20120126.1832

As part of the teaching I am engaged in, I try to provide a number of examples to my students of how I want things done.  This semester, I am teaching three classes which have as explicit requirements the composition of summaries; I have them read and summarize articles from the New York Times Opinion/Editorial section, and because I want them to succeed, I show them what kinds of things I want done.  To that end, I recently put together the following summary, posting it to the teaching blog I maintain so that my students can more easily access it:

On 23 January 2012, Stanley Fish's "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation" appeared in the online New York Times.  In the article, Fish complains that the tools being developed and employed by digital humanities scholars are changing methods of study for the worse by eliminating the possibility and need for critical interpretation.  He opens by carrying out a mock-reading of Milton's Areopagitica, using it as an exemplar of the kind of work that digital humanities facilitates, pointing out the inadequacy of such work by asserting that the simple existence of a pattern does not suffice to support a given interpretation of that pattern.  Fish moves on to assert that the simple identification of patterns is the focus of digital humanities research, a paradigm diametrically opposed to the methods by which literary criticism has been carried out for nearly a century.  He assails digital humanities work because it does not, in his view, offer closure and meaning, but rather rejects the certainty of meaning that he presents as the end-point of his own critical analysis.  Unfortunately, the article fails to convince for several reasons: he indulges in reductio ad absurdum arguments based on supposition errors (such as a tacit assertion that digital humanities research never approaches a text with an idea of critical approach already in hand, that researchers wholly hand over their agency to the machines), over-simplification, and, in his last paragraph, an excessive degree of smirking sarcasm.

Fish exerts a certain influence on those working in the academic humanities.  For instance, more than a third of Profession 2009 is devoted to responses to and from Stanley Fish; for an annual publication to focus so narrowly on a single scholar bespeaks the importance of that scholar.  Even those people who take issue with him concede that he does have useful things to say.  Patricia Bizzell provides one example ready to hand for me.  Jonathan Culler provides another.  So it is clear that he is worth attention.  And even in critiquing digital scholarship, he is not entirely in error; there are, admittedly, problems with the field.  Some of the questions he raises are questions that need to be asked.  And there are other stress-points in doing digital work; one of the major ones is the shift towards an attitude and social context which facilitate what we currently regard as plagiarism.  It is a potential problem, as I have discussed.

The great opening of information that digital work performs does set up a climate in which anyone can access and contribute to information, and the concepts of ownership of ideas and the receipt of credit for articulating them are becoming more contested.  That Fish makes claims that grate is not a reason to reject him out of hand; he does make a number of good points, and even when he does not, the fact that he does pose questions, that he compels them and the defense of ideas that they entail, is a good thing.  One of the tenets of critical thinking, that chimera we are exhorted to pursue in our classrooms, is that one must question ideas and claims, and in the questioning, they are either strengthened or shown to merit being discarded--an idea DePalma lays out quite succinctly in his article.

That he says what he says is not the problem.  What he says can be argued against--and any scholar should expect that there will be argument against it.  Certainly, Fish's position against the value of the digital humanities is argued against.  Purdy and Walker, for example, assert the need to integrate digital scholarship into the rubrics used for hiring, promotion, and tenure, noting that it is "often more likely than print to be read and used" (190).  Their position is hardly in line with that of Fish.  In addition, Profession 2011 gives as much of itself to discussion of digital scholarship as Profession 2009 devotes to Fish, and it would not likely do so were there not something to discuss about the matter.  In it, Schreibman, Mandell, and Olsen make the point early on that "humanities disciplines must find ways not simply of evaluating but also of valuing digital scholarship" (123).  The position is one more or less diametrically opposed to that Fish outlines in his New York Times piece, and it is one supported by a number of other scholars.  Excellent speller Geoffrey Rockwell, for instance, remarks on the potential for the development of new modes of inquiry by digital scholarship, viewing it as one of the assets of digital work (154-55).  Jerome McGann, whose “On Creating a Usable Future” I have discussed, even asserts digital scholarship as a potential corrective to the crisis in which the academic humanities currently find themselves.  It is hardly a condemnation of the field of study.

No, the problem is not that he says what he says.  The problem is where he says what he says.*

Many people read the New York Times, whether in printed or online format, and so Fish is positioned to be able to address a wide audience through writing for it.  The position is one that not many in academia have; most of us speak to our students and our colleagues about our work and the views we come to have through it, and we try to publish articles and books, but in reality few people outside the academic establishment (and not as many within it as should be the case) pay attention to what goes on within the walls of the proverbial ivory tower.  The affairs of those descended from Chaucer's Clerk do not often penetrate the perceptions of the bulk of people in the United States, something I think I have commented on before (here, here, here, and here, if not elsewhere).  So what Fish writes has the opportunity to exert disproportionate influence on popular perception of the work done by those in the humanities.  When he decides to condemn a field of study, then, he does more than simply express a divergent opinion of scholarly discipline--which he is certainly within his rights to do, both as a human being and as a scholar.  He marshals opposition to the ability of others to do their work--and in that, he undermines himself, for in saying that any one of us working in the academic humanities is wasting time to no good purpose, the accusation that any others of us, or even all of us, are similarly wasteful becomes not just possible but viable.

After all, if even our own are calling into question whether or not the work we do is actually worth doing as a field, as opposed to simply disagreeing about results or specific methods...

Works Cited**
~Bizzell, Patricia. "Composition Studies Saves the World!" Profession 2009 (2009): 94-98. Print.
~Culler, Johnathan. "Writing to Provoke." Profession 2009 (2009): 84-88. Print.
~DePalma, Michael-John. "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." CCC 63.2 (December 2011): 219-43. Print.
~Fish, Stanley. "Mind Your P's and B's: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 23 January 2010. Web. 24 January 2012.
~McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011 (2011): 182-95. Print.
~Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. "Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work." Profession 2010 (2010): 177-95. Print.
~Rockwell, Geoffrey. "On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship." Profession 2011 (2011): 152-68. Print.
~Schreibman, Susan, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen. Introduction. Profession 2011 (2011): 123-35. Print.

*I understand that this comment is somewhat problematic.  I think I explain the reasoning behind it in the following paragraph, but I do know that I appear to tread dangerously close to advocating censorship.  For the record, here as often, I am not generally in favor of restricting speech, particularly academic speech (do I need to make a full disclosure statement here?).  Fish has every right to voice his opinion, and he goes to great length to support that opinion, so that he is exercising sufficiently due diligence--even if he is wrong.  And the Times has the right to print what it pleases, both as an instrument of "the press" and as a business providing a product.  That does not mean that I have to be happy, or that I in fact am happy, to have seen it pop up where it did.  There is a lot of potential for damage in it, and since I am one of those who may be damaged by it, I think I have the right to express my displeasure at the decision no less than did Fish and the Times to make it.

**I am aware of the irony of my employing a preponderance of print sources in discussing digital scholarship.  Many of my sources, however, discuss the necessity of interplay between traditional print and new digital media.  I hope to be aligned with the practice current research suggests is preferable.

20111214.1823

I have continued to read through my copy of Profession 2011, today getting into its cluster of articles centered on digital humanities scholarship.  One of the articles in that cluster is the work of Jerome McGann, whose book The Textual Condition informs my dissertation; because I am familiar with his work, I was interested in seeing what he released in “On Creating a Usable Future.”

In the article, McGann makes a convincing case that scholars in the humanities need to get involved in digital scholarship, especially since the dominance of print is coming to an end in the near future.  We—and I am a scholar in the humanities, so I can use that pronoun—have not done well enough at it yet, “reacting to the rapidly changing scene rather than working to shape policy and exert control over events,” although that is beginning to change (184).  The Google Books settlement is presented as a case-in-point example (192).  There is much to gain from developing and employing digital resources, and there is a need to adjust the institutional practices of humanities departments to accommodate the valuation and assessment of digital media.  Even so, as McGann remarks, there is a need to move beyond the surface-level phenomena that digital media tend to foster: “Social software technologies have a wide-spreading but shallow root system whose most impressive result to date, Wikipedia, illustrates both its capacities and its limits” (187).  Substantial scholarship requires substantial engagement, even in digital media, and it will be the task of those in the humanities to foster that engagement.

As he discusses his points, McGann makes several particularly pithy comments.  For one, he remarks that “Book culture will not go extinct: human memory is too closely bound to it” (185); if he is correct, then it will be a relief to such bibliophiles as myself.  For another, he relates “the belief, long held by the university community, that innovative research would drive effective and innovative pedagogy” (189).  It is in no small part due to the need for that innovation that some of the protections of tenure were set up; despite the complaints people have against it, the freedom from fear of reprisal for sincerely and ethically undertaking otherwise unpopular research is necessary to the advancement of human knowledge about the world and about ourselves.  The latter is one of the purposes of the humanities, and people are not always pleasant, so that what the study of us reveals is not like to be.

Related is the idea “that a usable future is a function of a usable past” (187).  To paraphrase McGann, the humanities work to create an inclusive and reliable cultural record which scholars can augment through the exercise of their disciplines (185).  We have to have knowledge of who and what we were to understand fully who and what we are.  Both have to be in place for us to have any hope of conceiving of who and what we will be, or even if there will be a “we” for us to be.  And what is “we,” anyway?

Digital technologies can be put to the ends of the humanities, certainly, but much needs to be done.  McGann remarks that the resources currently available are all too often left at the peripheries of scholarly endeavor (190).  More needs to be done to integrate them.  I have made a start on doing so; although my dissertation is largely on a traditional model, it makes free use of digital materials.  And in my non-dissertation writings, many of which I at least like to pretend are of a somewhat scholarly nature, I try to link to relevant materials (as herein).  In addition, I know of people who do quite a bit of scholarship electronically, such as HASTAC.  Perhaps if more of us do it, the study of the humanities can move in a direction that will help to redeem it from the onus under which it is currently operating.  And something needs to be done, certainly, lest the whole enterprise die.

Work Cited
McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession 2011(2011): 182-95. Print.

20130503.0957

One of the things that the digital humanities is supposed to foster, as a number of articles in the last several issues of Profession note, is the exchange of ideas.  Scholarship promotes itself as being a venue for sharing knowledge and understanding, regardless of the medium, but digital versions thereof have the ability to reach broader audiences and to facilitate faster feedback than their print counterparts, as well as to permit asynchronous discussion and enduring potential for revision based upon the feedback received.  So "conventional wisdom" holds,* and so my own admittedly limited experience has shown.

I try to be a generator for some of that feedback.  On one blog I follow, Helen Young's Diverse Fictions, I make a point of offering comments in response to the author's posts.  From time to time, they have even been potentially helpful and productive conversations.  I can hope that I will benefit from similar commentaries on my own work.

If and when I ever get back to teaching, and teaching a class conducive to the idea, I think I will follow the practice I have seen some of my colleagues deploy and require my students to write their papers as blog entries.  I have had some practice in doing so, writing reflections and the occasional academic bit on this blog and another I maintain (if less well than this one), so I think I can speak from some situated ethos.  And, despite the protestations of many who claim that digital media are ruining writing in a way never before seen in the history of writing (which are inaccurate, I might add), there is much good writing on the Internet.

I entertain the conceit that I do some of it.

The assignment suggests itself as one suited to the continually-emergent digital environment and one likely to help students prepare for work; many of the job opportunities I have seen specifically ask for experience in blogging and other social media.  It allows for more flexible submission, permitting those students who have many other concerns (children and jobs) to be able to get their work done and turned in around their schedules.  Whether or not it is more environmentally-friendly than traditional submission, I am not sure.  But it might be, and that, too, is worth considering.

*I place the phrase in quotes because I am not entirely sure that digital scholarship has managed to develop conventions yet.  And convention should be questioned in any event.

20130731.0830

Those who have read what I have written know that I discuss my work as a college-level English teacher--a work that I am moving to Oklahoma to be able to continue with some sense of security.  I assign my students a fair amount of writing, even though I know that many of them are entirely unaccustomed to doing such work.  I also try to model the kind of behavior I want to see from my students, and so I end up doing the same assignments I give them.  When I assign them a short essay--say, a summary of an article from the New York Times--I do so from having written a number of them and doing yet more at odd intervals, and the same is true if I ask for a short contrastive essay, or yet other kinds of papers.

One that I assign to my first-year composition classes and my literature classes is a conference-length paper, one intended for a fifteen- to twenty-minute presentation--although, given the relative newness of the experience to my students and the demands on my own time, I tend to work at the shorter end of what is acceptable for such a thing.  Since I am teaching one section of first-year composition and one section of literature this term, I have drafted two such papers (and recently!); the second, a piece on Robin Hobb's Words like Coins, is of particular note for me, offering something of a new experience and what might be a small foray into digital humanities work, broadly defined.

It is so because I have Words like Coins only in e-book format, and working with it in that format was my first experience with inserting marginalia for my own use into an electronic document.  (I tend to grade papers in digital form, but there is a marked difference between writing comments for students who too often do not read them and leaving notes for myself to follow later as I draft papers.)  The process is a bit unwieldy for me, given the number of clicks necessary for the input method to work, and I am still not able to scan through an electronic document as quickly as a print one to find individual notes and comments.  Still, the notes are typed rather than scrawled out in my less-than-elegant pen-hand, and they mark out the text to which they refer more clearly than my analog scribblings, so there is something worth pursuing in the process.

I have long since decided that the e-reader my lovely wife bought for me a few years back would be the venue through which I will read most of my leisure reading (I maintain a subscription to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as I have since 1999, and still receive it and some other magazines in print).  My library remains (if a bit leaner due to packing for the move), and it still receives additions, but those are typically critical materials and gift/display copies; the throwaway books with which I occupy myself on planes and trains are being moved to the e-reader.  I do a fair it of work with such materials, however, and it is good to know that I can do so in the digital as well as in the print.

20140731.0727

Payday has come once again, and I am glad of it, although the bills have come along with it and there is all too little left. So it is not quite the same as I have remarked before. More's the pity.

The end of July has tended to be a good time for my writing, I find as I look back through the blogroll. I posted here on this day in 2010, 2011, and 2013; in 2012, I was overseas and concerned with being a tourist. It was a good experience, overall, even if I do still lament the amount of money I spent that month...never again. The years of which I do have records here, however, show a shift in preoccupation and in writing. Being able to make such a claim is one of the advantages of record-keeping, and being able to do so easily is one of the advantages of doing so online. That I can seize upon the advantages helps me to understand some of the claims of scholars in favor of digital humanities work; Fish is still wrong.

In 2010, my concern was entirely local. I lived in The City, and there was rancor about the so-called WTC Mosque. My comment about the matter was terse, a mere 125 words. I have not heard anything about the matter since moving--and, indeed, I did not hear much about it before moving, although it is possible that my relative isolation from mainstream news media did something to inhibit my hearing about it. The comment was somewhat passive-aggressive, I admit; it is addressed to "those of you," a nameless collective I have no real expectation ever actually read anything I write. Perhaps it bespeaks some degree of cowardice. Perhaps it bespeaks some degree of stereotyping. Certainly, it indicates a lack of focus for the annoyance evidenced in the piece.

In 2011, I was enmeshed in drafting my dissertation. As it happened, I did not get the draft completed until the end of the year and hurriedly pushed through revisions and final proofing in the short months of the UL Spring 2012 term. Again, I posted a mere 125 words to apologize for and justify the gap in my writing into the blog. I suppose it is understandable; I was teaching six classes at the time in addition to the research work (on the dissertation and on other projects). Such actions do not leave much time for other writing, whatever the value of that writing might be. (I am well aware that there may not be much to anything I put on a page, although some writing is more likely to be of worth than other writing.)

In 2013, I was working through preparations to move to Sherwood Cottage from Bedfordside Garden in the Best of the Boroughs. I was also more fully engaged in my teaching than I had been in previous years--sensibly, since I had completed the dissertation at that point. I was also dipping a toe into digital scholarship. I have not immersed myself more fully in that kind of work; I still do most of my criticism with printed pages, even if I find many or most of them online. (I read more quickly from a sheet than from a screen. Old habits.) But the kind of writing that I was doing in 2013 was of a more sustained, more contemplative, and more developed sort than my earlier pieces. It suggests that I have gotten better at doing what I do--which is good, since a fair chunk of my money comes from my sitting in front of my computer and typing madly about things clients want to read. It is how I can increase my payday yields and maybe have a little bit more left o'er next time around.

20130831.1411

Having resumed reading pieces from the New York Times the other day, largely because I once again have access to its online version, I decided to do a bit more such reading to support my ongoing writing on this blog and in other places.  That led me to Tyler Cowen's 31 August 2013 article, "Who Will Prosper in the New World," which had just released when I looked at it.

In the article, Prof. Cowen asserts that the increasingly automated and always-accessibly-online means of production and transmission will not benefit all persons equally, but certain groups will do particularly well.  Cowen lists the groups, explaining why and how each of those listed will find special benefit from the direction he sees matters going.  The article is reported as an adaptation of material from a book, Average is Over, and it is perhaps one with the adaptation that the explanations are not as detailed as they perhaps could be to be truly informative.

And there is a problem in the worldview that seems to underlie Prof. Cowen's assertions.  The article seems to take as given that the increasing mechanization of production of materials and information is a good thing; while I am happy to have access to diverse information and am on record as a supporter of work in the digital humanities (sometimes despite the words of far more senior scholars), I do not have quite so optimistic a view of the encroaching computerization of all things as Cowen seems to have.  Indeed, I view what he asserts as being good things as dehumanizing--and as a scholar of the humanities, I do not know that I can endorse those things that tend to the excision of what is human, and potentially some of the best parts of what it is to *be* human.

For instance, Cowen comments on online coursework, using Coursera as his example (I focus on his comments about teaching and about evaluating writing because they are areas in which I may claim some expertise).  While Cowen points out that the motivated will be those who benefit from such coursework, it may be argued that the presence of a professor in the classroom, of a living human being to whom one is accountable, does much to motivate people who might otherwise not be motivated and who, in finding such motivation, end up discovering a greater purpose for themselves than that of which they otherwise would have conceived.  And it is also the case that those who have already proven themselves to be good students find it difficult to maintain motivation in online courses.  Steven D. Krause reports himself as being one such in his contribution to the June 2013 issue of CCC.  Presumably, as someone who holds a professorship and was therefore good at the thing called school, and who describes himself as interested in the course for several reasons (689), he would be one of the more motivated participants.  Yet this was not the case; he reports that his interest wavered soon, and in large part because of the nature of the course itself (690-94).  The same was true for Jeff Rice, who notes that "Even with eagerness to learn about MOOCs by doing them, even with an overall interest in music [the subject of the course], and even with the minimal requirement of two to three paragraphs per writing assignment and relative ease of watching video lectures created in advance, [he] failed to follow through on the course" (699).  Again, someone with reasons to be motivated and a demonstrated past history of being a motivated student--for Rice is also among the professoriate--has difficulty maintaining motivation in the absence of actual human contact.  Rice asserts that it is a lack of emotional involvement that drove his failure in the class (702)--and physical presence and direct connection between people, such as that within a well-run traditional classroom, fosters emotional involvement in a way that no more remote medium can.  As Krause notes, "a textbook is not the same as a teacher," and education is not simply the provision of information (694); it is a series of interactions among people, and the removal of people makes those interactions less possible.  Cowen's assertion that we will have the best education ever available because of the ease of content delivery, that teaching will be better for being less human and more digitized, is therefore not entirely sound, and I must wonder if the rest of his statements are similarly suspect.

Perhaps it is because I have read as much science fiction as I have in my life that I have the opinions I have regarding the values and dangers of thinking devices.  I nearly cut my teeth on Asimov, and if I am going to be living in a world where the machines are doing most of the work of the mind, I want at the very least to see that those machines have something like the Three Laws, or their corollary Zeroth Law, built into them.  And even with them in place, one only need look to the Spacers to see what an overreliance on the machines will foster...

Works Cited

• Cowen, Tyler. "Who Will Prosper in the New World." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 31 August 2013. Web. 31 August 2013.
• Krause, Steven D. "MOOC Response about 'Listening to World Music.'" CCC 64.6 (June 2013): 689-95. Print.
• Rice, Jeff. "What I Learned in MOOC." CCC 64.6 (June 2013): 695-703. Print.

20131228.0751

As I was returning home from taking my wife to work yesterday, I heard comments on the radio about skaldic poetry, the highly allusive and complicated verse typified by the works of Snorri Sturluson and Egill Skallagrímsson.  In them, the speaker (whose name I sadly forget) noted the deep background knowledge that audiences of skaldic verse had to have to understand what the skalds were saying to them.  (As the skalds were usually saying nice things about the lords who supported them, the audiences usually had reason to know what was being said; even the doughty Nordic folks liked hearing people speak well of them.)

I know of people who might say that we have lost the ability to have such things, that we do not teach our children enough of the old ways and common backgrounds for us to have such a body of work.  But I think those people are wrong; we do still have the ability to make such works happen, to refer to things in arcane kennings, through obscure metonymy and synecdoche.  Indeed, we are more able to do so; more people can be counted on to know more things or, failing that, to know where to go to learn of those things.  For instance, when I wrote some days ago that "The Muse is far away / On Oreb or on Sinai," I expected that my readers would either mark the association with Milton's Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 6-7), already having the knowledge or running a simple search for "Oreb or on Sinai," and so would understand what I wrote without my having to write it.  Or when I wrote earlier that "Jeff Lynne's cheery call has been answered abundantly," people would know who Lynne is or would find out quickly.  And there are other examples besides.

We still refer to things form our past, and we recognize now that our past is far more complicated and glorious than we had been led to believe in that same past.  More value is ascribed to more things, not less, and so more is referenced now than once was.  Not only in poetry: are there not Arthurian overtones in the Zelda series (perhaps an essay for another time), and do we not still celebrate retellings of old tales on screens silver, small, and digital?  It is because there are more symbols to navigate that my part of The Work, my study of the academic humanities and teaching of the same, remains valuable.  My colleagues and I are the ones who examine what is done for what works well and what works poorly, writing of how they function and what those functions assert about both the people who produce and the people who consume.  It is only through looking to the past that we can do so; without knowing that Oreb and Sinai are linked by Milton, the repetition of that link makes little sense, and without the training in looking for such things and looking at them in ways admittedly esoteric, what they reveal of writer and reader is hardly evident.

And it needs to be.  For one, there is the link to the cultures of the past from which the cultures of the present are sprung, a link that may lead at times to uncomfortable realizations of ancestral errors but that still serves to ground people in the long line of humanity.  For another, the presentation and manipulation of such symbols as my colleagues and I are wont to explicate serves to influence the thoughts and perspectives of people; media saturation ensures that it is so.  Being able to recognize the symbols that are presented and understand their contexts of origin allows for greater self-control, greater immunity from the ploys of marketers and demagogues, and greater ability of the self to be the self.  And that is certainly a worthy thing.

20160301.0742

I am aware that it is later than I usually write in this webspace. Part of it is that I overslept; I missed when I went to push the snooze button and turned off my alarm altogether, and I evidently need more rest than I have gotten. Part, though, is that I just got back to Sherwood Cottage from my polling place; I voted, and if you have not, you should, too. (How I voted is none of your damned business.) There was a bit of a snag as I did so, admittedly; the polling workers had forgotten some changes to the voting rules in Oklahoma. I think I was the first one to come to them under those rules; it was an honest flub, easily addressed, and no harm done. So I have my sticker, and one of the things that I had meant to do today is removed from the list of things that I need to do.

There are others, of course, since work continues. I am in the midst of preparing a sample infographic portfolio for my students, addressing an assignment new to the regular sequence expected for the classes I am teaching in my primary position. It is not a thing I have done before, so I am having a bit of a struggle with it, but I am moving through it well enough. Whether my students will fare similarly is unclear to me; they are purportedly digital natives, but I have seen that many of them are...less adept in a number of computing principles and techniques than even I, a humanities scholar taught on the trailing edge of "traditional" schooling, am. But it is a useful exercise, one that helps me to anticipate problems the students will have as well as to develop and demonstrate my own proficiency in producing documents of various sorts.

In addition, I should probably see about drafting a sample annotated bibliography for my students in another class, although that exercise will go more easily for me, given how familiar I am with the task. No freelance order is as yet waiting for me (although I would not be surprised to see one come in today; such things happen, and I am glad that they do, since I make a fair bit of money on it), so I have some time to attend to other things, and I have some other writing that needs catching up on. I am looking forward to getting things done, and maybe there will be some helpful election returns to see later on in the day.