The Salt-Box

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome McGann’s NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) group.

Another Thursday, another chance to post at Blog of a Bookslut.  The key bit:

What kind of self-deluded narcissism is required for an editor of the Times Book Review section to write, “Never mind reviews. What’s happened to proletarian literature in this country?” It’s fairer to turn this around: “Never mind proletarian literature. What’s happened to reviews in this country?” Is it really too much to ask that the Times review chancier works or ones from smaller presses? Garner pretends as though the fact that the Times hasn’t reviewed any such books means that they don’t exist.

Read the whole thing.  I suspect that more interviews are forthcoming soon, too!

My weekly post at Blog of a Bookslut is up. Topics include the new book of Guantanamo Bay detainee poems, a new edition of Blake’s illustrations of “Comus,” the “Immanent Willy,” and more.

It looks like The Salt-Box is back up and running.  It may take a day or two to get all the tires kicked–esp. w/r/t feeds and archives–but regular blogging will commence immediately.