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Literary Kinds
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tv tropes: labeling and recategorizing
I am here posting a link to one of my favorite sites, TV Tropes. Hopefully no one takes this as incentive to waste several hours.
I am surprised I didn't think of it sooner when we discussed resorting genres, to be honest. TV Tropes has myriad pages about tropes, cliches, themes, character types, and anything imaginable that is present in books, movies, anime/manga, comics, television, internet culture, and even real life. By doing so, works of all different genres and even mediums are completely resorted based on common ideas that are present in them.
![Herbie's picture Herbie's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-708.jpg)
Formatting your blog post
When I talk about formatting on a blog, I'm talking about more than just where your paragraph breaks should be and how many spaces should be between those paragraphs. I'm also talking about making sure that when you copy/paste your entry from Word into the blog site that all of your apostrophes and quotation marks are still part of the entry. I couldn't get through Carolyn R.
![aseidman's picture aseidman's picture](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/1d2b0723b0998eff578755419ebf1f1a.jpg?d=https%3A%2F%2Fserendipstudio.org%2Fexchange%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FSerendipStudioAvatar.png&s=85&r=G)
Livejournal - A considered rant.
Here's a thought: Jane Pinckard asserts that a "journal," rather than a blog, is that a journal requires real consideration before posting. Perhaps that is why blank notebooks, the kind sold at your local bookstore, are usually referred to by the vendors at "journals" rather than "diaries." So, then, what is the significance of the name "LiveJournal?" The well known online diary creation site is very much that - a diary site. LiveJournal is primarily used to create diaries and accounts of events, often dramatic ones, in the lives of individual writers.
![TPB1988's picture TPB1988's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-713.jpg)
(1/28): Pros and Cons of Blogging
As is routine, we began the class by connecting ourselves to one another. Although this time a person would introduce another person and the latter would be the one to explain the connection. It was really interesting to see how at first what people had in common were very general things such as gender but as time went on it became dorms and even languages that linked people. I have to admit that at the start of this course I was not too fond of this exercise due to my horrible memory with names but as the days pass I am not only learning each person's name, but an interesting bit of information as well.
![Jessica Watkins's picture Jessica Watkins's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-690.jpg)
Everything is Connected
This class continues to amaze me regarding how much it is related to biology. The reading about blogging as a genre brought up such terms as "evolution" and "Darwin" and I couldn't help but think to myself "My God. Everything really does come back to everything else." It's incredible how everything is connected in some way, and I wonder how much is left out there for us human beings to connect the dots.
![aybala50's picture aybala50's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-451.jpg)
Blogging
After the class discussion on Thursday, I found myself thinking about the extent to which I blog and read blogs. In class I shared that I read a couple of my friends blogs and that I don't blog. I found, after some thought, that this is not true. This is my 4th class in which I've been using Serendip, hence I've actually blogged a fair amount through this site. As mentioned in class we all use blogs more so than we think, whether it be blogs about computers or any other research that is being done for classes. There are also a large number of students on this campus (or used to be) that visited sites like CollegeACB. I admit that I have been on this college gossip site and have read the material, though I have never submitted an entry on this site.
![jrlewis's picture jrlewis's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-414.jpg)
In the Humanities and the Natural Sciences
I found the activity of classifying Bryn Mawr College’s English Department very challenging. Attempting to understand what knowledge and skills individual professors offer the department highlighted the different methodologies available for studying literature. Genre, time period, language, nationality, and medium are all relevant ways of organizing literary criticism. This is not true of the natural sciences. Only current scientific knowledge is considered relevant. The phenomena studied by scientists are not affected by language, location, or culture. Therefore, the structure of natural science departments is very different from humanities departments. For example, Bryn Mawr’s chemistry department is consists of professors who spec
![rmeyers's picture rmeyers's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-691.jpg)
Blogs and Fractals: the comic
I was looking through some webcomics and blogs today after our discussion in class, and I came across this particularly applicable comic by xkcd.com. I believe it was Ed Folsom who mentioned fractals in relation to genre, quoting Dimock on the "fractal database." Here is "Blogofractal" as pictured by xkcd.
![Molly's picture Molly's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-689.jpg)
Thoughts on blogging
Jo(e)'s blog and the comments it inspired got me to think a bit more about blogging than I have in the past. I've never really blogged myself (aside from now, I guess), but I do consider it an interesting hobby, one that no one can ignore these days. Most of the people who responded to Jo(e)'s posting, however, have taken a more active part in the blogging world, and their views provided points of interest for me.
![sweetp's picture sweetp's picture](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c6a39c781973e4d1d1c1465bc17cb1fa.jpg?d=https%3A%2F%2Fserendipstudio.org%2Fexchange%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FSerendipStudioAvatar.png&s=85&r=G)
online arguments
In reading jo(e)'s blog entry and the comments it elicited, I noticed the dynamics of an argument throughout a couple posts, with one I'd like to elaborate on. The first comment following the blog entry has rather agressive echoes, where the author invokes his point of view's rightness as opposed to everyone else's way of thinking. Dr. K has an opinion. And it's the correct one.
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I...
The idea that you can "think rhizomically" insinuates that you should consider things in terms of having no center or structure. But Professor Dalke mentioned an interesting point last class: Can you organize the world without a center? Isn't an individual constantly thinking in terms of themselves? Jo(e) references the blogging medium, talking about "Bitch Ph.D."s blog as "her ideas, her opinions, her style of writing". Wouldn't that mean that a blog is an expression of an individual, putting whomever is posting, whether it be the blogger themselves or someone leaving a remark about the material, in the spotlight? Just by skimming through the comments on Jo(e)'s blog, one finds a sea of "I"s...
![Herbie's picture Herbie's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-708.jpg)
Anonymity and Accountibility
The Internet is a wonderful place. However, it's also very dangerous. It's easy to think about the dangers the Internet presents when you first shop on a new website, and you wonder whether or not giving them your credit card information is really a good idea. Or when you meet someone new online, you wonder if they're actually who they say they are, or if they're really twice your age and incredibly creepy. I think the most dangerous thing about the internet, however, is the way it allows us to mask ourselves in anonymity and pretend like that makes it okay for us to behave badly. Or even the thought that using nicknames means that no one will find out who we are.
![sgb90's picture sgb90's picture](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/572dc89488386acd5872915e5e434a92.jpg?d=https%3A%2F%2Fserendipstudio.org%2Fexchange%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FSerendipStudioAvatar.png&s=85&r=G)
In Contradiction, Freedom
As jo(e) notes in "Blogging as an Emerging Genre," a blog offers the potential for "a text with multiple voices," less constrained by a single format of writing and open to everyone. In the responses to jo(e)'s post, numerous words (many contradictory) in relation to the concept of blogging caught my attention: "broader," vs. "trivial," "superficial by its instant, easy access." Individuals' purposes in blogging also differed: "the blog is this kind of spastic release of energy for me" vs.
![Shayna S's picture Shayna S's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-614.png)
Literature as a Conversation: The WEblog
Dictionary.com says the definition of a database is "a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer."
The same site recognizes an archive as "any extensive record or collection of data."
![Jessica Watkins's picture Jessica Watkins's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-690.jpg)
Hiding in Plain Sight
Jo(e)'s post was interesting, but the comments after it were even more so. The post by Dr.K concerning how "information gets trivialized and made superficial by its instant, easy access" when it is put on the internet brought up memories from Folsom's article. Databases and blogs are unifiers in the sense that they open new doors to those who had limited access to their information before, but is this necessarily a good thing?
![spleenfiend's picture spleenfiend's picture](/exchange//files/images/SerendipStudioAvatar.png)
the online diary: conducive to stalking
Laurie McNeill's article "The Diary on the Internet" was published in 2003, meaning all the examples cited were from 2002 and sooner. Many of them were even from the nineties! I did not become acquainted with internet culture until I was nine, in 2001 (when I actually had a website on Digimon), and of course, I was nine and did not frequent any serious parts of the internet.
![rmeyers's picture rmeyers's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-691.jpg)
applicable information and parentheses
As we are reading these articles and blog posts about the genre of blogs, I began to think about why I read the blogs I read, and why I don't write one myself. (The second was fairly obvious, and flows from the first: I have a dairy, but a truly private, paper and pen documentation of lists and life, because nothing I say has a purpose besides fulling a need I have to catalog my life.) But I also realized as McNeill mentioned that "I am drawn to Web diaries that most closely resemble traditional literary tests" (25) that all of the blogs I read are by authors (and while I do not read many blogs, this is still, I believe, significant). They are usually by authors who have written books I like, and who do not often post meaningless rambles.