“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
--Audre Lorde
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“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
--Audre Lorde
Some documentation of what I've been up to:
"Open Access Beyond Academia," Maura Smale's post about our work at the Free University
&
Brooklyn Zine Fest Video by Jessica Durkin (click through for embedded video)
This May Day, a coalition of students and faculty from Brooklyn College, Columbia University, the CUNY Graduate Center, Eugene Lang College, Hunter College, New School for Social Research, New York University, the Occupy University, and Princeton University are collaborating to produce a “collective educational experiment” to be held on Tuesday, May 1st from 10am to 3pm. The action is in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street’s call for a General Strike and a day without the 99%.
Looking forward to the Free Universityon May Day, and wondering whether fellow New Yorkers might want to observe International Day against DRM on May 4 in some official manner?
Here's a bottle thrown out into the internet/ocean: would anyone reading this be interested to work alongside me in some capacity on various ongoing writing projects? I have a few things that I have been sitting on and would like some feedback and advice about the BIG overarching themes of the things that I have been writing about, but I am also wondering if there are colleagues out there who are in a similar situation and would like the favor returned on a somewhat regular basis?
I'm working on three projects right now that are all drafted but need more backbone (one about print/zines and community/american studies, another about ebooks and a final one that's a kind of crazy film/feminism piece).
Although I am reading and thinking a lot about open peer review in my digital humanities class this semester, these projects still don't feel polished enough to open them up to the wide web--I'm still figuring out what each of these things should be and how to get them there, and I wonder about publishing something that feels unfinished. But it might be the next step. Also, my interest in publishing this post is to think about resolving this larger dilemma--and feeling like I would like a group of people with whom to write and reflect on writing with.
After reading Planned Obsolescence, I agree with Kathleen Fitzpatrick that academic writing could and should be more social and conversational. I'm interested in thinking more about writing communities and support for writing works-in-progress. What resources, links, suggestions and advice can you share?
Lots of really great looking events are on their way for those of us who like to hold pieces of things bound together in our hands and talk to the person who gathered and created:
FEMINIST ZINE FEST: Saturday, February 25 @ Brooklyn Commons
2012 CHAPBOOK FESTIVAL: Wednesday-Friday, March 28-30 @ the CUNY Grad Center and the Center for Book Arts
BROOKLYN ZINE FEST: Sunday, April 15 @ Public Assembly
I'll be tabling with copies of all issues of The Borough is My Library and as the Brooklyn College zine librarian at the zine fests, and hope to be exploring at the Chapbook Fest.
This has been going around everywhere, but I thought I'd share it here too: Woody Guthrie's 1942 resolutions. We made a big list of all of the good things from 2011 and I have a few goals for 2012, but I can't really top this.
I didn't meet my goal for increasing the overall number of books in 2011. I'd set it high, at 65. But I did read one more book than I had in the last two years--52 instead of 51--and this year was also a LARGE book year: the number of pages that goodreads tells me I read in 2011 vastly outnumbers any previous year in which I kept track.
Most of the books on the list that aren't novels are because of grad school. There were also a number of books I am still half way through (a lot of cyberculture and ebook-related things) that I suspect I'll finish in 2012, and two huge novels I just started (Moby Dick and 1Q84).
Anyhow, here's the list! Especially recommended books are starred as usual. Happy 2012!
The Borough is My Library: A Metropolitan Library Workers Zine, Issue 3, December 2011
It took me a little longer this year, but here are all of the details about The Borough is My Library/the Biblioball zine for 2011!!
Copies available on a sliding scale $4 – $7. All profits go to Literacy for Incarcerated Teens. Get issues 1 & 2 online here. Issues available free of charge for zine libraries.
*If you would like to order a copy via the mail email alycia(at)brokenja(dot)ws for mailing address and further details, or to get a quote for additional shipping costs for international orders.
This year's issue features more about a few projects I've been working on and have been inspired by.
Contents include:
This issue also has an authentic cloth taped spine, LC call number classification, and found book pages.
I gave a short talk at the CUNY IT Conference on December 9 and thought I would share the slides I made here. There are more notes about the panel I was a part of at the Open Access @ CUNY blog (Prof. Jill Cirasella's presentation is especially useful for those interested in the practicalities of OA publishing). We had excellent conversations with other CUNY folks at the conference, and it was great to get a chance to talk OA with a wide array of CUNY colleagues.
Just a note that the Film Forum is screening Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION, a Bleeding Light Film Group release, and Anthology Film Archives will be having a Anarchism on Film series later this month--if you happen to catch any of these, let me know what you think!
I'm delighted to yet again be a (small) part of the Desk Set Biblioball! Come out and support Literacy for Incarcerated Teens and pick up a copy of the soon-to-be-released The Borough is My Library: A Metropolitan Library Workers Zine, #3!
092 306.76 ǂb Q
110 2 Que(e)ry (Organization)
245 10 Que(e)ry V : ǂb open access / ǂc curated by the Que(e)ry Librarians.
260 New York, N.Y. : ǂb The Stonewall Inn (53 Christopher St.), ǂc Saturday, November 19, 2011.
300 1 dance party (9:00 p.m. - 4:00 a.m.)
521 For queer librarians and those who love them ; everyone welcome (21+).
511 0 DJ MARC Records; DJ Sirlinda ; DJ Emoticon.
505 0 Queer Zines — Gay-A$$ Raffle — Nerdy Gogos — Queer-Lit Drinks.
536 $5-10 suggested donation, Benefiting the Queer Zine Archive Project.
650 0 Librarians, Queer ǂx Friends and associates ǂv Congresses.
710 2 Queer Zine Archive Project, ǂe dedicatee.
710 2 Desk Set (Organization), ǂe cohost.
856 42 ǂu http://queeryparty.tumblr.com/
No library can be safely stored when it has been removed from its librarians by force in the middle of the night.
No library is being safely stored when it is kept from its readers.
Just a short note here about the talk that I attended yesterday that the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative put on featuring Ben Vershbow of NYPL Labs: This was one of the most inspiring library-related talks I've been to in a long time. Maybe it was due to the fact that at Pratt I spent a lot of time pulling out print Sanborn maps for architecture students and puzzling over their layout and metadata that I was utterly amazed by the Map Warper project, or that I had just last summer had a discussion with Jim Danky about how important it would be if libraries would collect menus that I love the public collaborative What's on the Menu transcription project. But I suspect that even without these personal experiences, I would have been wowed by what they're up to at NYPL. It's great that they are working to share special collections in such useful ways for New Yorkers and the world. Hooray!
You can keep up with NYPL Labs at their blog, and a recording of the talk has been posted at CUNY DHI (a group who also continually impresses me).
Thinking about Wisconsin today
On a my own tour of BK today:
