Publication and Presentation Opportunities

OPPORTUNITIES

No Sweat Shakespeare (http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/advertise/) - This site accepts guest posts that are "of a decent quality and relevant to Shakespeare." I submitted my "Free Code and Renaissance Plagiarism" chapter as a potential guest post, since it talks a lot about Shakespeare in terms of the "plagiarism question." I consider it to be of a decent quality, so we'll see if they like it.

Digital Humanities 2017 (http://adho.org/announcements/2015/announcing-locations-dh-2017-and-dh-2018) - This is an annual conference sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Their call for papers indicates that they accept proposals that sit at the intersection of the humanities (lit, art, etc.) and modern technology. The theme for 2017 is "Access." My chapter on "Free Code and Renaissance Plagiarism" is essentially about community access to individual work, so it seems like a good fit. Also, the conference is being held in Montreal, which is one of my favorite places. I haven't submitted a paper there (I'm not sure if going to Montreal in 2017 will be plausible for me or not).

New Directions in the Humanities 2016 (http://thehumanities.com/2016-conference/call-for-presenters) - This conference is taking place in June of next year at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of their concerns is the intersection of art and technology. They seem like a much more formal academic conference than perhaps my papers are fit for, but with some modification this might be an interesting venue to present at. I have not submitted a paper to this.

Sharing our ebook

I shared the ebook with the following six people:

HOMIES

Dylan Lyman - My wife. She's a high school teacher, so she's got an interest in my second chapter on coding literacy. It's the end of the semester, so we'll see if she has time to read it soon.

Kelsey J. - One of my best friends in high school. She just got a degree in English so I thought she might have an interest. Her comment was "So far Octocat is my favorite part," referring to the Octocat logo in my first chapter.

Josh J. - My high school Debate coach and one of the school's great English teachers. I haven't heard back from him yet.

[Facebook] - I posted a link and an explanation of what we did. Three of my friends have "liked" the link. That's pretty good, considering that I didn't expect anybody to really be interested in my homework.

PROS

Jeff Atwood - I quoted him in my second chapter, so I told him that I'd cited him and included a link to the ebook, "in case you prefer not to be spoken about behind your back." He replied, "Hey great! Thanks for letting me know. I'll take a look!"

Benjamin Stein - I quoted him in my second chapter too. I couldn't find his email address online so I tweeted him a link and a brief explanation that I had cited him.

Gustavo Muslera - I quoted him in my first chapter. I returned to our original discussion thread and added a comment letting him know that I'd quoted him and he's welcome to read the ebook if he'd like.


I'll update if I hear back from anyone else.

Social Contact List

Topics: Open-source programming / Coding as essential literacy

Status: Just about ready to call 'em done and throw in the towel. Minor touch-ups and revisions to be done.

HOMIES

• My wife is a high school teacher. I'll ask her what she thinks about coding in schools and whether "computational thinking" would help her students perform better. She's also using a more or less community-driven curriculum in her Geology class (since she doesn't have Geology training herself) so I'll see how she feels about open-source curriculum.

PEERS

• A couple of guys I work with, Brian and Deven, are coders with many years of industry experience. I can talk to them about whether they think coding should be part of their kids' curriculum. Another guy I work with, Nate, teaches his kid to code. I'll have to see what that experience has brought out.

EXPERTS

• Monty is a guy I've volunteered with several times. He's in charge of the local Google Developers Group, which runs the annual Hour of Code, and works for a company in the private education sector. I can ask him about the coding-as-literacy movement and see how he feels about it.

ENTHUSIASTS

• My cousin James and brother Anders are both coders, and Anders's wife is a former middle school teacher. It's very probably that they have opinions on coding in education, and the first two probably have feelings on open-source code as well. I see them frequently, so I can bring up both topics and see what they think.

The Tempest and Renaissance Viral Culture

 The invention of the printing press made it possible for Renaissance “memes” to reach Shakespeare and influence his loudest and weirdest play, The Tempest.

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Each of our themes this semester represents a timeless human question that popular technology is quick to try to answer. Hit the jump break for more incredibly informative sentences.

The Foodstuff of Dreams

Ever had a dream that you ate a delicious meal, and then you woke up starving? What about a dream that you had to pee but couldn't find a bathroom? Let me reassure you that these dreams are part of the universal human experience.

Conservatrix Lestrange

The "broken heart and contrite spirit" that the Psalmist famously spoke of seems to be a mainstay of Renaissance-era devotional texts. It seems that popular religion was (for a brief period, perhaps) less about self-aggrandizement and praying on street-corners than about quiet, self-effacing repentance.

Who Are These People?

Dear people of England, 16th century:

Do you even know what you believe?



Sigh.

Love,
Isaac

Is Caliban a Man?

Who is Caliban?

I think this question is intentionally fascinating. We may be tempted to think that, for Shakespeare, Caliban is just a savage. But anyone who has read Hamlet or Othello knows that none of Shakespeare's characters are intentionally simple. So what is Caliban's complexity?

Let's look back on Hamlet's famous statement, "What a piece of work is a man!" Like most of Shakespeare's most striking lines, this one is usually taken out of context. Hamlet speaks this line, and the ones that follow, with a definite tone of uncertainty and possibly sarcasm. The praise is written like a rote prayer without heartfelt meaning. Shakespeare's concept of man, we see, isn't as clear cut as good and evil, black and white. If there are any doubts in this regard, all we need to do is consult Othello.

So is Caliban just a black savage with no redeeming qualities? You could argue that, but it would be an uphill battle. It's more likely that Caliban represents a side of man that most people in Shakespeare's time weren't comfortable speaking about; thus the relegation to a native creature, a seemingly unsympathetic fish-man whose only desire is to betray Prospero. He is uncultured, angry, and lustful. A piece of work, indeed.

I'm convinced that Shakespeare's "What a piece of work is man!" deserves to be read with a structural question mark. All of his best characters spring from the page wielding a difficult balance of darkness and light. And if any character in The Tempest begs our study in this context, Caliban does.

Barbaric (read: brave), Ancient (read: new) Islands (read: worlds)

Shakespeare writes a play set in Cyprus: no magic. Shakespeare writes a play set in Messina: no magic. Shakespeare writes a play set on a Mediterranean island: magic. (?)

At the time that The Tempest was written, the air was thick with tales of the new lands of America, Ireland, and Africa, "brave new worlds" where people did fascinating things like worshiping heathen gods and eating each other. Really, the spectacle of the thing got out of hand. It's no wonder that Shakespeare wanted part of the action. Couldn't help himself.

Petrarch: Inventor of the Seance For Purposes of Flattery

[Italy. A small home seemingly decorated with fervent but sporadic mini-shrines.]

Ohmmmmmm. Is Cicero there? Ask our spirit guide if Cicero is there.

Cicero. Yes. Hi. Um, I'm Petrarch and I invent sonnets and so forth, and I don't really have any questions for you because I am your biggest fan and have devoted serious effort to stalking you transtemporally. Ahem. Love you bye.

[End scene.]

< Isaac > ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ < /Isaac >

Isaac Lyman

One day during summer 2014, I got crazy sick. Skipped work. Put my life on hold. Laid in bed all day. But did I skip the Fictionist concert that evening? Duh no.

My name is Isaac. I'm a computer programmer and I tend to think like an engineer; I don't really fit the English major mold. But I'm here and I probably won't go away even if you tell me to, so there.

As far as the Renaissance goes, I think I'm in favor of it. I like Shakespeare a lot (I'm genuinely jazzed that we'll be studying Hamlet). My all-time favorite homework assignment involved memorizing and acting out one of Claudius's soliloquies. I would tell you that it was a life-changing experience, but if you don't automatically disbelieve that every time you hear it from a college student, you're probably not skeptical enough. Anyway, it was awesome.

Aside from the bard, my experience is limited. I can kick it with Donne and Montaigne if I have to. I think Donne's "The Flea" is excellent from basically every perspective: religious devotional poem, seduce-ish love poem, blood-and-guts poem, making-people-uncomfortable poem, and those are all the perspectives I'm aware of at this point in my education.

I'll be frank about my experience with eBooks (as if I'm hedgy about other things). I've found eBooks to be generally of a much lower quality than regular books from, you know, Random House or HarperCollins. And I've always looked down my nose (which isn't that hard with a nose like mine) at people who take on the title of "author" after self-publishing a book. One kid in my high school "published" a fantasy novel that he was really proud of. I tried to read a couple pages of it. It was just the worst. That was how I learned that there's no minimum standard for self-published works.

A point for optimism: There is a substantial body of high-quality self-published work online (blogs, online news media, open-source code, etc.) that I have a high respect for. Therefore, high-quality eBooks are not such a far-fetched idea that I cannot conceive of their existence. On the contrary, I am eager to test the waters and see how something like this comes together, and I will be glad to contribute what I can to this project.