I found the activity of classifying Bryn Mawr College’s English Department very challenging.  Attempting to understand what knowledge and skills individual professors offer the department highlighted the different methodologies available for studying literature.  Genre, time period, language, nationality, and medium are all relevant ways of organizing literary criticism.  This is not true of the natural sciences.  Only current scientific knowledge is considered relevant.  The phenomena studied by scientists are not affected by language, location, or culture.  Therefore, the structure of natural science departments is very different from humanities departments.  For example, Bryn Mawr’s chemistry department is consists of professors who spec

I was looking through some webcomics and blogs today after our discussion in class, and I came across this particularly applicable comic by xkcd.com. I believe it was Ed Folsom who mentioned fractals in relation to genre, quoting Dimock on the "fractal database." Here is "Blogofractal" as pictured by xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/124

 Jo(e)'s blog and the comments it inspired got me to think a bit more about blogging than I have in the past.  I've never really blogged myself (aside from now, I guess), but I do consider it an interesting hobby, one that no one can ignore these days. Most of the people who responded to Jo(e)'s posting, however, have taken a more active part in the blogging world, and their views provided points of interest for me.

In reading jo(e)'s blog entry and the comments it elicited, I noticed the dynamics of an argument throughout a couple posts, with one I'd like to elaborate on.  The first comment following the blog entry has rather agressive echoes, where the author invokes his point of view's rightness as opposed to everyone else's way of thinking.  Dr. K has an opinion.  And it's the correct one.

 The idea that you can "think rhizomically" insinuates that you should consider things in terms of having no center or structure. But Professor Dalke mentioned an interesting point last class: Can you organize the world without a center? Isn't an individual constantly thinking in terms of themselves? Jo(e) references the blogging medium, talking about "Bitch Ph.D."s blog as "her ideas, her opinions, her style of writing". Wouldn't that mean that a blog is an expression of an individual, putting whomever is posting, whether it be the blogger themselves or someone leaving a remark about the material, in the spotlight? Just by skimming through the comments on Jo(e)'s blog, one finds a sea of "I"s...

The Internet is a wonderful place.  However, it's also very dangerous.  It's easy to think about the dangers the Internet presents when you first shop on a new website, and you wonder whether or not giving them your credit card information is really a good idea.  Or when you meet someone new online, you wonder if they're actually who they say they are, or if they're really twice your age and incredibly creepy.  I think the most dangerous thing about the internet, however, is the way it allows us to mask ourselves in anonymity and pretend like that makes it okay for us to behave badly. Or even the thought that using nicknames means that no one will find out who we are.