Yes, I tried to forget about Text Patterns — tried to pretend it had never happened, tried to move on to "fresh fields and pastures new," as the poet once wrote. But darn it, this thing is in my blood! And when the good folks at The New Atlantis agreed to host my meditations, I couldn't forego the opportunity. So in the coming days, look for posts on the ever-more-serious conversation about the e-book (prompted by the second edition Kindle, among other things), different forms of connectivity, whether books should be invisible, the present and future of libraries, technologies of the humanities, and assorted related stuff. I'm looking forward to it and I hope some of you are too.
Text Patterns
February 27, 2009
This is just a test comment. Nothing to see here, really.
Do you take requests? One thing I'm awfully curious about is how you maintain such an active online life (blogs, twitter, etc) and still publish as much as you do.
The internet has made research easier than ever, but my and my friends' experience in grad school is that the internet is also a huge time suck. I've basically had to shut it off all day in order to get anything done. So I'm hugely interested in how other people think about and handle this problem. If it is a problem.
Beth, I'm not sure I'm much of an example, since I waste a lot of time, but here are some key practices for me: Twitterrific set to check tweets once an hour; IM set to invisible; no email notifications; no web browsing beyond what my RSS reader fetches up for me. That keeps the distractions relatively under control.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Alan. I've been looking forward to the return of Text Patterns and its insights on the interplay of technology with reading and writing.