by Jenae Cohn | Jun 21, 2018 | National Endowment for the Humanities Institute
In roughly 3200 B.C., people used mobile devices. Sumerian clay tablets weren’t exactly like smartphones, but they had a lot of the same benefits: you could hold them in the palm of your hand, you could access records of past transactions or conversations, and...
by Jenae Cohn | Jun 20, 2018 | National Endowment for the Humanities Institute
Yesterday, I sat at the desk, hunched over a piece of wax thread, and a stack of papers. I was supposed to be making a coptic book, a medieval style of book where the papers are woven together to create an organically coiled binding. The process is strenuous,...
by Jenae Cohn | Jun 19, 2018 | Uncategorized
What happens when you get a group of people in a room together who all love to talk about and think about what it means for the book to be a form of technology? An immediate answer is simple: you get a generative collaborative of people who are eager to work together...
by Jenae Cohn | Dec 5, 2017 | Digital Literacy, Functional Literacy, Web Culture Musings
As a child, I had a recurring bodysnatching nightmare. In the nightmare, I would be safely tucked into my bed, but I would then sense a glowing presence moving down the hallway that separated the front door to the house from my bedroom door. I would stay frozen under...
by Jenae Cohn | Apr 15, 2017 | Personal, Professionalization
The silence on this blog is glaring. Crafting yet another introduction to yet another apology for silence fills me with a familiar feeling of fraudulence, a nagging insecurity about my repeated inability to embrace the constant grind that being a writer requires. Yet...
by Jenae Cohn | Dec 21, 2015 | Personal, Professionalization
For Ph.D. students, the holidays can be a dreaded time because it means inevitable questions from old family and friends about a lot of stressful topics, from their long-term projects to their future career outcomes. Believe me, Ph.D. students do a great job of...
by Jenae Cohn | Oct 16, 2014 | Personal, Professionalization
Let me start with some Obvious Things: Obvious Thing #1: I’m pretty good at starting and abandoning blogs. Why is that? Well, here’s an obvious reason for my obvious fact: writing is hard. I’ve come to accept that (and embrace it on my best days)....
by Jenae Cohn | Oct 11, 2014 | Personal, Professionalization
My poor, almost four-year-old laptop is on the brink of collapse. She moans and churns and thinks really hard about loading webpages now. Awakening her from digital slumber takes a few pushes and prods at her buttons. It’s not her fault; this is exactly...
by Jenae Cohn | Aug 7, 2014 | Functional Literacy, Personal, Professionalization
I sheepishly admitted something embarrassing to a member of my dissertation committee yesterday: I still use Microsoft Word to take notes and keep track of citations. “Jenaaaaae,” he groaned. “Seriously? It’s time to get with the twenty-first...
by Jenae Cohn | Jul 22, 2014 | Personal, Professionalization
Whenever I am asked, “So, what’s your research about anyway?” my stomach dips. My mind goes blank for a moment; what is my research about? Do I even know? Sometimes, I feel like the project I’m working on is so big that I don’t know where...
