#AcademicsWithCats

What We Learn from Cats. A book I spotted en route to lunch today. Written by one of the preeminent scholars of the Sefardi ballad tradition. Now in its third reprinting.

In certain respects, the Spanish academy is much more rigid than the American one, especially in terms of traditional disciplinary boundaries; but at the same time, it's much more tolerant of academics doing all different kinds of writing.

The Sad Cats of Academia.edu (A Tale of Customer Service in No Way Worthy of T.S. Eliot and Edward Gorey)

Especially since I have complained about academia.edu in this space before (and especially especially, because that post, depressingly, is my most popular post ever, if site stats are to be believed), I wanted to make a point of publicly complimenting the organization on a good interaction that I had with them.

With no warning, academia.edu spontaneously changed the layout of their web site and I hate it. The low contrast makes it hard to read, the full listing of everyone's activity in small white boxes makes for a lot more scrolling through screens with no sense of visual hierarchy, and it seemed like change for change's sake, a la Facebook, rather than change in the interest of functionality.

I tweeted my dismay:

I hate the new @academia.edu #newsfeed. They don't have to imitate FB so far as to randomly change the look of the page for no good reason.
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) October 8, 2014

The first reply I got was a picture of a sad cat from one of their developers. Maybe not the most professional response on the planet, but whatever mood I was in meant it struck me as really funny.

@homophonous @academia pic.twitter.com/yHei718KCT
— Conway Anderson (@ConwayAnderson) October 8, 2014

But then I got two more sad cats from from their developers. (I swear. I'm eventually getting to the part where they act like responsible human beings attending to a user complaint.)

@ConwayAnderson @homophonous @academia pic.twitter.com/pSthb2Zp58
— Kate Miltenberger (@katemilty) October 8, 2014

@katemilty @ConwayAnderson @homophonous @academia pic.twitter.com/rci4SPEKpC
— Kevin Wu (@kevinwuhoo) October 8, 2014

By this point I was getting a little big concerned that I was going to go to sleep and wake up with a feed full of sad cat photos from academia.edu developers.

Great. Criticize @academia.edu's new layout, get bombarded with photos of sad cats.
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) October 8, 2014

In fact, a colleague tweeted to thank me for sending him a PDF offprint of my new article, and I replied that it was good that he had it, since I was fully expecting my academia.edu page to be full of sad, terrified cats by the morning, too.

@ShammaBoyarin You're welcome! Because nobody may find it now online because of drowning in all the cats...
— S.J. Pearce (@homophonous) October 8, 2014

In the narrative structure of the anecdote, you may identify this moment as the turning point.

What I in fact woke up to was an email to my NYU account  from the academia.edu operations manager, apologizing for the loopy cat antics of the night previous and asking if I wouldn't mind putting my concerns about the new layout into more than 140 characters, with copy to one of the company VPs. I figured that if they were going out of their way to solicit feedback, then I had a responsibility to provide it rather than just engage in short-form griping, so I did.  I got a rather lengthy reply from the VP, thanking me for my feedback, explaining why they made the changes that they did and what their planned next phases of development are (which include increasing the contrast between the white background and light gray text!). It seems like the kind of thing that they should have made more public before changing the site on people, but I was pleased that they were willing to take the time to tell their end users what's going on. It's certainly far more than Facebook does with even more serious issues at stake.

So, kitten' around aside, nice job on this one, guys!

(And now a return to your regularly scheduled cat photos, namely ones of my own cat sitting on my own book manuscript and mostly looking bored.)

And the book-finishing marathon continues.

Indestructible Prose

Territorial Dispute

¡Albricia, Álvar Fáñez || ca echados somos de tierra!

(It's an alarmingly appropriate book for him

to have chosen to make his stand for the chair.)

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

He's helping. (Or looking for the mouse.)

Book-Finishing Marathon (Day Thirty-Two)

And here I'd always thought they were called book snakes.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Twenty-Seven (Really)

Well, if you're going to sleep across an unhelpfully large percentage of the surface of my desk, then you can hold my papers up.

Yes, you.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Sixteen

Near-total eclipse of the book manuscript:

Thanks, all, for bearing with me as I post all of these cat-and-book-manuscript photos. Normal service will have been resumed as soon as possible.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Fifteen

Note the correct arrangement of computer, cat and copy.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Twelve

Today, the practical cat and I tackle poetics.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Two

The cat continues to be singularly unhelpful. That's the manuscript atop which he is chilling out.

Update, 3pm: We have arrived at an uneasy compromise:

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day One

Sat down to the computer after the record third round of winter respiratory crud to begin my six-week, uninterrupted marathon of book manuscript finishing. Drinking my coffee and reading the various morning news sources, I was greeted by the following tidbit in my Twitter timeline:

Happy winter break, #NYU! “Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.” —George MacDonald #MotivationMonday
— New York University (@nyuniversity) December 23, 2013

It took every muscle in both my hands not to reply: "Unless you're an assistant professor hoping to earn tenure."

The cat is keeping me company, sitting on my desk, relentlessly gnawing on my shoulder. Onwards and upwards.

Today's (Art-Historical) Damage

Visited the Met today. Books were 20% off for members. Bought these. Now having them guarded by a fuzzy heraldic animal that is extremely pointy at five of six ends.

GROWLTIGER'S ON THE LOOSE! (medieval version)

 

Full marks for effort, major deduction for execution, though.

Personally, even if my cat loved medieval history (he doesn't), I'd still actually put a picture of him on a "lost cat" poster. I mean, if you see a ginger cat wandering Cambridge, are you just supposed to go up to it and start quizzing it on the Battle of Hastings and call the number if it responds?

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to the need to advertise the cat's proclivities, but really, if you need a pictures of medieval cats (and yes, I've just used the words "medieval" and "cat" in the same sentence, fully knowing the risk of reigniting the flurry of cat-print-on-manuscript pictures circulating) there are much better options available.

Nevertheless, I do hope these folks find their cat.

Editing Help

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot!

"Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.
He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme
A long while before Queen Victoria's accession."

(Yes, my cat fell asleep of his own accord on a Bible that was open to the book of Deuteronomy. Yes, I read loads of Eliot when I'm not reading medieval poetry.)