ABC blog

Once upon a time in the Stone Age I had a webpage. Nobody is impressed now, but in the Stone Age it was rather unusual to have a personal webpage, and I learned how to build one with simple html in a half-day course at Åbo Akademi, Finland, where I was a Visiting Professor. As a small university, Åbo Akademi thought it was worth while to teach their employees to build their own webpages. It was uploaded on the university server, and I was allowed to keep it there for a while after I had left them. Then I moved it to Stockholm University server, because it was still Stone Age and nobody in my department had webpages, but when I left Stockholm I had to find a web hotel, buy a domain and pay for service. It was rather cumbersome. Finally, when academia.edu was launched, there was no point in having a private page. Academia is a great network, and it has many superb features. Except one that I had on my Stone Age webpage. I had a subject index to my work. Of course I have tags on my book and paper publications on academia, but they can never be as detailed as a subject index, and I have so many weird subjects in my work that academia does not acknowledge.

It has been a while since I did a blog marathon. In the coming weeks, I will be running a Subject Index to my work, focused on the various subjects I have written about, particularly terms and concepts I have invented. Some have become established, some haven't. It's a good way to look back on my professional career at this dark and cold time of year.

So watch this space: the ABC of children's literature research.

Farewell to an old friend

I have just killed one of my darlings. I have taken down my homepage that I had since 1998. I started it when I was visiting chair in Finland, and the wonderful IT person they had offered to teach all of us in the project how to make a simple website. You had to write it in html then, but it was easy as long as you didn't want anything elaborate. My first website, containing five or six linked pages, was hosted on the university server, and I kept adding to it. It was quite remarkable then to have a personal webpage. So remarkable that when I moved to San Diego I was allowed to transfer it to their server. It was still remarkable enough when we moved back to Sweden and I asked the IT person to allow me to put it on the department server. I was the only one except the IT person who had access. At that time you could mess up the whole university web, but I was trusted not to. I was the only person in the department who had a homepage. Everybody thought I was showing off. I was by now using Dreamweaver. The site was still very unsophisticated in appearance, but full of content. Many people told me it was useful. I had a huge link collection: at that time searching the web was a lot more difficult than now, and I provided the students with links to good sites. I had my publications with links first to my own additional pages (I learned from the beginning not to overlaod individual pages), then to publisher sites. I had subject index to my own work so that anyone could easily find where I had written about Diana Wynne Jones or aetonormativity.

Then we moved to Cambridge, by which time a university server would not host a private homepage. I registered a domain and found a host. I had to change hosts because updating didn't work, and the first host had poor customer support. I get upset when things don't work, because I am a user, I don't know how to solve a problem. I postpone it in all eternity. I couldn't update the site for a long time, and a site that is not updated is dead. I had emails from people telling me that my links were broken. I spent hours trying to make things work. I knew how easy it was to use Blogger or something similar. Things have changed since I sat in Finland and wrote my html. (Once upon a time in Stone Age, I wrote my own database programs).

Farewell, my old faithful friend. Everything you did for me during these years can be done easier and aesthetically more appealing today. Who needs a link collection? Who needs course descriptions? My book reviews? My hobby pages? Everything is available elsewhere, everything is connected to everything else, and an old-fashioned homepage looks like a runic stone. Rest in peace.

Withdrawal

The day before Christmas Eve, when the kids came, I promised myself that I would not switch on my computer until they had left. Not check my work or private email, not update Facebook status or read others, not blog, not read other blogs, not add books on Shelfari or papers on Academia, not browse ebay, not even look up what was going on in my dollhouse community. I made this promisejust before I started reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows but the book certainly enhanced my decision not to get addicted. The thing is, the kids had their iPad with them and sat over it most of the time when they didn't borrow one or two of our laptops, and then Julia got a new smartphone for Christmas which she immediately started playing with. I was firm, however, until Christmas day morning when they slept till nine, and all my codex books were in the room where they slept, as were all my room boxes and tools, I had not bought a Christmas jigsaw puzzle, and I didn't want to drill new holes in the walls while they were asleep. I succumbed, and actually nothing much had happened online while I was away. Most people had been away too.Yet the very second I logged in there was a Skype call. Which made me glad.

Carr claims and shows with reference to brain research that internet affects our way of thinking. I don't buy everything he says, but it is fascinating. I am one of the dinosaurs who, although I do use some social media, will never learn to multitask. I simply cannot do more than one thing at a time. If I use Skype I cannot simultaneously chat or surf, and if I check my email I do it and nothing else. If I look up something on Wikipedia I read it all through before I start clicking on links, if at all. In other words, I am still a linear thinker and will never be anything else. My recent re-reading of a lot of very long, slow reads, including Moby-Dick, Remembrance of Things Past and Doctor Faustus, must be a subconscious defence against fragmentarisation. I hate books with short chapters and high pace, which most Young Adult novels are these days. I never want to read another YA novel again. At least not this year.

And yet I won't make this post longer than this.