La rosa mecánica

Welcome to my website! I have created these pages here at INFO.ANNAHILLER.COM to better acquaint you with who I am, what I do, and why I love to do it. Use the navigation bar at the top of the page to learn more about various aspects of my research, my interests and my background. Feel free to take a look at my blog at LITSCI.ANNAHILLER.COM, where I explore an area of special professional interest: the intersection between literature and science. Leave a comment or send an email—all feedback is welcome, and suggestions for content are always desired. In the meantime, enjoy browsing the site… ¡adelante!

For those of you who are interested:

I will be presenting a paper at this year’s conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Charlotte, NC. The title is “Pure Poetry and the Chemical Subject”, and I don’t know yet the official date for the presentation, but will send along more information when possible.

I’m very excited to meet my colleagues in the SLSA, and to hear the latest in research being done on the LitSci front.

Very Excited!!!

Having recently suffered a hand injury—I broke my pinky finger just over two weeks ago—it became necessary for me to find a way to continue to write my dissertation, all the while protecting my finger from further damage and deformity.

Enter voice recognition software: Enter Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.5

Dragon must be trained for it to function properly, but the training lasts maybe 15 minutes. I had to read from John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, which was actually quite informative… and a little inspirational, I must confess. And as I’ve gone on with Dragon, I’ve managed to train it further—the more you use it, the more precise it becomes at capturing your individual speech patterns.

However, there is a major drawback for those of us in the business of Foreign Languages and Literatures, who are essentially writing articles, dissertations, books and reviews in more than one idiom: Dragon is relentlessly monolingual.

While I did hear from an I.T. guy sitting in the waiting room at the orthopedist’s office this afternoon that there is a “Spanish patch” that you can put on it, I hesitate to overwhelm my RAM with yet another language interface, and I doubt that it is equipped to handle the rapid switching between languages that sometimes happens when citing a source, or using a term that doesn’t translate well—in my case, words like “atraso” and “regeneracionismo” have a much higher potency left in the original Spanish.

i trained it to recognize “atraso“—you have the option of training it to recognize individual words. While it picked up easily words like “atraso” and “carta“, it did not do so well with “novatores” or “regeneracionismo“—not at all surprising really. (Admittedly, it came close with “novatores“, registering it as “Nova Torres”. With regeneracionismo, though, I just got “???”.)

Bilingual drawbacks aside, I highly recommend Dragon for those of us hindered manually in one way or another. Right now, for me, typing for more than 30 minutes causes great pain. But with Dragon, the only thing that causes discomfort is the annoying microphone that juts off the headset and that I can’t quite get into a correct position.

But this is, all told, a small price to pay for being able to continue with a dissertation that is proving to be more challenging than I ever expected, even without the physical disability.

There is considerable controversy (if you are a Windows user) about whether to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007. This is not an unwarranted debate: the changes in the general Office platform are significant, and the decision to upgrade should be made (in my opinion) with the following things in mind.

1. Are you willing to upgrade also to Windows Vista? If yes, then go ahead and upgrade to Office 2007; you’ll be very glad you did, as they work very well together. If you’re not willing to upgrade your OS, and want to stay with XP (or worse, ME or 2000) then I would hesitate before purchasing your Office upgrade. I have Office 2007 installed on an XP platform for a 2-year-old computer, and it slowed down the entire system significantly. I defragged my hard drive, did everything I could to speed things up, to no avail. I thought it was a flaw in Office 2007 that was causing the problem. Then I got a new computer, with Vista installed, and life was good again. Moral of the story: if you have XP or lower, stay with your older version of office.
2. Do you use EndNote? If so, you will want to consider doing the upgrade to both Vista and Office 2007, as Office 2007 has a wonderful EndNote interface built right in. It is worth spending a significant amount of time with EndNote to learn how to make it work for you; similarly, it is worth spending time with Office 2007 in order to optimize your EndNote usage. I am a firm believer in EndNote’s usefulness for dissertation writing, and I advocate its use, even for those who are not tech-savvy. When manipulating the hundreds of references that you inevitably accumulate as you work on your dissertation, it is imperative to have a means for organizing all that data. EndNote is a godsend in that regard. In sum: If you want to optimize EndNote, upgrade to Vista + Office 2007.
3. If you upgrade, bear in mind that a large portion of Office users will not have upgraded. Luckily, you can save your documents in “compatibility mode” that (for the most part) does not cause loss of fidelity. (I’ve only had problems with fidelity when saving in compatibility mode in Excel 2007; so far no problems with Word 2007). I recommend saving two versions of each document you create: one in .docx (2007 format) and one in .doc (earlier format). It’s easy as pie.

Conclusion: If you’re writing your dissertation, it’s time to consider, in general, having the most up-to-date system available. Just remember that not everyone is as cutting-edge as you are. So be ready to be as compatible as possible with other systems, which may mean creating an extra document or two. But considering that most computers now come with upwards of 150GB of memory, this shouldn’t be too much of a hardship.

Of course, none of this applies if you own a Mac, where your coolness factor simply renders all of this moot.

You must choose, but choose wisely. This is technology that will become your Bedtime Penguin Pal, your breakfast partner, your squash buddy, your cell mate. In the end, choose the technology that will make dissertation writing (at least the mechanics of it) easier and more fun for you as a writer and a consumer. That’s the whole point, right?

Happy Upgrading!

We have officially closed submissions for this issue (18/19) of Lucero, titled “Iberia in Transit”.

Lucero will issue a call for papers for No. 20 in Fall 2008 under a new editorial board, and certainly with a new topic.

Any questions regarding Lucero (either now or in the future) can always be directed to the current editorial board at uclucero@berkeley.edu .

The submissions deadline for Lucero: “Iberia in Transit” has been extended to 10 February 2008.

Please send all submissions to uclucero@berkeley.edu

or via Snail Mail to

Lucero
c/o Dept. of Spanish & Portuguse
5319 Dwinelle Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94706

Thanks! Please click on the Lucero link above to read our Call for Papers.

Graduate Students: If you haven’t done this yet, no matter how far along you are in your studies, you owe it to yourselves to become a member. If you’re worried about the financial aspect, don’t: Grad Student memberships are only $20 for the year, and if you decide to attend the convention, the registration fees are significantly reduced, as are hotel rates (if you jump on them early—usually as soon as they become available. I think I made this year’s reservations in mid-September).

Just go to the MLA website and sign up; I’m pretty sure it can all be done online, as most things are these days.

For those of us in the field of language & literature, a membership in the MLA is essential. And the sooner you sign up, the more information you’ll have when the time comes around to go on The Market, and it never hurts to have a sense of what you’re up against before you jump in.

But it doesn’t stop with the MLA. There is an abundance of professional networks dedicated to various specialties and sub-specialties, membership in which provides opportunities for publication, conference papers, and general awareness of what’s going on in your field.

For example, I am a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish & Portuguese and the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.

Being a member of the AATSP has given me the opportunity to submit papers, present at conferences, and even has job listings.

The listserv at SLSA keeps me current with recent publications, conferences and dissertations being written in this sub-specialty of mine.

I’m still debating about ALTA: The American Literary Translators Association. Technically, I’m not a literary translator, although I do some translation here and there. And so whether that membership would be useful to me is somewhat debatable. Part of me says, hey, it couldn’t hurt, one more membership…

But the point is to consider carefully each association, and figure out what benefits each one brings, and then decide if it’s worth your money (and, more importantly, your attention) to join.

Whatever you decide to do, join the MLA first. Read their newsletters carefully. Check the website for calls for papers. Think about submitting for the annual conference at some point. Follow the thread: one society leads to another. Be selective, but then take full advantage of your membership(s). Your CV will thank you for it.

In doing my research for my dissertation, I’ve stumbled multiple times on the CSA-run MLA Bibliography whose interface is overly complex and really unfriendly to those who don’t speak technologese. In addition, if you work with EndNote as your bibliographical manager, they make it especially hard to find the right filter that you need to export your references, choosing instead to partner with RefWorks. (A post about the benefits of EndNote vs. RefWorks will follow shortly.)

One solution to the abominable nature of the CSA-MLA Bib is to use WorldCat instead. WorldCat is fantastic, and has an easy export feature (yes, you still have to get the right filter, although I can’t remember where—I’ll find out) that works well with EndNote. WorldCat’s search engine is fairly sensitive and indexes not just books and articles, but internet resources and audiovisual data as well. It’s a great place for starting a broad search, and an easy option for exporting.

But what happens when you start venturing into extremely specific, targeted areas of research? At that point, it’s time to look beyond the MLA Bib and WorldCat and see what resources your institution of higher learning has available for you.

What I found this week—and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t come across it sooner—is a database specific to the field of Peninsular Spanish Literature, indexing all books and articles relevant to the field published between 1980 and the present: La bibliografía de literatura española.

It’s a fabulous way to find the most contemporary criticism in your chosen area of expertise. Its interface is simple, even for the least tech-savvy of us. The only problem is that there is no way to download references, or even compile a “marked list” that carries from page to page. They don’t have a way to mail these references to yourself or anything of the sort, which is inconvenient.

I’ve discovered that the best way to manipulate this particular database is to run it in tandem with WorldCat, where you can find the same reference and then export it easily. If you really want to juggle, then run WorldCat, the bibliografía, and your local University’s library database at the same time, making a note of what’s available at your Local U, making notes of this in EndNote (or in whatever way you choose to organize your research—I’ve found that creating groups in EndNote is a good way to have a bird’s-eye view of what needs to be done with your research. Again, more on that later.)

The moral of the story being: don’t limit yourself to the MLA Bib, or even WorldCat. There are dozens of area-specific db’s out there that can make your work go a whole lot quicker. Investigate the website of your U’s library and if necessary, talk to a librarian about how to max out your research. Your work can only benefit (and immensely so) from this.

Cheers!

Anna

For the English version of the Call for Papers for Lucero 18/19: Iberia in Transit, please click here.

Submissions can be sent to uclucero@berkeley.edu or to the following address:

Lucero
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
5319 Dwinelle Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
USA

¡Saludos desde España!

I’ve recently come to Madrid to do research for the first two chapters of my dissertation. As the first of my chapters deals with the philosopher/author José Ortega y Gasset, one of my dissertation advisors suggested that I contact the Fundación José Ortega y Gasset to see if I could use their facility to help flesh out my chapter.

I arrived in Madrid on Sunday morning, and made it to the FOyG by Wednesday, where I met with the librarian with whom I had communicated previously. She gave me a brief tour of the library, acquainted me with their search engine, and then let me go about my business, letting me know that she was just downstairs should I need her assistance.

The library of the Fundación is located in an old villa, set off of the calle Fortuny just north of the center of Madrid (closest Metro stop: Rubén Darío) and a few blocks west of the Paseo de la Castellana. The villa was refurbished a few decades ago, and is in need of a modernization as the building is struggling with the technological demands of the modern library. They have adjusted admirably—the library has wireless access, and several computers that are connected via the internet to the database of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), of which it is a branch. It also has an admiral database of its own, KNOSYS, which has an simple interface, and has the entire library of the Foundation catalogued, with its own system that allows the researcher to easily locate items within the facility.

The staff of the Foundation was very accommodating—they allowed me to leave the articles that I needed with fotocopiadoras, which would have had them for me immediately had the copier not been jammed. I left the articles with the staff, and they were waiting for me at the front desk the next day, for a very reasonable price.

I’ve found articles at the Foundation that would have been impossible to get my hands on in the U.S., thus making my trip to Madrid already worth it. For those who are working on anything pertaining to Ortega, it is imprescindible that you go to the Foundation as it is full of treasures.

Special note: the personal archive of José Ortega y Gasset is accessible as well, but it requires sending a letter or email to the Director of the Foundation, who in turn asks for access from the conservators of the estate. I have not asked for access to the personal archive this go-round because I learned that the archive pertaining to Ortega’s project, the Revista de Occidente, was lost during the Civil War. Once I have formulated a specific inquiry, I will ask for access. Many of the librarians have asked me to give them specific information about my research, so if you do ask to use the facility, come prepared!