The Aporetic

FDR had a gift for theater. It might have had a lot to do with his paralysis, and the elaborate and taxing steps he took to conceal it. He had handrails and ramps set up behind podiums he had hand controls in his car. With the discrete assistance of aides, and a cane he could […]

In the future, we’ll all be curators. Sean Takats’ recent post looks again at how access to information changes out work. If readers will forgive some geezerish ramblings, I’ll recall what it was like back in the early 1990s, when I could reasonably have been called a digital media pioneer, and consider how new media […]

You can see it coming: “pages,” as a form of citation, are dead. And you can see why. With an electronic text, the reader can change the font size almost without limit. That makes pagination useless, and probably obsolete. In English “page” has multiple related meanings. The word can mean a young male servant as […]

My friend and colleague Matt Karush has consistently argued that the present system has more merit than people like me want to recognize. I asked him to write a post describing his concerns, and so below, the first guest blogger at theaporetic.   As I have listened to some of my colleagues press for the […]

My post on “academic editing 2.0” generated some heat in the comments, and some misunderstandings. What I was proposing is actually really conservative, and aimed at preserving and strengthening the profession. Among the gamut of digital possibilities it would have to be counted as timid, modest and cautious. Let me try to be more clear. […]

Our county, Arlington, has announced they will pull Our Virginia from the classroom “until a corrected digital edition becomes available, probably at the end of this month.” It’s better than doing nothing, but it’s really not a good result. The County will go back to the same company, Five Ponds Press. Five Ponds will remove […]