Viewing profile — jmenn

He was, by all modern standards, a rather terrible writer, though _Pelham_ is rather interesting if read as throwback eighteenth-century fiction or a precursor to detective novels.…

My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual mic…

Apologies if this is mentioned and I missed it, but does this account for changes in word meaning or context over time? Earlier literature, such as Austen, could be considered “not…

After reading Sloan's _Sourdough_, I ended up buying FWSY and have been making sourdough for about 6-9 months. I find the entire process remarkably fun, relaxing, and exciting. Unf…

They're probably a lot worse inside academia for those fields. That said, everyone I know with an MA in English is doing really well for themselves, both inside and outside the aca…

I've taken up woodworking. Though I'm still remarkably terrible at it, it's nice to feel something material that I built. At first it was mentally exhausting but still rewarding, a…

I work at a university so getting books hasn't been too big an issue for me, but the public libraries near me have been pretty good about offering classes to a broad group of peopl…

Not sure if this counts as engineering or a war story, but in my first job as an undergrad, I was hired as a "web intern" to setup a CMS for a non-profit. They offered me two CMSs …

I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.

You may be interested in Matthew Kirschenbaum's work on the literary history of word processing and, well, archiving software. He gave a talk, "Software, It's a Thing," at a confer…

This sort of took me aback in the article; this is a relatively well-known piece of libertine literature for those who study early-modern lit/culture.

In my field (English / English Lit) one of the motivations for the monograph is tenure. That's likely worth more than any royalties off the actual book sales.

The cutoff at 1800 seems odd given Louis Eustace Ude's _The French Cook_ comes out in French in 1813, and had a strong foothold in England prior to 1800. [1] If I understand correc…

Same, but English literature PhD student keeping an eye on being employable in the future if tenure disappears. Generally find myself writing Python as a hobby or for my dissertati…

Disclaimer: I'm in an English PhD program. Regarding the parent's comment about adjuncting, no one who goes into an English PhD program expects they'll get a tenure track job out o…

The non-research/terminal MS may also be useful for those wishing to teach computer science at the junior/community-college level.