the site in response to the needs and the interests of the community, and as a result, it feels a lot like other blogs in some ways, and not at all in others. Judged on its own merits, it is a striking design, and has a very rich feature set. Particularly for community-based journalism/journaling, which has always been at the heart of the project, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better platform.

But it is also interesting in the ways in which it integrates with the physical community–a section just north of downtown Buffalo surrounding Elmwood Boulevard Avenue–but manages not to integrate much with other blogs. Certainly, there are links to it from other prominent blogs in Buffalo, and it is widely read by bloggers in the area, but it has somehow managed–largely by design–to be a very place-based community website, and for that reason, among others, a particularly interesting collaborative community. Paul did a lot to publicize the site, but none of it was virtual publicity. Mostly, he linked to the site from the physical location: the side of his house, chalking the sidewalk, or t-shirts on people.

It’s not especially difficult to find burlesque in New York, as the art is celebrating a bit of a renaissance. Clearly, I left Buffalo, a little too soon. Looks like fun; it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

Tomorrow morning (at 4, because I am too damn cheap thrifty to spend $50 to take a cab to JFK), I am making my second to last trip out to Buffalo. I’ll be home for the weekend, and then I’m headed out next Tuesday for my last, UB-related, Buffalo trip. OK, I will probably be making at least another couple trips to defend two graduate students who still need to finish, but as a regular employee, these are the last two planned visits.

This last year of commuting has been terrible, I will readily admit. I had stars in my eyes for a while. I would get everyone to use the telephone and email, and for some, IM and video Skype. It would be like I was completely there. After all, we’re academics–telecommuting is nothing new. Sure, I’d need to show up now and then for some things, but most of the heavy lifting could be done through the wire. And when I needed to go, the flight on Jet Blue is only 50 minutes.

I was so wrong. The decision to commute was a poor one. The commute runs to several hours and brain-death and physical exhaustion for several more. Logistics and expense far outstripped my expectations, and my work suffered. This has largely been a lost year for me.

I wanted to give the university enough time to make a leadership transition for the Masters in Informatics program, and to replace me on the faculty. I also wanted to give myself time to do a more complete job search. Had I left last summer rather than this one, I would have left academia for a stint in the “real world” of consulting before coming back. In the end, though, I think that choosing to live in Manhattan and work in Buffalo was a bad decision.

Part of that, of course, is that I have been a “short timer” for way, way too long. Only in the academic world would someone give notice nearly sixteen months before actually separating from the organization. I was already in a marginal position on the faculty, split between two departments with duties that took away from both my teaching and my research. Some of the changes and politics of the School have been particularly wearing for someone who was heavily invested and now quickly divesting in its future. I’m certain this strife is not nearly as grinding as it is in many, many departments, but a lot of the collegiality and excitement that was part of the department when I joined it seems to be sapped away toward the end. To be fair, that may simply be because I was not as much a part of what was happening in terms of research within the department. Part is that I allowed my future to get too quickly entangled in the nuts and bolts of the programs. I should have defended my own time and objectives better.

Two of the faculty who most influenced my decision to come to Buffalo left a couple years ago, and some of the remaining faculty think of my work as not worthwhile, and been openly or quietly dismissive of it. I’m a pretty independent sort of person, but it’s hard to be a part of a community when you are considered to be a kind of adjunct in all but title–a position that has no doubt been especially encouraged by my relative absence over the last year. The direction of the department has changed, and become more focused in an area that is not my interest. In many ways, I applaud that change. I had always argued that a department as small as Buffalo’s (with only a dozen or so tenure-track faculty) had to focus to be able to move toward excellence. It has, and I expect its reputation will grow, thanks to the work of some very talented faculty. What I didn’t expect, but perhaps should have, is that such a focus would leave my interests so far out of frame.

On Friday, there will be a group going away party for the four of us who are leaving. (And those of you who know me in person know how much I love parties!) I can say unequivocally that I am eager to move on. I am ready for new challenges and a chance to work in a program where my efforts can gain a bit more traction; where my work can really be the work of the department. I’m looking forward to leaving aside some of the administrative issues, and focusing more on my teaching (in my own area!) and my research. Perhaps most of all, I’m looking forward to a fresh start.

Perhaps it is merely cognitive dissonance doing its required work, but I now wish I had made this move years earlier. I will always have fond memories of Buffalo, particularly of some of the extraordinarily talented graduate students I have had the pleasure to know, and I am sure that the less fond memories will fade more quickly, as is always the case.

I’ve intentionally left mention of my future plans a bit vague on the blog. I will rectify that in the coming months. I wanted to avoid the temptation of leaving Buffalo mentally before I left in fact. As we move into summer, I hope that I will be able to shake my old habits of thought and action as I move into a new position, and new ways of working.

Well, this is a round-about path. Lorna Peterson (on faculty at UB) dropped me a note indicating that fix Buffalo had referred to me as the “dean of Buffalo blogging.” (Oh, and I do like that, by the way. I’d put it in my tag-line, if I weren’t a deserter.) All of this pointing to an article in the Buffalo News about community blogging.

I do think that the urban critique found among Buffalo bloggers is, if not unique, at least unusual. I hope that articles like this will drive more Buffalonians to follow these blogs, and ultimately to take action. It’s a nice indication of how blogs and local communities can be tied together, and how blogging can be used toward a project that spreads beyond just a few people. I think an interesting piece of this is how often photographs are used on these blogs as a clear tie to place. Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether this can add momentum to local blogging efforts. Would love to see local politicians embrace this grassroots effort.

The article includes information on Buffalo’s city ranking for blog density derived from Jia Lin’s dissertation, by the way.

A bit of a late notice, but: Jia Lin will be defending her doctoral dissertation “Blogs and the City: Weblogs as Indicators of Urban Culture in America” tomorrow, Tuesday, December 13, at 2 pm in Baldy 553 on the north campus of the University at Buffalo. I am her committee chair, and other members include George Barnett and Pauline Cheong. Ms Lin will be defending via web chat, using Skype and Festoon, which may be a first for the department. We tried it with a Masters defense last week, but over a wireless connection that dropped quite a few packets. Hopefully, things will go a bit more smoothly this time around!

The defense is open to the public. If you are in Buffalo and interested in blogging research, stop by.