Maps

Today I went to my site to draw a map and to start adding prose descriptions of the various things in the lab and what their function is. I spent an hour there doing that today and I ended up with eight pages of notes and I only described one room. I have two more to go, but those are smaller rooms with less stuff in them.

Everyday brings me one step closer to finishing this dissertation!

What's Your Computer's Name

In describing the site (or one of the sites) in my dissertation, one of the things I did was start drawing a map and describing all the artifacts in the lab and their purpose. Among those things are the computers, which all have names so that they can be accessed by others on the network or remotely through the web. Apparently the naming conventions are determined by the profs (who fund the lab). Each one has a different convention. Those include:

prof 1: Famous Australian Cricket Players.

prof 2: Shakespearean characters, particularly those named in a certain play about a Danish Prince. (this prof is from Denmark). This prof has since moved to UCLA where all the computers are named after(could you guess this?) beaches.

prof 3: animals.

prof 4: has Mordred, Morgana, and Nimue, which are all named for Arthurian Legend. (As has been prof 4's custom since the beginning of time.)

prof 5: machines, Malolan and Vaikuntam, are named for Avatars and Celestial Abodes of Vishnu.

And, as always there are some exceptions:

Collective machines are named for relatively obscure science-fiction entities.

Apple Macintosh machines running MacOS X are named for Biblical references to suffering and punishment: Famine, Pestilence and Death,(Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Rev 6:1-8) and Millstone, ("...better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck." Mark 9:42.)

Book o' the Day

Many thanks to a former colleague who pointed me in the direction of The Academic Job Search Handbook. It is a great resource for people seriously looking for tenure track positions.

The Job Search

I was expecting not to be starting on job searches this early, but then yesterday I saw a job advertised in New Zealand

Question of the Day

I started writing about why I picked the group of people I did in my research. As part of the answer, I started talking about how Levi-Strauss made a distinction between hot and cold cultures. He was fond of binaries, as you may be aware. He said that the degree of heat is based on the degree of participation in the marketplace. So, cold cultures are ones that have very little trade with other groups of people.

Now, as should be obvious, this distinction between hot and cold cultures has, largely, been blown out of the water. Even in the most remote places on the planet, one can find people who are fans of Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, or Oprah Winfrey. This blurring of the distinction between hot and cold has meant that just about any group is fair game for an ethnographic study. But the question I have from all this is, is there any reason for ethnographer to continue going to the jungle, the mountain, or the remote island. Is there anything that is a preferred subject for the ethnographer? Is there anything that is a boring or unacceptable subject for the ethnographer?

Back From Vacation

We made it back Sunday night. It was a great trip.

Now I have plenty of work to do. A book review needs to be done in ten days. I didn't finish that methodology chapter, so there's more work on that, and teaching starts Monday with handouts to prepare in that area too.

But it's good to be back