Choisir entre supprimer le français et supprimer la philosophie… Quel beau choix ! Enlever plutôt le foie ou le poumon ? Plutôt l’estomac ou le coeur ?

Plutôt les yeux ou les oreilles ?

Il faudrait inventer un enseignement strictement monolingue d’une part – car tout peut être traduit en anglais, n’est-ce pas ? – et strictement dépourvu de toute interrogation (par exemple sur ce qu’implique la “traduction” en général et en particulier de telle langue à telle autre). Une seule langue débarrassée des parasites de la réflexion serait une belle matière universitaire, lisse, harmonieuse, aisée à soumettre aux contrôles d’acquisition.

Il faut donhc proposer de supprimer l’un et l’autre, le français et la philosophie. Et tout ce qui pourrait s’en approcher, comme le latin ou la psychanalyse, l’italien, l’espagnol ou la théorie littéraire, le russe ou l’histoire. Peut-être serait-il judicieux d’introduire à la place, et de manière obligatoire, quelques langages informatiques (comme java) et aussi le chinois commercial et le hindi technologique, du moins avant que ces langues soient complètement transcrites en anglais. A moins que n’arrive l’inverse.

De toutes façons, enseignons ce qui s’affiche sur nos panneaux publicitaires et sur les moniteurs des places boursières.

Rien d’autre !

Courage, camarades, un monde nouveau va naître !

Jean-Luc Nancy, professeur émérite d’une vieille Université française (pas pour longtemps).

What’s that you say? You can’t read it because it’s in French? Well luckily for you, despite the best efforts of the Albany adminstration there are French Studies Faculty left. So, you can read it in translation:

To choose between eliminating French or Philosophy . . . what a fabulous choice! Should one rather take out the liver or the lung? The stomach or the heart? The eyes or ears?

We need to invent teaching that is, on the one hand, strictly monolingual – for isn’t it true that everything can be translated into English? – and strictly lacking in all forms of questioning (for example concerning what is implied by “translation” in general and from one language to another in particular). A single language unencumbered by the static [parasites] of reflection would be a great subject for university study, smooth, harmonious, easily submitting to the controls of acquisition.

We should propose eliminating both of them, French and Philosophy. And everything existing in proximity to them, like Latin or psychoanalysis, Italian, Spanish or literary theory, Russian or History. Perhaps it would be wise to introduce in their place, as requirements, certain computer languages (like Java), as well as commerical Chinese and technological Hindi, at least until such languages are able to be completely transcribed into English. Unless the inverse were to happen first.

In any case, let’s teach what is displayed on our advertising billboards and on the stock exchange monitors. That and nothing else!

Courage, comrades, a new world is about to be born!

Jean-Luc Nancy, Emeritus Professor of an old French (not for long) university.

Translation by Professor of French and English David Wills (fair disclosure David was my dissertation director).

I want to explicate some of the issues I raised in the last post, address some of the comments, walk back my position on at least one point (yes you are all right the word “bad” was not a fair characterization), and dig in on a few others.To keep these posts stylistically similar let me again start with two observations.

1. One of the essays I most enjoy teaching in my media studies classes is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. When teaching this essay I often begin the class by saying Benjamin understood why Ebert was wrong. That is Ebert, rather famously claimed that while video games might demonstrate a high level of craft, they will never rise to the level of art. Of course what Benjamin argued in The Work of Art, at the time in relation to photography, was that the question should not be “Is Photography Art?” but rather the more important question: “What does having photography do to our concept of art?” (By extension the question of video games should be what does having video games do to our concept of art.)
This is similar to how I think about the concept of digital humanities. I think we should not be asking, can the humanities be digital, or how does the digital allow or not allow us to do humanities, but rather, what does having the digital do to our idea of the humanities (and by extension what it means to be human). Anything short of this strikes me as less than interesting, but more importantly a missed opportunity.

2. Okay, I can tell I am really going to get in trouble for this one but . . .

The following is not originally my observation, I wish I could take credit for it as I generally agree and think it is really astute, but it’s not mine. (But I will let the original source remain anonymous as it was an “off the record conversation,” but if said person wants to claim it, I will note credit here.)
Generally speaking (painting really broad but accurate brush strokes here) Digital Historians, and Digital Literary Scholars have had significantly different approaches to incorporating “the digital” into their respective scholarship. Digital Historians have leveraged the digital to expand and engage a wider public in the work of history. As examples of this think of Omeka, or leveraging social media to engage in crowd sourced projects. That is, Digital Historians have often begun by asking “how does the digital allow us to reach a larger/public audience?” Now this could be because many of the folks working in Digital History come from a public history background . . . But in the case of literary studies the “digital” projects have not, as much, changed the scope of the audience. So that if you look at digital literary projects they often look remarkably similar to projects in the pre-digital era, just ones which have been put on steroids and run thru a computational process. Seems to me that the Digital Historian model is a better one.

Okay so onto the post. . .

I can’t help but notice that most of the talk, or at least critique, in the comments centers around the last paragraph, largely ignoring the analysis which led me to that paragraph. (To be fair I sort of invite this, saving my central and controversial claims for that section, but still . . .) That is, the early part of the post has as its supposition that “Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff,” and by Universities I mostly arguing about humanities scholars, but that’s only because the context was the MLA. When I look at what type of digital scholarship in the humanities is being recognized and valued by the institutions within which we operate it seems that that scholarship is mostly conservative, does little to question, upset, or threaten the dominant paradigms. And, that what I see to be as truly important work has yet to receive recognition. The fact that someone like Brian can be without a job and largely a “real nobody” while he is such a significant “virtual somebody” is just one example of this.

In his comment on the original post Tim Lepczyk suggests that a large part of the problem here is in defining what I, or anyone, means by the digital humanities, or humanities 2.0. I think this is spot on, and this is probably one of the most slippery parts of my argument, one I haven’t entirely worked out. As he points out there has been a certain amount of baggage from prior text analysis that is ported over in the upgrade to digital humanities. I definitely see humanities scholars as collaborating with computer scholars, IT folks, and people from a range of places within the academy and outside the academy. (Indeed one of my favorite presentations at the MLA addressed one particularly thorny aspect of this issue, @nowviskie’stake on intellectual property and labor in the age of collaboration.) But I think if what the digital does is just take the old disciplines and make them digital, leaving disciplinarity and the silo structure of the University in tact, it will have failed. I want to see the digital transform not just the content or practice of the disciplines, but the very idea of disciplinarity.

But, it is not entirely true as Brian Breman argues that I am advocating a “this changes everything,” approach to the digital humanities. In fact my major fear, the thing that keeps me up at night, is the idea that “this changes nothing.” Indeed that was the impetuous for the original post, despite the digital, nothing changes. It seems to me that the digital affords us (both as academics and as a wider members of a society) to do something really different, to re-organize many of the founding assumptions we have about how to organize knowledge, how to organize people, and even the nature of what it means to be human. But, I see us not necessarily taking advantage of this opportunity. In fact I see this as a fading opportunity, as our culture makes the “change over” from one intellectual substructure (dead tree) to another (digital network) it seems that we are porting over a host of prejudices about knowledge production and dissemination that are worth rethinking. (As just one example of this I think about intellectual property and knowledge ownership.) So, I would love if “this changes everything,” but unfortunately I think (as my original post claimed) that this has changed little, especially within the walls of academia. This is not to suggest that there are not some significant revolutions/projects taking place both within and outside of academia, but that a lot of what is being done/counting as digital scholarship does little to question the founding principles of academic knowledge production, especially within the field of “literary studies” (principles which we can at this moment, perhaps, but for a very short time re-negotiate).

On the most radical I’ll raise the question this way: The rate at which some of the digital scholarship has been so smoothly/effortlessly incorporated into the walls of the academia should perhaps give us pause to question whether or not it actually signals any change at all. Again to paint broad brushstrokes, but ones which I think are relatively accurate, scholarship tends to fall into two categories: 1. That which does little to call into question the walls of the ivory tower, or what is worse strengthens those walls, a digital humanism which would build an ivory tower of bricks and mortar and supercomputers crunching large amounts of textual data producing more and more textual analysis that seems even more and more removed from the public which the academy says it serves re-inscribing and re-enforcing a very conservative form of humanities scholarship. 2. A digital humanism which takes down those walls and claims a new space for scholarship and public intellectualism. Now while these two positions are not as mutually exclusive as I am painting them here I am more than willing to sacrifice the first for the sake of the later.

In the longest comment on the last post, @mkirschenbaum, suggests that when we think about the internet we need to think not about the Derrida of The Postcard or Of Grammatology, but rather the Derrida of Given Time. This is perhaps the most succinct phrasing I have heard of the problem. We spend too much time thinking about the structure of the link or data and not enough time thinking about the social relations and ethical questions opened up by this space.

And in this regard I agree with in part @sramsay’s comment that “new tools can facilitate a new type of public intellectualism.” The printing press was not just a faster version of the scriptorium, it was the “gadgets of the early modern period and the networks of communication in which they flourished” that changed the intellectual and wider cultural landscape. The printing press was not a mere tool by any means. But, it was precisely at the level beyond the printing press as gadget that I want to look, and to which I think we need to focus our efforts. On one level the printing press was just a gadget and the real, the important change, came at the level of the social negotiation about how that gadget would be deployed. Authorship, intellectual property, authority, piracy, etc. were all social/legal/cultural negotiations that occurred and were not decided at the level of the gadget, even if the gadget did speed up the rate of connectivity. If academic scholarship, just to take one example, says “what can I author now on the web,” without first calling into question the notion of “authorship” and recognizing the degree to which it might be heterogenous to the way knowledge can be organized on the web we will have missed a golden opportunity.

I think I should have been perhaps clearer, or not so glib in my paraphrasing of the question from my panel. I think to say that it was a “bad” question was wrong. What I should have said was that I think to answer the question straight up is not the most productive way to look at the problem. Instead by answering the question backwards, saying what if we thought about the “digital” as not merely an adjective (gadget to be applied to the humanities) but something much more, what does having the digital do to our conception of the humanities, seems to me the place we should place our focus.

And so this is where I am really going to dig in. @tanyaclement, correctly so, calls my analysis out, saying that like the MLA I am perhaps focusing too much on social media, “Clearly, there has been a lot of focus on “Digital Humanities” this year because of the rise of twitter and, as such, DH has now been associated with social media almost exclusively. This is unfortunate.” Where I am going to disagree with this is at the level of “unfortunate.” I think this is a fortunate thing (if only it were the case). The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period. Yes it is true that there are hosts of scholars having scholarly discussions who are not on Twitter, but you know what, they better be, or they risk being made irrelevant. No this doesn’t mean that every scholar has to have a Twitter account, but it probably wouldn’t hurt, but it does mean that every scholar better be having their discussions in public on the web in these digital spaces for all to participate in.

I realize that this stance displays a certain amount of irreverence to the very people on whose shoulders which I stand in order to make this argument, but on the same time it displays a hyper-fidelity to their work, thinking about how it can be carried into this new digital substructure, used to shape this (perhaps) new way or organizing knowledge.

Yesterday this argument took a different sort of turn when Ian Bogost published The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities. In part Bogost was weighing in on the question of Digital Humanities and its arrival, non-arrival, but was actually, it seems to me, making a much broader critique. Regardless, as he observes in the comments on the post, much of the discussion centers around a conflict between digital humanities and new media. Along these lines Matt asked if this is not just a debate over semantics, and perhaps less generously, a territorial pissing match. Throwing around the term “digital humanities” as an empty signifier, backlash against the digital humanities.

Let me be clear, I have no desire to engage in an academic territorialization argument. Honestly I couldn’t care less, having left an English department I am quite happy to not have to engage in those discussions. My position was a much larger one, addressing the question of whether or not “digital humanities” has arrived, and in a connected manner what this means for the future of the humanities. It appeared to me that much of the discussion at MLA was about the arrival of the “digital humanities” and in a related theme the extent to which this can serve as a “cure” (as Ian puts it) for what ails the humanities.

So let me put it a different way, maybe the digital humanities has arrived, maybe it is becoming central and important in the way that humanities scholars do their work, but the digital humanities that has arrived (the slow work that @tanyaclement mentions) is the kind of arrival that changes nothing, a non-event. The only type of digital humanities that is allowed to arrive it the type that leaves the work of humanities scholars unchanged. Seriously, don’t tell me your project on using computers to “tag up Milton” is the new bold cutting edge future of humanities, or if it is the future of the humanities it is a future in which the humanities becomes increasingly irrelevant and faculty continue to complain at boorish parties how society marginalizes them, all the while reveling in said marginalization, wearing it as a badge of honor which purportedly proves their superiority on all matters cultural.

As Ian observes, “It’s not “the digital” that marks the future of the humanities, it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas.” That is what I was after in my original post, the idea that the digital that I am hoping for, hoping will challenge and change scholarship hasn’t arrived yet, for all the self congratulation about the rise of the digital, little if anything has changed. Humanists are still largely irrelevant in the broader culture discussions, and it seems to me purposely chose to remain so.(Actually I am not certain the degree to which this is really about “literary” humanists, as it seems this issue plays out differently in history. But that might just be the perspective of an outsider.)

And this is the brilliance of Brian’s paper (content not withstanding) he made his material more relevant than all the other papers that weren’t published, he engaged the outside (even if it was a paper that was a lot of inside baseball on the workings of the academy) because he opened his analysis and thinking to a wider audience (and as @amandafrench and @bitchphd remark did it with a real-time spin that enhanced at both the level of content and delivery). Again The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn’t attend the MLA. Or maybe, the real influence of his paper should be measured by how many non-academics read his paper. Scholars need to be online or be irrelevant, because our future depends upon it, but more importantly the future of how knowledge production dissemination takes place in the broader culture will be determined by it.

1. Clearly one of the themes that has developed in the MLA post-mortem has been the rise of social media and the influence of technology at the conference. Both The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed noticed the prominence of Twitter at the convention, or the apparent prominence of Twitter. It seemed that unlike last year where the majority of conversation about/on Twitter and the MLA was confined to to one session, this year, although noticeably less than other conferences, Social Media was clearly playing a role.

What is more, as The Chronicle noticed this seemed to be a part of a larger trend in the Digital Humanities. Ultimately I agree with Mark Sample (@samplereality), who posted an analysis of the MLA Tweets and Matt Kirschenbaum(@mkirschenbaum) who argued via Twitter that this meme/theme was some what overstated. As Matt observed, the MLA has a history of at least being marginally receptive to “technology and literacy” panels even if they have not been placed in the center of the discourse. (Rosemeary Feal deserves mad props for her outreach here. Tweeters aren’t always the most reverent or polite bunch, self included, but I am nothing compared to @mladeconvention.) Given that Matt won the MLA book award for best first book, it is hard to ignore the fact that digital humanities is becoming more prominent and more mainstream, if still marginal. But I also think there is somewhat of an echo chamber effect here. That is, of course those who write online and are engaged with technology are more likely to notice that technology is being talked about. I think if we polled all of the attendees at the MLA a vast majority of them would have no idea that a conversation (at times academic, at times not) was taking place via Twitter. Indeed I would venture to guess that a majority could not really describe to you what Twitter is/was.

2. One of the other “much talked about items” at MLA was Brian Croxall’s (@briancroxall’s) paper, or non paper titled, “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty.” I say non-paper because Brian, who is currently on the job market and an adjunct faculty, didn’t attend the MLA, instead he published his paper to his own website. (I am told the paper was also read in absentia.) I won’t recap the whole thing here, you should just go read it. But two things stand out in the article: 1.”After all, I’m not a tenure-track faculty member, and the truth of the matter is that I simply cannot afford to come to this year’s MLA.” 2. “And yes, that means I do qualify for food stamps while working a full-time job as a professor!”
For several reasons Brian’s paper hit a nerve. Indeed The Chronicle picked up the story, a piece which for a few days was listed as the most popular story on The Chronicle’s website. His paper became, arguably, the most talked about paper of the convention.

In part Brian’s story (how the paper became popular, not the content-or at least not yet, more on that in a minute) is in part a story of the rise of social media, and its influence. And this is where I think the real story in the Digital Humanities is, not the rise of the Digital Humanities, but rather the rise or non-rise of social media as a means of knowledge creation and distribution, and the fact that the rise has changed little. Digital Humanities if it is rising is rising as “Humanities 2.0″ allowed in because it is non-threatening.

So if you imagined asking all of the MLA attendees, not just the social media enabled ones, what papers/talks/panels were influential my guess is that Brian’s might not make the list, or if it did it wouldn’t top the list. That is because most of the “chatter” about the paper was taking place online, not in the space of the MLA.

Let’s be honest, at any given session you are lucky if you get over 50 people, assuming the panel at which the paper was read was well attended maybe 100 people actually heard the paper given. But, the real influence of Brian’s paper can’t be measured this way. The real influence should be measured by how many people read his paper, who didn’t attend the MLA. According to Brian, views to his blog jumped 200-300% in the two days following his post; even being conservative one could guess that over 2000 people performed more than a cursory glance at his paper (the numbers here are fuzzy and hard to track but I certainly think this is in the neighborhood). And Brian tells me that in total since the convention he is probably close to 5,000 views. 5000 people, that is half the size of the convention.

And, so if you asked all academics across the US who were following the MLA (reading The Chronicle, following academic websites and blogs) what the most influential story out of MLA was I think Brian’s would have topped the list, easily. Most academics would perform serious acts of defilement to get a readership in the thousands and Brian got it overnight.

Or, not really. . .Brian built that readership over the last three years.

As Amanda French (@amandafrench) argues, what social media affords us is the opportunity to amplify scholarly communication (actually if your read only one thing today on social media and academia today, read this). As she points out in her analysis (interestingly enough Amanda was not at MLA but still tweeting (conversing) about the MLA during the conference) only 3% of the people at MLA were tweeting about it. Compare that to other conferences, even other academic ones, and this looks rather pathetic. Clearly MLAers have a long way to go in coming to terms with social media as a place for scholarly conversation.

But, what made Brian’s paper so influential/successful is that Brian had already spent a great deal of time building network capital. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter, was one of the panelists at last years MLA-Twitter panel. He teaches with technology. I know several professors borrow/steal his assignments. (I personally looked at his class wiki when designing my own.) Besides having a substantial traditional CV, Brian has a lot of “street cred” in the digital humanities/social networking/academia world. More than a lot of folks, deservedly so. It isn’t that he just “plays” with all this social media, he actually contributes to the community of scholars who are using it, in ways which are recognized as meaningful and important.

In this regard I couldn’t disagree with BitchPhD more (someone with whom I often agree) in her entry into the MLA, social media, Brian’s paper nexus of forces. Bitch claims that, “Professor Croxall is, if I may, a virtual nobody.” Totally not true. Unlike Bitch he is not anonymous, or even pseudo-anonymous, his online identity and “real world identity” are the same. He is far from a virtual nobody. Indeed I would say he is one of the more prominent voices on matters digital and academia. He is clearly a “virtual somebody,” and he has made himself a “virtual somebody” by being an active, productive, important, member of the “virtual academic community.” If he is anything he is a “real nobody,” but a “virtual somebody.” In the digital world network capital is the real “coin of the realm,” and Brian has a good bit of it, which when mustered and amplified through the network capital of others (@kfitz, @dancohen, @amandafrench, @mkgold, @chutry, @academicdave —all of us tweeted about Brian’s piece) brings him more audience members than he could ever really hoped to get in one room at the MLA.

And so Brian isn’t a virtual nobody, he isn’t a “potential somebody” he is a scholar of the the digital humanities, one that ought to be recognized. But here is the disconnect, Brian has a lot of “coin” in the realm of network capital, but this hasn’t yielded any “coin” in the realm of bricks and mortar institutions. If we were really seeing the rise of the digital humanities someone like Brian wouldn’t be without a job, and the fact that he published his paper online wouldn’t be such an oddity, it would be standard practice. Instead Brian’s move seems all “meta- and performative and shit” when in fact it is what scholars should be doing.

And so in the “I refute it thus” model of argumentation I offer up two observations: 1. The fact that Brian’s making public of his paper was an oddity worth noticing means that we are far away from the rise of the digital humanities. 2. The fact that a prominent digital scholar like Brian doesn’t even get one interview at the MLA means more than the economy is bad, that tenure track jobs are not being offered, but rather that Universities are still valuing the wrong stuff. They are looking for “real somebodies” instead of “virtual somebodies.” Something which the digital humanities has the potential of changing (although I remain skeptical).

In the panel at which I presented, an audience member noting the “meme” about the rise of the digital humanities asked if all of this “stuff” about digital humanities just reflected our fascination with gadgets, or how we balance our technology with humanities, how does the digital affect the humanities in a non-gadget way? (I paraphrase but that’s the thrust of the question). After a few of the other panelists answered, I suggested that the question was bad (this is often a rhetorical trope I employ). I said instead of thinking of the word digital as an adjective which modifies the humanities, the humanities 2.0 model, I am more interested in how the digital effects not how we do the humanities, but rather how the digital can fundamentally change what it means to do humanities, how the digital might change the very concept of “the humanities.” I don’t want a digital facelift for the humanities, I want the digital to completely change what it means to be a humanities scholar. When this happens then I’ll start arguing that the digital humanities have arrived. Really I couldn’t care less about text visualizations or neat programs which analyze the occurrences of the word “house” in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. If that is your scholarship fine, but it strikes me that that is just doing the same thing with new tools. Give me the “virtual somebodies” who are engaging in a new type of public intellectualism any day. Better yet, if you are a University and want to remain relevant in the next moment, give these people a job.

(For those who are interested, you can read more about the panel I was on about Microblogging over at the HATAC blog.)

Several others have already blogged their MLA experiences, including Alex Reid (who has at least three posts), and Cathy Davidson (who has posts about the Twitter panel, and two separate posts about the Digital Media and Learning Panel). For more general impressions of the MLA from digital scholars you should check out fellow Microblogging panelist Matt Gold’s excellent post about The Rise of the Digital MLA and Chuck Tyron’s reflections on the MLA as he works on a syllabus.

What I wanted to do was add my voice to this series of reflections and musings, perhaps in a series of posts, explaining why I thought the MLA was so productive this year (for me at least) and suggest a few ways this can be even more the case. So, I am going to start with something that might be counter-intutive, and seemingly unrelated to the “digital” but which upon consideration was huge in my experience. The Jobmarket or more precisely the lack there of for me. (Later I’ll talk about some of the panels, or individual meetings I had, but for now . . .)

This was the first year I have attended MLA when I was not interviewing, or serving on an interview committee. Aside from the huge time suckage that interviewing can be, it was also a huge mental relief. If you are interviewing (either side doing the interview, or being interviewed) the process is incredibly mentally demanding and thus really intrudes on your ability to do other things at the conference. This would be fine if the conference was only for interviewing, but its not. So, here is my suggestion:

Schools should stop interviewing at the MLA

Okay I know what you all (or many of you) are thinking, that I must be crazy, and you want a job so people should interview more at the MLA, but just stick with me a moment on this as I explain.

The tradition of interviewing at the MLA (and here I hypothesize I have no real knowledge of this) grows out of a pre-digital world model, when the easiest and most efficient way for schools to interview a large enough pool was to assemble them all in one place, but this is no longer the case. Digital tools can compensate, and provide a better option. Consider for a moment what is the carbon foot print of the MLA, having 8,000+ people travel from all over the US to meet, how many people could we cut from that list if interviewing was not taking place?

What’s the alternative? Simple, video interview. The technology is now good enough, and cheap enough (easily less then the price of one plane ticket for one faculty member of one of the interview committees at any school). I already know of several schools that have gone this route. Now I know what you are thinking, video interview that can’t be as good as in person. Seriously? If you think that having someone sit on a bed in a hotel room and answer questions for half an hour as they try to sneak a peek at their watch making sure they have enough time to sprint half way across down town (or in SF up a hill) to their next interview, gives you an accurate view of the candidate you are kidding yourself.

Consider the advantages:
• How much money would your institution save? If you saved your department the cost of 3 people traveling to another city (flight, hotel, meals) for three days what would you save? Maybe you could even convince your chair to allow you to bring an extra candidate to the on-campus interview? (Which is a far better measure of someone’s fit.)
• How much money would graduate students save? The job market is a ridiculously expensive endeavor, especially if you are a grad student with already paltry income, and have to travel to MLA for two-three interviews, or what is worse make reservations and plans to attend MLA to not get any interviews. Ridiculous.
• Quality Interviews: How much better could the interviews (on both sides) be if you were not cramming them into a tight schedule. If they are done remotely you could do three a day over several days, rather than four or five a day.
• Eliminate the hotel room problem. Seriously folks what kind of profession asks people to interview in a hotel room while sitting on a bed? Want to see something surreal? Go to a MLA hotel, take the elevator up to the rooms, stand in the hallway and watch as ten or fifteen people line up in the hallway and knock on doors at precisely 10:00. Weird!
• Eliminate graduate student stress. I think the whole two to three days to make or break your career/life, is a little much. The jobmarket is already brutal enough (like being audited by the IRS someone once told me) but pulling all these people on the market together and putting them in a couple of hotels just adds to the insanity.
• This makes for a better timeline. You can do the interviews in early December, and notify candidates about campus invites before the holidays.
• But most important this would free up the conference to be about the exchange of academic ideas. Yes sans job market the MLA might be smaller, but people would actually have time to go to panels, talk, converse and meet with each other, without the pressure of interviewing, or worrying about whether or not someone from one of the schools you are interviewing at is at a particular session . . . In short eliminate the interviewing (which is just not efficient), and make the MLA about the ideas.