Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-27

• A gem from Cindy @selfe2 on writing academic articles: The question of "are you doing too much" is really a question of "how." #
• Hey Mitch, this doesn't have quite the same ring: "This little [wealthy] light of ours, we're gonna let it shine" #sotu #
• [Notice size of "wrong" & "must] RT @dianadell: Daniels' #SOTU Republican Response 2012 as analyzed by Wordle: http://t.co/wBcC2Kcz #sotu
  

Reading Adobe PDF, Microsoft .DOC and .DOCX, HTML, etc. on your Kindle or other eReader

More and more of my grad school friends are buying eReaders. Being one of the resident OSU Digital Media Studies nerds, these friends often ask me how to convert the file types most commonly used in academia–particularly Adobe PDF–to eReader-friendly formats. As recently as six months ago, my answer to this was “Just shoot yourself, it’s easier than trying to get the PDF on your machine in a useful format.”  But that answer stinks; many of us, including me, bought eReaders so that we could spend less time in the glaring eye-straining glow of our computer monitors.  PDF and Word files comprise over half of my homework reading, and I run into tons of academically useful HTML documents that I wish I could put on my eReader.

Solution: 2epub.com is a web-based service that converts from doc, docx, epub, fb2, html, lit, rtf, mobi, odt, pdb, pdf, prc, rtf, and text to epub (ideal for most eReaders except Kindle), fb2, lit, lrf, and mobi (ideal for Kindle).  You can convert up to 5 files and up to 25 MB of data at a time.  

 

UPDATE! Solution 3: OSU grad student friend Chase Bollig recommends Klip.me for Kindle users.  It provides a bookmarklet similar to the one used by Instapaper to instantly email marked articles to your Kindle (for free).  I’ve added it to my toolbar for situations where I only want to send a single file to my Kindle; I’m keeping Instapaper too for situations where I want to send a lot of stuff to Kindle all at once.  Thanks for the recommendation, Chase! 

 

Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:

• EPUB from Word Docs
• 2EPUB – A Free Doc to ePub Converter
• Your Guide to eReaders and eBooks for Library Staff

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-20

• "Sh-t Rhetoricians Say" from @aristotlejulep: inevitable. accurate. literacy. literacy. literacy. http://t.co/9JF22XEb #
• Remember Amit Gupta, the guy whose bone marrow donor campaign went viral? He found a match! RT @SocialStreaming http://t.co/940Vrux4” #
• Really enjoying @Kindle preview chap of @ibogost's How to Do Things with Videogames…might have 2 buy! http://t.co/pNyX1SVp” #
• Amen! RT @betajames RT @deetronic: Dear Apple, I give my students texts for free AND THEY LOVE ME FOR IT.” #
• "Remixing Ethical Composition": Awesome online journal article from @rachaelshapiro http://t.co/fpAKwfPd” #
• Graduate Research Network @ Computers & Writing also loves discussion leaders! Pls coax ur favorite digital humanist: http://t.co/2Zy7eEhE #
• Graduate Research Network @ Computers and Writing Conference (May 17-20) now taking proposals (thru Apr 25)! http://t.co/JWN4Me9A #
• While we're talking #ElderScrolls snarky hand-drawn map of Morrowind http://t.co/dIcURqgD #
• Love @overthinkingit's "Skyrim and Historical Revisionism" http://t.co/SUuhuK1D #
• Nan Johnson: "Logic is a series of connections. A series of operations. A set of moves we've decided is reasonable. It's not a truth." #
• Just found 2 fave high-traffic sites that aren't striking 4 #SOPA Asked them to consider joining. #
• Humorous #SOPA strike sites from @TheOatmeal http://t.co/KNbzhZLq and @McSweeneys http://t.co/Ju9slQMK #
• Pittsburgh people: Writing teacher seeks text/audio/video accounts of your daily commute http://t.co/Uw6FCpVs #
• Just added this #SOPA Strike WordPress plugin to my blog. Site doesn't get much traffic, but it felt right. http://t.co/ecF4XEDm #
• Photobucket export plugin for iPhoto, where have you been all my life? I would have waited for you. #ididactually #
• My old writing center haunt @umsweetland is hiring a Lecturer III, PhD req, 4-yr contract, 3-3 load. Pls RT! http://t.co/vdXUdtbN #
• "Before Tech" audio essay gives baby boomer's perspective on using Skype to talk w/ kids. I <3 Keith Taylor. 2 mins. http://t.co/yhIoWzOs #
• The next time I teach anticipating audience values + counter-argument, I'm using "Who is Tim Tebow?" from Gawker http://t.co/Kof1ecJC #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-13

• Yikes! Meant Joseph Williams, not John Williams. Thanks @mday666 for correction! The book, again: http://t.co/iQ2GUbnY #
• .@selfe2 likes John Williams' Style: 10 Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Paperback $5 shipped, Kindle ed. $32! Yeowch! http://t.co/ZW08Xeo0 #
• Well THAT'S going in my RSS Reader! RT @betterbooktitle http://www.betterbooktitles.com/archive #
• .@selfe2's description of a prepositional phrase: "Anything a squirrel can do to a tree. Go around, go up, be 'of'…" #
• Classmate said I should tweet this: Nan J. in discussion of Burke + absolute truth "There's always a center. It's just never the same one." #
• Nan Johnson's reaction to being tweet-quoted during class: I love that you're all tippy tapping. You never run out of ways 2 help ppl learn. #
• More Nan J.: "Burke is not Butler. He doesn't believe that the proverbial creates the sitch; rhetoric names the sitch that's already there" #
• I can never get enough of the Better Book Titles meme. http://t.co/cmy4SG2d #
• And maximum partial credit to @S_moores for suggesting ad hominem … true, but so many ways to take down a peg w/o insulting character #
• LOL not term I was looking for, but SHOULD be formal rhetorical term for "take down a peg" RT @hors_doeuvre: burn #
• Ah, there's the take-em-down-a-notch terms I wanted: aporia and insultatio. (For record, we were discussing #MittRomney and #NewtGingrich #
• Another Nan Johnson gem: "Causality is not real. It's a mode we've made up as a way of talking about the real. It's not a real real." #
• Hey rhetoric nerds: What's the word from classical rhetoric for the diminishment move/"take the other guy down a peg" move? (Not refutation) #
• Another gem from Nan Johnson, discussing Burke's scapegoat mechanism: "There should be a t-shirt that says Devil Function. I'd wear it." #
• Thanks to Byron Hawk for this slick list of rhet/comp journals #saysthegradstudentpreparingherfirstarticle http://t.co/TVZ9Dt1O #
• Thoughtful followup to the Vendler/Dove brouhaha by @YRTEOPpoetry Criticism and Identity: Who Needs Poetry Anthologies? http://t.co/bUxGYEJ9 #
• The most accurate review of War Horse I've seen yet. Written by a properly horse crazy AND cynical adult. http://t.co/UaHjVdGr #
• 25 of the Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World http://t.co/XnxZxR91 #
• #MLA12 was a boon for my Following list. @readywriting @briancroxall @mkgold @nowviskie @jasonrhody @miriamkp and so on #
• Classmate wondering about digital or multimodal journals in Renaissance English Studies. Know some? Please RT! #
• Sage advice from @selfe2 re: English job campus visits: Get the tenure/promo guidelines b4 you go. Even if u have to call to request them. #
• More Nan J.: "Burke doesn't think rhetoric is making humanness. It's the other way around; it's the function of humanness to be rhetorical." #
• More Nan J.: Burke does not think there are consequences beyond human choices. There is nothing that we cannot make, or unmake, or stop." #
• More Nan J.: "Burke will never give up agency to culture. Agency is what people do & the instruments they create–but he is a humanist." #
• Another Nan Johnson gem: "Burke is not Foucault. Saying 'This is what people are like' is not the same as 'This is what culture made us.'" #
• Jewel from Nan Johnson: "There is no scapegoat in the Gettysburg Address. It's common death, common cost. A beneficent unification." #
• .@myergeau brilliant as always: But I Never Think of You As Disabled: Accessing Paternalism, Erasure, & Other Happy…" http://t.co/EtDBKATD #
• Sarah the Blogger calls it Apple Puff-Up. I call it Lazy People's Apple Pie. It's in my oven right now! http://t.co/HejLFs9a #
• Mario Bros as Creationist plot? Unconvincing, but a fun read. RT @overthinkingit: Are You There, God? It’s-a Me, Mario! http://t.co/mfdYOdbm #
• Constantly updating #MLA12 tweet archive started Fri 12/30. Pass it around! Thanks @mhawksey! https://t.co/s3RU4XVs #
• Hilarious limited edition Social Media Propaganda Poster. "Twitter: Be brief! The enemy might be listening in"etc. http://t.co/zKUfZ1K6 #
• Couldn't find archive of #MLA12 hashtag. Seemed wrong, so I made one. Started Fri around 5 pm PST https://t.co/DCPbBGLJ #
• Hey #mla12 is anyone archiving this hashtag or pushing it to a database? #
• One of 50+ reasons @s2ceball is a role model: RT @cjprender: Cheryl Ball shows the way ahead for peer review #MLA12 http://t.co/5ISEls2W” #
• Thanks to those tweeting #MLA12 It sounds digital-humanities-tastic! #cccc12 please note #mla12 #039;s free wifi in all rooms and copy it. #

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Archive of the #MLA12 Tweets from the Modern Language Association

(Awesome Update Saturday 1/7: Martin Hawskey built a tool that archives tweets from the last seven days.  He kindly produced a near-complete archive of #MLA12 that stretches back to Wednesday and beyond.  There’s a bit missing from Friday’s overwhelming chatter, but who cares!?   If you’d like to thank him, he’s in the blog comments or hit up his MASHe EdTech blog or thank him/follow him on Twitter!

And if you really want to see my archive, which is incomplete compared to the one linked above, read on.)

So here I was on my comfy couch in Columbus, Ohio, reading tweets from the 2012 Modern Language Association conference in Seattle. Like any good grad student of digital media and composition studies who’s stuck at home during a major conference, I was amped to see the hashtag #mla12 blowing up like crazy. Apparently every conference room at MLA ’12 has WiFi, which means the place has gone literally to the Twitter birds.  (Side note: 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, please follow this example.)

Anyway, @readywriting (Lee Skallerup) had made a Storify of Friday’s session S167, “The Fight for Public Higher Education.”  I sent that to one of my Ohio State grad school colleagues on Facebook because it’s directly related to his work, and another OSU grad student colleague said that she was having trouble keeping up with the #mla12 tweets and hoped she could catch up later.

And I thought, “Come to think of it, I’m having trouble keeping up with the tweets too.”  So I searched Twitter for the hashtag, hoping to see quite a few earlier hours’ worth of #mla12 goodness.  I got a measly few hours’ results; apparently this is a new annoying quirk of the Twitter API.  I went to Twapperkeeper thinking surely someone had set up a Twapperkeeper archive for #mla12.  Not only was there no archive, but Twapperkeeper has been sold to Hootsuite and went inactive today January 6 (Madame Irony, your timing is impeccable!).  So I cruised over to my Hootsuite account thinking I could self-archvie #mla12 there, and I found out that archiving on Hootsuite requires a pro account at $10/month.  And this grad student doesn’t have $10/month to archive conferences that she’s not even attending, much less organizing.

And search though I might, ask the Tweeps to point me to one though I might, I couldn’t find an existing archive of #mla12.

Commence a major moment of WTF and OMG.  This has got to be an oversight on my part.  Surely the digital humanists are archiving the conference at which they are so actively tweeting about archiving (among other things).

But just in case, I took matters into my own hands.  I’ve set up a simple Google Docs spreadsheet archive of #MLA12 tweets starting Friday, January 6 around 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.  Forgive me its primitive nature; it’s better than nothing.  And thanks to Martin for such crystal-clear directions and a Youtube video walkthrough on how to set up Twitter hashtag archives using a simple, pre-written Google Docs spreadsheet script!

If I am wrong and there is some archive of #mla12 that ran on Thursday and Friday, PLEASE tell us all about that in the comments.  I missed so many Tweets on Thursday and Friday that it hurts my brain to even think about it.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-06

• First day of Burke-and-Booth-tastic rhetoric seminar with Nan Johnson. Resisting temptation to tweet every amazing thing she says. #imafan #
• "Oh there's nothing 1/2way about fencing in the US border if we fence it which we actually already have" #MittRomney #GiveIowaATry #
• Dude, where's the Twitter hashtag contest mashing up Music Man lyrics with Republican candidate jokes? #GiveIowaATry #
• RT @avantgame My sister's book The Will Power Instinct is #170 on Amazon. http://t.co/ADehM2qS [Checking out Kindle preview chap right now!] #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-30

• eReader/iPad cover looks like The Neverending Story from movie. I wanteth it http://t.co/rQkUtXM0 #
• My dad (a pilot) tells me that the airspace codes 4 landing approach in Portsmouth, NH. are (in this order) ITAWT ITAWA PDYE TTATT + IDEED. #
• Great student assignment? RT @openculture: Imagine "The Empire Strikes Back" as a Silent Film, and here's what you get: http://t.co/risM4Fu7 #
• Sis brought Lewis Farms Winter Strawberries, grown in solar tunnels, to Xmas in VA. Awesomely good! Read more here http://t.co/9PpuVbd4 #
• Family reaction to @askinosie hot cocoa: "Oh my God. We're gonna have to order another kilo of this." #
• Wonder how many times Siri's been queried today re: Chinese restaurants #
• English multimodal grad student porn: “@russeltarr: 20 Great Authors (and Actors) Read Famous Literature Out Loud: http://t.co/3YNV0yXu” #
• Free today on iTunes: GetDrunker App, "show me what you have and I'll make you a drink." http://t.co/9wgcJ8Q1 #
• I <3 the Ryan Gosling meme RT @magicandrew: @mthomps "Hey girl, I know we're in a bubble…but I could never overvalue you."” #
• How to make a Mountain Dew Christmas Tree http://t.co/qT3HBYrY #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-23

• Really wish someone would modify @Amazon Product Search extension for @googlechrome so that it would search Kindle store specifically. #
• For example, @overthinkingit's "Miss Bianca: The Ultimate Disney Princess" http://t.co/Yr244USx #
• Just became obsessed with @overthinkingit, the blog that "subjects the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve." #
• Rad infographic in this article flow-charts foods based on flavor commonalities. http://t.co/byeYjy8L #
• These PSAs about adopting shelter pets made me snarf with laughter http://t.co/dyu4sbKH #
• 2 y.o. male shepherd mix dog for adoption. Rescued him from shelter as Xmas good deed. In Columbus, OH. Pls RT! http://t.co/8ELOyCtW #
• Funny @amazon reviews on the Gin and Titonic Ice Cube Tray (it's also on sale for $5) http://t.co/AXXQBIKy #
• From @Kickstarter: Imaginary Marching Band "open-source wearable instruments that … create real music thru pantomime" http://t.co/197LWSF6 #
• Fun list RT @TIME: We picked the top 10 literary side-kicks. What do you think Watson would have to say about it? | http://t.co/bY3y3fLg #
• Elder Scrolls V: #Skyrim is an #accessibility fail. Tiny narrow font, almost no contrast, non-default captions. Hard to read even in 20/20. #
• It's a good night to relink to this stunning @flickr photostream of the North Korean Mass Games http://t.co/zpJRM80I #
• My relationship with major international news: Saw that Kim Jong Il might be dead and immediately hopped on Twitter. #
• Transferring your iTunes Library – an exhaustive but very informative article http://t.co/lqXmefPO #
• Loving the @Anthroparodie blog. A must-see if you've ever shopped at Anthropologie or teach visual rhetoric http://t.co/ABngVMFX #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-16

• Just ordered a bulk kilo of @askinosie cocoa powder. It's the stuff in @jenisicecreams and @zingermans hot chocolate! Insanely delicious. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-09

• Thoughtful RhetComp Ryan Gosling Meme does Toulmin argument in a Toulmin-y way. Good classroom example? http://t.co/PbML1ToL #
• "Angry Street" t-shirt mashes up Angry Birds with Sesame Street. #perfecttowearwhileteachingvideoremix http://t.co/ovCXgVjl #
• CPU Wars: trump card game based on real historical CPU specs. Perfect #geek Xmas gift? http://t.co/MNfBTsvJ #
• Via @nprnews: Haiku Traffic Signs Bring Poetry To NYC Streets http://t.co/LNTU48ea #
• Rita Dove, my undergrad mentor and ideal poet-scholar, politely tells Helen Vendler to shove it: http://t.co/Zkdg4nWZ #
• Awesome collection of songs composed in the 1992 Super Nintendo game Mario Paint (which I played, yo) http://t.co/sRDu7sC3 #

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