I just sat down in LUCI for a few minutes to take a break from today’s schedule, only to have Meg remark: “They must be exhausted.” I suspect she meant the prospective students, but I think it could apply to any of us.

Visiting student days are always intense and there is just too much information to process. It is just impossible to describe the immensity of choosing your PhD program. That said, these students look great, and I certainly hope they all choose to come play with us in Irvine. In just a few minutes, they will get to relax as well: We are all piling in cars and heading to the beach.

For today, I leave you with this picture in honor of our prospectives. A baby anteater — fresh-eyed, full of ideas, and ready to do some research! (You can see it, right?)

So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis.

It was with a fond appreciation of our sweet buttery friends that I began my PhD education at UC Irvine, as well as culinary education focused on cookies (albiet more ad-hoc). It started when one of our admin staff had to do a variety of bizarre tasks to sort out the behind-the-scenes details of my fellowship. I am still not clear on what happened, but as I understand it had a lot to do with too many pockets of money with too many random restrictions. The point is that something was screwed up, and someone worked extra hard to unscrew it. And for this, I decided to make them cookies.

Emboldened by a KitchenAid mixer, somehow the recipe was doubled, and before I knew it I was taking cookies to all kinds of admin staff. Surely it was only a matter of time before they each would do something deserving of edible thank-yous, and so I figured it couldn’t hurt to bank some karma (Tip for grad students: Eating cookies with admin staff actually gives you time to learn a little about them. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it is nice to have so many cookie-filled smiles around).

When I told my friend Gabe about the cookies, he excitedly sent me off to try a recipe from the New York Times. I suppose that was the beginning of the end. The recipe, however, while completely fantastic, was not nearly as interesting as the attached article, evocatively entitled “Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret.”

Interspersed in a cookie-fan-boy narrative were fantastic tips with explanations that made my engineering heart quicken. For example, did you know that it is important to let your dough refrigerate? It turns out that when you mix your ingredients, you are basically wrapping your flour in butter, preventing the eggs from getting through and working their magic. The solution? 24-36 hours in the fridge gives eggs time to work through the butter and work their magic! Of course they say the “proof is in the <cookie-based alternative to pudding>”, and after making a batch (double, of course), I was stunned at how good they were.

Since the NYT episode, I have moved on to other varieties, scouring the web for the same kind of technical explanations of what is actually happening during the cooking process. This UCI oven has popped out peanut butter, chocolate mint, ginger, and most recently, biscotti — cranberry, pistachio, pine nut biscotti, to be precise — and most of them aren’t half bad. I, meanwhile, have learned about letting ingredients come to room temperature before mixing, the awesome power of parchment paper, letting your cookie sheet cool between batches, and (sadly) the horror of doubling everything in a recipe except the flour (cooked butter anyone?).

At this rate “to cookies” may end up earning my dissertation dedication (that, or “the gym”), but until then I am amazed at how amenable cookies are to my geekiness. I am presenting in class today, so I figured I would whip up a batch of cookies for everyone. I thought about the biscotti, and was momentarily tempted by the ginger cookies — but man, those NYT cookies are just amazing.

Check them out for yourself: The recipe, and the play by play. (Oh, and be sure to send me your favorites too!)

Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.

One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”

Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.

Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces.

1. Carly & Kyle’s Wedding

Early this year, Steve and I flew to Walt Disney World where I was the man of honor in Carly’s wedding. It was not nearly as cheesy as I am sure they can be, and we had the added benefit of great January weather and world-class theme parks.

2. Inauguration Day

It might have been freezing as we walked towards the National Mall on that January morning, but there was something in the air. Gathered with throngs of people from near and wide, Steve and I were there to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

3. A PhD Tour

After applying to a variety of PhD programs, March and April was full of visits to various programs to find just the right fit. In the end, UC Irvine was the right place for me. Of course there is a down side to visiting so many wonderful places: I still feel sad that I somehow couldn’t smash all the schools together into some super-awesome-omni-uber-program. Le sigh. I suppose that is what conferences are for.

4. “Intertechnical Bodies” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference

This year I co-chaired a panel at the ACLA conference at Harvard University with Dora Danylevich and Megan McCabe. The conference was great, of course, and the panel and my paper were received well. However, most important were the long conversations with good friends, and the opportunity to see first-hand how some of the humanities approach their work.

5. I am an ID, sure, but mostly I am done.

“I am an ID” was the title of my Georgetown thesis. Two years in the making (with one grueling semester there at the end), my thesis examines how the ability to persist our personal data with technologies like databases changes the ways we present ourselves, and perhaps how we think of ourselves as well.

6. Georgetown Graduation

After two years it was time to thank Georgetown, throw a big party, and move along. Don’t we look fancy?

7. The most direct route from point A to B never involves a rental truck.

This summer I packed up my Dupont condo, and moved across the country in a 16′ truck. I-80 in Pennsylvania is not recommended, the people in Chicago are lovely, a stop in Utah was the perfect way to break the trip up, and most importantly, driving across the plains with a cat on your lap is the only way to go.

8. Welcome to UC Irvine

It was my friend Shawn King who drove with me for the last leg of the drive to California. We pulled in with that insane truck, and within hours had unloaded the whole thing and replaced it with a brand new VW GTI — such a sweet ride. Oh, and the school is nice too. See?

9. Apparently what I say matters!

Getting my research on craigslist and Foucault accepted as a chapter hit the top 10 last year, but it has taken until just this month to go through the machinery and hit the presses. It’s on Amazon and everything.

10. Made it through Fall Quarter – whew!

There are a bunch of different things that have happened since I got to Irvine — on their own, they each seem to small for the list, but they are important none-the-less, and so I am placing them here in this catch-all. Since I got to Irvine I have launched two research projects, applied for a fellowship, written a number of conference workshop papers, am halfway done with a full conference paper, and just last week found myself submitting a grant to the NSF with Gillian Hayes, Paul Dourish, and Janet Vertesi – a dream team, I must say. It has been a busy quarter, but it looks like 2010 is already headed in the right direction.

Looks like I am going to Savannah! I received word a couple days ago that my paper on PatientsLikeMe was accepted for the “CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future” workshop at CSCW 2010. The paper, co-authored with Caitie Lustig and my advisor, Gillian Hayes, is the start of some research engaging with issues around the representation of patients via PatientsLikeMe’s health data system.

The project is still in its formation, but if you would like to read more, you can find information on my personal page, where you will also find a copy of the workshop paper.

http://www.jedbrubaker.com/patientslikeme/

In the meantime, any thing I just can not miss while I am in Savannah?

Upon his death, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (of Panopticon fame) asked to be permanently embalmed and kept at the University of London, where his corpse “now fitted with a head made of wax, is regularly wheeled into college meetings, where it is duly recorded in the minutes as ‘present, but not voting’” (Hijiya, 1983, p. 356)

Talk about persistence. A-mazing.

I have recently been thinking again about the engineer’s role in reinforcing essentialized notions of identity. This is particularly relevant in the ubiquitous computing space where the focus on sensors explicitly aims to sense the body.

There is a complicated theoretical argument to be articulated, but honestly, I am writing final papers, and Derrida has been keeping me up at night. So, for today, I will summarize my thinking with the following comic from ThreePanelSoul, lovingly sent my way by Daniel.

Enjoy. I’ll see you next week.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long.

Eventually the blinking cursor became a burden; it would taunt me with accusations of abandoning the portion of my soul I had imprisoned into cyberspace. In moments of weakness, I would succumb to the cursor’s call. Yet interacting with LambdaMOO revealed how facile text-based interfaces can be, and it was clear that to participate in this “somewhere” would take a great deal of effort on my part. Unwilling to type long text descriptions of my “room” or “house” or whatever, LambdaMOO’s somewhere became a virtual “nowhere.”

Later that year, without quite realizing it, I did it again. This time I found myself wandering through Second Life. I had returned after discussing it in class, hoping that Second Life had grown up a bit and might have something more compelling to offer me this time around. In many ways it had, but I still was walking down empty virtual halls that uncomfortably reinforced the very thesis-isolation I was trying to avoid.

At some point I learned how to read the community announcements, several of which included ads for virtual raves featuring what apparently were some of Second Life’s hottest DJs. Perhaps only for the virtual company, for the next couple weeks I turned off iTunes, and sent my avatar off to different discos to listen to music (sometime broadcasting from actual club performances) and “dance” a harsh set of movements I had programmed into a macro set to endlessly loop. I would minimize my window and type away to the music, knowing that somewhere some generic representation of “me” was dancing the night away.

Fast forward to this last week. I have, with some surprise, returned to blogging with a vengeance. I think the stress and the need to “escape” has something to do with it. However, I find it curious that this time I escaped, well, into my own life. Blogging in the past has been one of the best ways for me to think through things, but sometimes the obligation of virtual (non)readership make it stifling. That said, a lot has happened since I moved to California, and I haven’t had much time to reflect on it all. Between Thanksgiving creeping up and CCT friends talking to me about their current PhD application process, I have been thinking about the things that are important to me and how grateful I am to be at UCI.

Blogging also serves another function: I find that I write so that I don’t forget. For those who are familiar with some of my current work, you know that I have been researching online death. This work has had me thinking about a quote from Foucault:

“Writing so as not to die… or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.”

Foucault was certainly referring to the potential for immortality through writing, but I am wondering if my scratching away at this blog attempts the almost opposite effect: Writing so as to live. Sappy endings aside, I am amused at the demise of my LambdaMOO and Second Life accounts, as well as their associated neuroses. I’d have to admit, even in the midst of all of this stress, there is no where else I’d rather be.

Alright, some of that is me. He does say:

..it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.

Given the number of papers I am writing this week, I might be putting this to a literal test. However, I just received some exciting news that is deserving of an interruption: Digital Technologies of the Self is out, and along with it, my chapter on craigslist Missed Connections.

Image courtesy of Yasmine Abbas's hand, and the helpful birds on Twitter.

You can find information about it on the publisher’s site, and it has even shown up on Amazon, where you can (as I have – tehe) sign up to be notified when they have it ready to be shipped to your eager hands!

What is the book about, you ask?

Inspired by the “technologies of the self” theorized by Michel Foucault in the early 1980s, this volume investigates how contemporary individuals fashion their identity/identities using digital technologies such as ambient intelligent devices, social networking platforms and online communities (Facebook, CouchSurfing and craigslist), online gaming (SilkRoad Online, Oblivion and World of Warcraft), podcasts, etc. With high-speed internet access, ubiquitous computing and generous storage capacity, the opportunities for staging and transforming the self/selves have become nearly limitless.

In many ways, my contribution serves as the culmination of my multi-year research project on craigslist. In other ways, this work lives on, continually informing every other project I engage. There is a certainty that it has granted me in my first weeks at UCI, but it is nonetheless a bit startling to see my name so stabilized in the table of contents.

Likewise, and inline with Foucault’s essay on authorship, it is equally startling to read others (in this case the editors in their introduction) writing about my chapter:

In the second chapter, Jed Brubaker examines… craigslist advertisements in the San Francisco, New York City and Washington, D.C, metropolitan areas. Brubaker writes that individuals leaving online notes (that are more likely to result in a “missed connection”) “engage in practices of self-description, balancing disclosure and anonymity in these public posts”. They construct an ephemeral identity. As Saul Alinsky writes, it might just be “a desperate search for personal identity — to let other people know that at least you are alive” (Alinsky 1971). However, Brubaker examines how, in the new spaces between the physical and digital, power and knowledge operate.

I know this sounds somewhat naive, and it isn’t like this is the first time I have been published. But this is a “book”, and somehow it feels different. Derrida may be laughing from his grave, but there is something both static and dynamically communal here. In contrast to the depiction of the author-singular, I might present the viewpoint my editors offer up instead:

Our interaction during the editing process… took place via… technological devices, often on the move, rushing between various professional obligations in our respective countries or in far-off places and spaces. Whatever the nature of our disembodied encounters, we know each other in the sense that through the many and varied “tethering devices” (or our “identity accessories”, Turkle 2006, 223) we have used for direct (Skype, Twitter, etc.) or indirect (website, blog) interaction, we have created an often-shifting picture of who we are — representations we want to come forward as “auctors” (authors/actors) of our lives (Bauman 2008, 52) who “create and shape things as much as… [we] might be a product of that creation and shaping”.

All in all, the whole thing kind of makes you question that image of the hollowed, isolated author. After all, regardless how exhausting or all-consuming it might be, Foucault would also be the first to agree: we write to stay alive.

Tonight Judy Olsen presented in my research methods on what she calls “the ten questions.” Apparently originally deployed on PhD students at the School of Information and the University of Michigan, these ten questions are designed to structure your research and (apparently) make graduation day arrive sooner. While they do structure research into a certain type of academic work, I do like the narrative they create. Without delay, here they are:

1. What is the problem?
2. Who cares?
3. What have people done about it? Why is this not solved?
4. What am I going to do about it?
5. What am I REALLY going to do? (A.K.A., how are you operationalizing this?)
6. What will/did you find?
7. What does this mean?
8. Who cares?
9. Where are you going to publish this?
10. What are you going to do next?

I am not exactly how this might map on to my attempts to problematize identity (ahem), but I am curious to try. Hold on, this might be a bumpy ride…