Kristopher L. Cannon

I find it odd that subscription cost is what prompts Harvard to propose a shift toward open-access publication, but I am excited by the benefits this may bring to the future of academic publishing. I wager that Harvard maintains the clout to bring “prestige” to a model centered on open-access.

I think I contracted this a while ago. I hope the brain damage is minimal.

I’ve long been interested in systems of personality or temperament typing, ranging from the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to the Ayurvedic doshas to any number of magazine or Facebook quizzes. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found the Myers-Briggs system very helpful in my personal and professional life—much more so than the quiz I took about which kind of pirate I would be. But all such quizzes and systems offer maps of difference. For instance: in learning that my dosha is pitta-kapha, I also realize that I have no vata traits—which are in fact the very physical and temperamental traits that characterize one of my best friends. The system of doshas offers a way of understanding the differences between us and why we prefer very different kinds of food and activity. The utility of any such system depends upon how detailed its maps of difference are and upon the context in which you’re using it.

My interest in such systems probably explains why, of the many organizational and self-improvement books I’ve read or skimmed, How to be Organized in Spite of Yourself: Time and Space Management that Works with Your Personal Style by Sunny Schlenger and Roberta Roesch really stuck in my mind and remained one that I frequently recommend to others. Schlenger and Roesch believe that no one organizational system will work for every individual, because we each have certain built-in preferences or styles. Through short quizzes, case studies, and specific suggestions tailored to each style, this book offers the reader the possibility of figuring out just why the filing system that works for your colleague doesn’t work for you, or why those stylish containers you splurged on because they looked good aren’t really fulfilling their intended purpose on your desk. No one style is inherently better than any other, as each has its benefits and drawbacks. Understanding those pros and cons can help you select organizational tools and strategies that will actually work for your particular style and circumstances.

Last month, the archives of FEED, one of the first great webzines, came back online, after nine years’ absence. FEED was a remarkable site: Beyond founding editors Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson, writers like Clay Shirky, Alex Ross, Josh Marshall, Julian Dibbell, and countless others made their reputations in the first flush of online cultural criticism. Eventually, FEED would join forces with Suck.com, the other great arbiter of online taste, circa 1995-2001. (Especially if you were an overeducated humanities type, ideally still in graduate school. Or maybe on hiatus from grad school while you worked at an AI lab. Then, Tim Cavanaugh, Heather Havrilesky, and Steven Johnson were your gods.)

And then it all went away. While some of the site’s authors reprinted their own essays on their own websites, it wasn’t possible, as Julian Dibbell, laments, “to link to [them] in their original context.” (Suck.com also had a brief hiatus, in December of 2005, when the URL was taken over by a porn site.)

FEED’s return, while welcome, isn’t without hiccups. They’ve ported the content to WordPress, and so right now the site’s a bit slow, and prone to throw up error messages of various sorts. Plus, on many pages it’s hard to figure out when the article was originally published, which is frustrating, at least from the view of scholarly citation practices.

A charming feature of the re-publishing of the archives are reminiscences by some of the earliest writers—in particular, don’t miss Stefanie Symans’s recollection of Steven Johnson backing the site up onto floppies, or Johnson’s tale of panicking to get HTML fixes posted on a 28.8 modem ahead of a Wall Street Journal column plugging them. The site as a whole is indispensable as a way of understanding the rapid evolution of online culture in the late 1990s. And, FEED Daily is still a superb example of good online writing.

The bigger, more ProfHacker-centric lesson to draw from the death and rebirth of FEED—beyond the obvious, “if you don’t know the site you should read it!”—is that sites need to think about their exit strategy as early as possible. While people like to say that once you post something online, it’s there forever, linkrot is an all-too-real phenomenon. Bethany Nowviskie and Dot Porter are currently working on a project, called Graceful Degradation, to examine the sustainability of today’s exciting digital projects. Preliminary results are already available online, with full results coming later this year.  While backing up your website and blog are important, they’re not the only factors to consider.