Networking

Daily Gleanings about how to be a better conversationalist, not least in professional networking contexts.

Daily Gleanings about memory and its improvement.

The MLA has started a new initiative, named the Humanities Commons. According to the Commons’s introductory webinar registration page, Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Commons. Run by a nonprofit consortium of scholarly societies, Humanities Commons wants to help you curate your online presence, expand the reach of your scholarship—whatever form it may take—and connect with other scholars who share your interests. ...

Over at Becoming Minimalist, Joshua Becker offers some personal introspection on a paradigmatic case of forgetting a couple’s names. In part, Becker narrates, I was sad that I wasn’t able to remember something as simple as the names of two people I very much enjoyed meeting. … And suddenly it struck me. I entered the conversation—as I do so often—with the desire to be known rather than to know. I was trying so hard to say something impressive or witty or intelligent that I entirely missed what they were saying on the other side of the conversation. ...