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When it comes to getting information from people, we use email. If you need to organize a lot of it (as if, say, you ran a lit mag) and you have money or the right friends, you might get your hands on a submission system to compile and organize all that good information. Or you might be out of luck. Dale Wisely over at Right Hand Pointing mentioned this really interesting idea to me the other day: use a combination of Google Apps’ forms and spreadsheets to put it all together in one easy to use location. This idea may seem obvious to those who regularly use Google Apps or surveys to collect data, but I was shocked at how clean this functionality is.
You can see it in action at Nanoism’s December Serial Contest and year-round at the short-form poetry journal Four and Twenty (the form is here).
Some disclaimers: This idea accepts plain text only (no boldface or italics) and organizes everything into a spreadsheet. This is not the best way to read large blocks of text but it works for poetry, flash, or any kind of micro. Acceptances/rejections still require a manual email, so if you run something like elimae and you’re firing off responses in three hours flat, you’d probably waste more time copy-and-pasting email addresses than it’s worth. But say you run a quarterly mag or a one-time deal where you’re sitting on pieces for a while and it’s easy to lose track of them—this is a nice way to keep ’em all in one place. Not just one folder, like with email filters, but literally one document. It’s also handy for doing your own Duotrope-style stats. Sure, you can do this all by hand in excel (or you could code your own system), but this definitely has its uses.
If nothing else, say you’re trying to collect addresses or contact info for writers to include in an anthology. You could send a big email (BCC’d, of course) and manually amass the responses. Or you could use Google Forms to collect the responses into a spreadsheet for you (which is what @nick did for Twitter Wit).
First the dogs ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I did not have a dog.
Then floppy disk failures ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I kept a spare.
Then social networks ate our work,
and I knew we were in serious trouble.
Robert Swartwood is a man after my own heart: a lover of the incredibly short-form. Earlier this year he coined the term “Hint Fiction” to mean “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.” Then he got a book deal from W.W. Norton to edit an anthology. Boom, like lightning.
When I first read about hint fiction (and some of its examples), I already had a very similar take on my ideal nano story. I completely agree with the definition quoted above as a basis for good short stuff (and I work from a very similar angle in choosing stories for Nanoism). But for some reason, in my experience (and especially in reading submissions for his original contest), many hint/nano stories are a not standalone stories at all but rather some kind of movie tag-line/newspaper headline that alludes to a story. They’re much more compelling if you imagine the guy from the movie previews reading them (though, really, wouldn’t that be true for everything?). If you read one of the various “six word story” outlets, you’ll see an even more extreme version of what I mean. Entertaining—yes. Standalone—yes. Story? Debatable.
I’m not the kind of person who says a story can’t be short, obviously. But in my reading, it should have some self contained action. The beginning, middle, end definition is not particularly useful. Nor is the conflict, climax, resolution triad. In nanofiction, these elements are often implied in a word or phrase (hinted at, so to speak). Given the length, it’s unavoidable. For “story”-judgment, I tend to ascribe to the idea of “change.” There must be some fundamental change for the character, however slight, from onset to ending. And to really hit home, the greater story must be hinted at. Leaving it out for the reader to make up is not hinting—it’s omission, and they are not the same thing.
One person killing another person with nothing else is not a story (but it is by far the most common theme I see). The author needs to give the reader some help in deciphering a greater narrative arc. There is a level of necessary vagueness to the form, but just tossing a scene out in 25 words does not a story make. All scene and no story is not good. All plot and no scene is also not good—it’s not supposed to be a synopsis, after all. You need both.
Submissions to the Hint Fiction anthology are open until the end of the month. While Mr Swartwood has already received over a 1000 entries and will publish probably no more than 150, perhaps your submission could net you $25 delicious dollars and an excuse to say, “Oh, why yes, I was published by Norton.”
One of the internet’s double edged swords: a lot of information is good, but the consequent ton of poorly researched and incorrect information is bad. Even lay people who want to be up-to-date on science must swim through the well-intentioned mistakes of their sources. Take, for example, this article: “Blindspot shows brain rewiring in an instant.”
The title and thrust of the article is that because we don’t notice our blind spot (the spot where there are no photoreceptors due to the optic nerve) even when deprived of input from the other eye, we must re-wire our brains instantaneously to compensate. “Re-wire” is in fact a horrible way to explain this phenomenon.
In order to produce our visual experience when deprived of input from both eyes, our brains utilize pathways that already exist—a sort of backup circuit. “Re-wire” implies that there the utilized pathway is new.
When the conductor of a train sees a problem ahead on the track and switches over at the next junction, he’s not building a new path. The other path has always been there, he’s just utilizing it in a situation when he otherwise might not.
Scientists have known for some time that the brain has alternate circuits for a variety of sensory modalities (think of “blindsight” for example). The fact that our brains can utilize our natural development and genetic predispositions to create this intricate machinery is incredible. The fact that our brains can cope with unexpected stimuli almost instantaneously is also amazing. But, let’s be clear: re-wiring—also known as learning—takes time. Contrary to the article’s implication, this study says nothing to the contrary.
A bizarre conundrum:
If you make a return to Bed Bath & Beyond with a gift receipt, you get a gift card for store credit.
If you make the same return without a receipt, you get a store credit receipt: a regular-looking paper receipt with some old-fashioned highlighting and a signature or two or three.
Now, the receipt can be used in any store for any item. In other words, just like a gift card. What possible reason is there for using an easy-to-lose wrinkle-prone receipt for returns instead of a gift card (like every other store in the 21st century)? And if I have a gift card, why can’t I just add the return value onto it so I don’t have to carry around two pieces of paper and one piece of plastic in order to buy overpriced curtain rods?
If it has the exact same buying power, why make a distinction in the first place?
The world is full of surveys: surveys for free meals at TGI Friday’s, surveys for news polls, and at school, surveys for curricular reform:
“In order to improve this course for next year, we would appreciate it very much if you would take a few minutes and fill out this evaluation form.”
And the idea behind a survey is a good (nay, excellent) one: to gather feedback and ostensibly make changes and corrections based on it. The issue is in survey construction and follow-through. The usual survey has a variety of broadly worded statements with answer choices 1-5, 1 being “strongly agree” and 5 being “strongly disagree.” There will usually be a text-box for general comments at the end. You take this survey and your answers disappear into the depths of the internet never to be heard from again.
But from the beginning, the idea that you can sum up whether something works effectively or not based on a numerical average is a kludge. Furthermore, even if an average of 4 does approximate satisfaction, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to do things. It’s an understandable shorthand, but anyone hoping that it’s sufficient to understand reception is fooling themselves. If people’s responses show that weekly quizzes are on the whole useful, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer or think it better if they were biweekly, on Mondays, on Fridays, longer, shorter, or anything else. If people say dividing the year into 4 chunks is no good, it doesn’t mean 7 would be better. A number is all well and good, but at the end of the day, how someone feels isn’t the crux: it’s why they feel the way they do.
In order for a survey to be effective, it has to take time. Each question needs to have its own comment box. Then, someone needs to go through those comment boxes and compile all of the suggestions and problems. Take the suggestions and complaints, then formulate new courses of action. Then, before implementing them, offer them anew in a survey: What do you think about these choices? Do they sound good? How good? Better then before? If not, why not? If that takes too much time to do, have students volunteer to do the grunt work. They’ll put in on their CVs, the administrators can continue doing whatever it is that administrators do, and everyone is happy. This is also how you make changes quickly. It doesn’t need to take years.
People tend to make incremental changes to the status quo. It’s hard to make drastic changes, especially if those changes reverse your hard work or go against your own inclinations; it’s even harder to come up with these changes yourself when necessary. This difficulty then breeds the stagnation that allows bad systems to continue even when their obsolescence is practically taken for granted. And yet, this is how you get curricular form with a stethoscope on the heartbeat of a student body.
Sometimes things don’t work—but if a goal is truly to teach a subject effectively, then no one can tell you better what does and does not work than students. This is how you don’t spin your wheels around a problem, making arbitrary changes. You need to ask for feedback, but more importantly, you need to be willing to listen to it.
This is not: “You Try to Live on 500k in This Town,” a NY Times article that explains why Obama’s proposal will make life unlivable for the executives whose daily life is inexorably tied to wasteful extravagance. When you don’t follow your own advice and save some of your 1+ million dollar salary, it’s harder for me to take your mortgage seriously. Just the same, when your necessary annual expenses include paying your Tom Daschle-style chaffeur, it keeps America firmly on the revenge train. If extravagance is required by corporate culture, then the culture-change brought about by salary-caps or (better yet) progressive tax increases can be a good thing.
If I were still in college, and if I spent my time in college with a schedule that allowed for such awesome frivolity, then I would want to take a class that did in-depth (with some calculus!) analysis of StarCraft. Homework would never be so fun again…
There’s no surprise people are realizing and writing about the low-value of advanced degrees. Schools have used grad students as educational fodder, producing far more than the demand for academics can keep up with. People hoping for their PhD to be something beyond their pursuit of an intellectual interest unfortunately will continue to be disappointed when tenure remains forever out of reach.