He was, by all modern standards, a rather terrible writer, though _Pelham_ is rather interesting if read as throwback
eighteenth-century fiction or a precursor to detective novels. If nothing else, 'his mouth full of truth and turbot' is a rather brilliant phrase.
My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time, and I've always wondered if these would be targeted by people looking to bring a complaint.
Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces of content accessible.
> Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time
Wholeheartedly agree with this. I once hosted a microsite on my personal server for a group at the university I was a web flunkey for as it needed to get up quickly, and well, corporate IT wasn't the fastest thing there, and it took them years to ask for changes after I'd left.
It's usually pretty easy for universities to update their main public facing pages, but as you mention, it's the thousands of other, quite often slightly bespoke (as this Professional or that Dr wants their own, custom slice) that's the breaker.
And I'll bet the vast majority of those PDFs were bitmaps made by somebody printing them on paper and then scanning them in because they didn't know how to make a text-based PDF directly from Word, or why doing so was a better idea.
Apologies if this is mentioned and I missed it, but does this account for changes in word meaning or context over time? Earlier literature, such as Austen, could be considered “not-vivid” unless you’re clued in for particular hints/phrases. I’m thinking of, perhaps, the use of “Et cetera” for pudenda.
After reading Sloan's _Sourdough_, I ended up buying FWSY and have been making sourdough for about 6-9 months. I find the entire process remarkably fun, relaxing, and exciting. Unfortunately, I still can't get that real "sour" taste from my breads.
You can buy sourdough cultures that kickstart your starter. Basically it’s a culture that’s been cultivated for years and the starter gets frozen or condensed right before shipping and all you do is rehydrate it a bit and then maintain it.
They're probably a lot worse inside academia for those fields. That said, everyone I know with an MA in English is doing really well for themselves, both inside and outside the academy. Maybe it's my small sample size though.
I've taken up woodworking. Though I'm still remarkably terrible at it, it's nice to feel something material that I built. At first it was mentally exhausting but still rewarding, and as I'm getting more used to the various tools, the mental load is relaxing a bit. It does, however, require at least a little bit of space where one can handle producing a bit of sawdust.
I work at a university so getting books hasn't been too big an issue for me, but the public libraries near me have been pretty good about offering classes to a broad group of people, and pushing their makerspace & 3-D printers. I know my craftier friends are there frequently for the 3-D printers.
Not sure if this counts as engineering or a war story, but in my first job as an undergrad, I was hired as a "web intern" to setup a CMS for a non-profit. They offered me two CMSs from which to choose, Drupal or Joomla, a list of functionalities they wanted, and let me run loose. I was making progress, right up until the Executive Director told me I wasn't allowed to write "custom code" due to the possibility that I may one day leave. No HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. that wasn't by default output from the CMS. The ED didn't believe I could write modules, so I ended up doing that, saying "look it's a default from this module in the CMS," and somehow that got the okay. A year later, when the ED retired, they hired me as a freelancer to redo everything in a more sensible way.
I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.
You may be interested in Matthew Kirschenbaum's work on the literary history of word processing and, well, archiving software. He gave a talk, "Software, It's a Thing," at a conference at the Library of Congress in 2014: https://medium.com/@mkirschenbaum/software-its-a-thing-a5504...
