new! digital facsimiles, Shakespeare apps & performance, close reading Othello & theater

Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have you covered! Here are 3 relatively recent pieces I wrote—I hope you enjoy them and share them. “When Is A Source Not A Source?” (link) This past November, I gave a presentation at the Stanford Primary Source Symposium, the theme of which was “The Phenomenology of the Source.” My talk focused on a question that has been bothering me for a while now: how do we treat digital facsimiles of early print as source material? I’ll give you a preview of my rousing conclusion: So, when is a source not a source? If we go by what we see evidenced in…

what those libraries were in The Toast

I thoroughly enjoyed “How To Decorate Your Dream Library” by Amy Collier for The Toast. But because I am me, I was made insane by the lack of captions identifying any of the libraries pictured, so I went ahead and worked my way through them. Go read the article, laugh heartily, and then come back to find out the libraries and photography credits. (A side note: How hard is it, really, to include this information in the original article? Most of the licensing on these images is some version of Creative Commons Attribution. But where’s the attribution in The Toast? It’s bad form. If I were a friend or family member of Jorge Royan, who took a slew of these and whose work is stunning, or any of the others, I’d be pretty pissed that I made my work available under an open license and that places couldn’t be bothered with…

books with friends

In the last few years I’ve started to keep track of what I’ve read. I don’t do anything fancy: I have a google doc and I write down the author and title of each book I’m reading and some quick notes on it, keeping track of the months as they go by. I do it partly because I was jealous of other friends’ lists and curious to know what I really read—not what I remembered reading, the low and high points, but what I’d really spent my time reading. I also do it so that when someone asks me for a recommendation, I have notes on what I liked and disliked and said meh to. (My 2015 book list is here, cryptic notes and all.) What I had not appreciated until recently, however, is that my list helps me remember my friends as well. When I look back at the…