Unfinished projects
I just received my copy (hot off the presses) of István Mészáros's Beyond Leviathan, which was originally intended as a mammoth three volume project on theories of the state. Unfortunately, Mészáros died of a stroke shortly after completing (or very nearly completing) the first volume, which is what Monthly Review Press just published. In his introduction, John Bellamy Foster promises that Mészáros's extensive preparatory notes for the remaining two volumes will be collected and published separately within "the next few years." The original plan of the three volume work is included in the appendices.
tags: diss
Moving the blog, again
Quick one here! I'm once again moving the blog, this time from its separate home on Neocities to a /blog directory on my primary website. There's no particular reason for this besides cost saving: linking a domain name to Neocities costs money, and the .blog domain I got for a steep discount last April was set to renew for considerably more than I paid for it the first time. (Incidentally, if anybody wants to grab wycoff.blog and redirect it to the Pitchfork review of Shine On or something, it will become available in a couple months.)
tags: web
Digital pedagogy redux
Monica Chin's new article in The Verge is getting a lot of buzz for highlighting something that many college faculty will doubtless have noticed: Gen Z students don't really think in terms of files and folders. Faculty from a range of institutions, public and private, two-year and R1, report having difficulty explaining to students how to locate files by following directory pathways. If a file doesn't turn up in global search, it may as well not exist. The story presents this in terms of a generation gap, with much of the disconnect explained by the ubiquity of search engines and students' greater familiarity with mobile over desktop computing, while faculty generally have the opposite. But there's displaced emphasis on the former over the latter, which I think is one of the deeper problems.
Citeproc Nights
As I confessed in a post on the old blog, I used to write in Microsoft Word (the horror) and type up all my references myself. It's not that I hadn't tried reference management software, but I had hated it. Word's in-built reference manager is atrocious, of course, and while programs like Zotero are marked improvements, they nonetheless have the same GUI elements I dislike. It was somehow less onerous to type out citations in full multiple times than to type them out once across a dozen text fields and checkboxes (Author, Title, Journal, Volume, Issue...). And integrating Zotero into Word just made it one more toolbar widget I had to keep track of in an already bloated bit of legacy enterprise software.
tags: diss