More on Bourdieu + Lab Notes

I'm going to drop the Dissertation Update titles in lieu of the "dissertation" tag below. The blogs gets to be even more monotonous than usual when all the titles start off the same.

Today I thought to look up for the first time when Bourdieu died and what sorts of things he was up to in his later life. There's a deeply cynical side to academic research, one where the news of Bourdieu's death in 2002 provides a sense of frank relief. After all, what if he was still out there, thinking about all the new media things I'm planning to write about? It's much easier to work with a fixed body of work, no matter how great (or just controversial) that achievement is. I found a wonderful little obituary for Bourdieu in The Nation, written by Katha Pollitt.

Finally, I'll add a link to Work Product, a "research diary or lab notebook" put together by Matthew Wilkens, a postdoc at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Wilkens is doing some very interesting stuff and his blog is a more sophisticated (and consistent) example of what I'm hoping to accomplish here. He's evaluating Part of Speech taggers right now, which is a major service to us all. Way to go, Matthew!