Poet Ponders the Digital

When I read academic job listing for "Digital Humanities" the skills range from HTML coding to video editing. Some list audio editing. The jobs are so varied that you cannot pinpoint what the phrase means. Is my doctorate in rhetoric, scientific and technical communication sufficient? Often it is not. Some posts suggest an MFA or Ph.D. in media production. Starting January 2016, I am going to be working towards completion of my MFA in Film and Digital Technology. This feels like a last-ditch effort to revive my academic career, while also giving me more credentials to support my creative writing. With or without an academic revival, I'll benefit greatly from the courses and the exercise of creating and editing digital works. One of the frustrations I've had on the job market is that nobody seems to know what the "Digital Humanities" are or how to prove you have the skills to teach the courses. My age and my experiences are a serious obstacle on this...

An Apple II advertisement from the December 1977 issue of Byte magazine, pages 16 and 17. The second page was described the features of the Apple II. The ad originally ran in May 1977 and was updated that December. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 5, 2015 Deadline February 2015 Issue BYTE magazine stopped appearing on newsstands in July 1998. The name lived on for a time as an online publication, without many of its best columnists and without its definitive test lab reports. Finally, in 2009, the real BYTE ceased to exist. Other online publishers revived the name, but it was never the same as the legendary print publication. In November 2014, my favorite online technical resource for Apple power users and developers, OS X Hints, went into archive mode. A month later, on December 16, 2014, Dr. Dobb’s Journal followed BYTE into the virtual sunset after 38 years of publication. In fact, they call it “sunsetting” the publication: Dr. Dobb’s wil...

English: Apple IIe computer (enhanced version) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 1, 2011 Deadline June 2011 Issue Reliving the Past: Retro Gaming and Vintage Computing The Commodore 64 is back. Known by its fans as the C64, this “keyboard is the computer” stands alongside the Atari 800 and Apple IIe as one of the most important computers of all time. Technically, the new C64 is a licensed recreation, offered by a new company named Commodore USA . According to the Guinness Book of World Records, more than 30 million units of the original C64 were sold during the 1980s. Commodore USA started accepting orders for the C64 in April. The first systems will arrive in June. According to several published interviews with Commodore USA founder Barry Altman, the C64 is going to be a genuine C64. When you turn on the new C64, you are asked if you want to run Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu Linux or the new Commodore OS. In “Commodore Mode” you can run softwar...