As a strong proponent of open access, I'm an avid user of both Selected Works and Scholarly Commons. My Selected Works site is http://works.bepress.com/afilreis/. I've just begun to add old articles and book chapters to the site, but I can say that it's not at all hard: find the offprint or make a photocopy, scan, upload, add the bibliographic information with an easy interface, click. Now anyone can read these heretofore hard-to-find essays, reviews, etc. As I do this work I ponder whether anyone will care, but then I receive monthly stats on how many people have downloaded each article. I'm amazed and gratified by how many. I suspect many if not most are outside the academy, far-flung geographically, or are high-school students without access to a good library.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
open access in action
As a strong proponent of open access, I'm an avid user of both Selected Works and Scholarly Commons. My Selected Works site is http://works.bepress.com/afilreis/. I've just begun to add old articles and book chapters to the site, but I can say that it's not at all hard: find the offprint or make a photocopy, scan, upload, add the bibliographic information with an easy interface, click. Now anyone can read these heretofore hard-to-find essays, reviews, etc. As I do this work I ponder whether anyone will care, but then I receive monthly stats on how many people have downloaded each article. I'm amazed and gratified by how many. I suspect many if not most are outside the academy, far-flung geographically, or are high-school students without access to a good library.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
