Previous Front-Page Items

Why do so many ordinary Americans vote for corporate interests rather than their own? Thomas Frank explains how the Right appropriated populism in his incisive and entertaining book What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank is editor of The Baffler, a magazine of cultural criticism.

Archive.org's "WaybackMachine" allows you to visit archived versions of Web sites. Enter the URL of any site to see the site as it was in past months and years. (archived 9/23/05)

The British Library's Gallery, "Turning the Pages," digitally simulates the physical experience of print media. While such simulations may not be necessary in the case of today's New York Times articles, it can help us recover the reading experience of rare, historical manuscripts like Jane Austen's early work and Lewis Carroll's original Alice. (archived 9/1/06)

Jill Walker's blog from the University of Bergen (archived 9/1/06)

The blog Writing and the Digital Life from De Montford University Leicester, Bedford. (archived 9/1/06)

At a dinner for a famous Visiting Author..., the guest of honor, who was sitting next to me, asked what I did on campus. I rattled on briefly about “advising faculty” and “online pedagogy.”

Listening carefully, the Visiting Author’s eyes cleared after a moment. She pulled back from me slightly as if to get a better look and said, “You mean distance education?"—as if I had been struggling to find a euphemistic way of explaining that I handled the campus’s medical waste."

— from "Making Distance Presence: The Compositional Voice in Online Learning" published in Computers and Composition (September 2003) More on my scholarship....