From (under) the Chair's Desk
Happy birthday, IWP! And congratulations to Chris
Merrill for organizing such an impressive array of events
that showcase writing in Iowa as part of the IWP’s fortieth
birthday celebrations! Details of the continuing intellectual
festivities are included
in the departmental calendar, but let me extend a special welcome
to two of our emeriti colleagues who are visiting from overseas
to share in the event, namely Stavros Deligiorgis and Danny
Weissbort.
As most of you know, Danny was for many years the director of the
Iowa Translation Workshop and I’m delighted to notice that
the College has authorized this year a new search for an assistant
professor of translation studies “to play a leading role
in Iowa’s MFA program in literary translation,” which
is now housed in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature.
See this
page for a list of all the searches approved for this year in CLAS.
Details of the IWP celebrations and other exciting upcoming events
are all laid out in the English
Department Calendar, now a click
away at the foot of this page. Meanwhile, I will devote the remainder
of my part of this column to a cluster of computer issues that
I have recently been learning about.
Cyber-Security/Identity Theft Matters
I recently sat through a meeting on IT Security led by Steve Fleagle,
the university’s Chief Information Officer and head of ITS,
in which I became suitably horrified to realize how vulnerable
we are to cyber-security threats. But, for all the grandiosity
of the name, I became convinced that our chief vulnerability as
a department is stunningly low-tech: the theft or loss of a laptop!
Laptop computers get stolen all the time, of course, with much
greater frequency than any fancy hacking into mainframes. Indeed,
if you followed the local news on Monday, you would have seen the
story of a laptop stolen from a former TA in the Philosophy Department
and the consequent embarrassments and risks that such a theft can
generate. That laptop had grade information from years before when
the TA had been a grader, including some hundred Social Security
Numbers from back in the bad old days when the university used
to identify students through SSNs. All of this is confidential
information and SSNs are particularly sensitive in view of the
possibility of identity theft when associated with a name. For
this reason, the university as an institution has a responsibility
to notify all individuals whose SSNs may have been compromised.
You can imagine the hassle and expense of doing that for a hundred
students, especially as you have to recreate the list of what was
lost. And if that was pretty awkward, I shudder to think of the
effort involved after the compromising of a Psychology Department
database with 14,000 SSNs in Fall 2006!
There is a straightforward solution that can immediately eliminate
this risk for our department. Please take a moment today to look
at your laptop or any other portable device and make sure you don’t
have any sensitive information on there. In particular, make sure
you don’t have any Social Security Numbers, which you may
have as part of grade records from a few years’ back. If
you find such materials, please delete at once. It cannot make
sense to keep such sensitive information in such a vulnerable place!
This suggestion leads to two related cautions. One is to make
sure you don’t have a single copy of your research or teaching
materials on a laptop or even a desk computer. You should always
back up data, as we all know, but all the more so if it is sitting
on the very machine that is most likely to get lost or stolen.
In general, it is wise to use the H: drive on your office machine
as a safe place for your research and teaching materials since
the university goes to great lengths to back those files up.
The other caution is to minimize the amount of confidential information
you store in any form. Desktop computers, mainframes, and file
cabinets are all somewhat vulnerable and so it is good practice
to make sure you are not holding lists that associate names with
Social Security Numbers or any other confidential information unnecessarily.
In general, remember that OSIRIS contains student records, including
complete grade lists, that you can access any time provided you
have FERPA training (the federally-controlling guide to handling
student record information that I encourage everyone to be familiar
with and get certified in, see http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/ferpa/).
It is far better to have the Registrar keep the records and to
access them from their database than to hold vulnerable information
yourself. We have a secure disposal bin for shredding confidential
materials in the parcel room in 308 EPB if you want to get rid
of any confidential paper records. Meanwhile, the department as
a whole will continue trying to minimize our holding of records
that include sensitive information, including SSNs, and make sure
that these are properly secure when we do need to keep them. Let
me know if you spot any further unnecessary vulnerabilities in
this respect!
Other ITS Matters
I learned a number of other things from this meeting devoted to
ITS. In terms of backing up data, the university is currently in
the planning and development stage for a new UI Data Center Space,
i.e. the flood-proof, tornado-proof place with secure power supplies
where they store all that secure stuff. For my part, I assume whatever
they build will be more than adequate for backing up my kind of
data usage (every book I’ve written or edited along with
every article I’ve ever written all fit easily on one of
those little flash drives!). But if you use large amounts of data
and have suggestions or concerns about the building of secure storage,
your input is welcome and you should contact Boyd Knosp. (See,
further, this
page).
Various other new IT initiatives are supposed to be helpful for
us. You probably know by now about MAUI, which one day will integrate
OSIRIS and InfoHawk and perhaps other aspects of student and course
records (see here).
I don’t know when they will be rolling this out, but I assume
it will be fairly soon. Probably none of you still use Blue for
an e-mail system, but if you do you should be concerned as it is
finally dying the death of old computer systems. Outlook will be
remaining the same, although ITS seems to have renamed its part
of the mail system as Hawkmail. Meanwhile, there is a new version
of the Microsoft Office suite (including Word) that ITS will be
releasing to us soon and which they will be supporting
in the future . ITS is also providing a new
website for classroom technology
support.
And, to support our instructional technology needs, we can now
ask for an appointment with a Student Instructional Technology
Assistant; see here.
Finally, the CLAS ITS group has announced a new service that sounded
pretty appealing to the likes of me, who are completely dependent
on our computers but would rather never have to think about them.
Something called CLAS System Management Service seems to involve
essentially the College ITS folks taking central control of one’s
office computer. The advantage is that these central folks will
then take responsibility for upgrades and updates to all the software
on one’s system and take care of all the latest security
gizmos. (Presumably the disadvantage is that one loses autonomy
over the software installed on your machine.) Currently the system
is for Windows, although ITS is working on developing a parallel
system for Macs. As I understand it, they are rolling this System
Management Service out gradually, with a recommendation that new
office computers installed from now on get lodged into this system.
I assume that the implications of all this will become clearer
as we gain experience but, if faculty are interested, I can invite
someone from CLAS ITS to talk to us as a department about the new
service.
And so, let me wish you all productive use of your computers for
all the myriad of things they help us achieve in our profession!
Ed Folsom's essay, "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation
of Archives," appears
in the October
issue of PMLA, along
with responses to the essay by Peter Stallybrass, Jerome McGann,
Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman, and N. Katherine Hayles. The
essay and responses concern the accomplishments and potential of
digital humanities projects and focus on the Walt
Whitman Archive,
co-directed by Folsom and Kenneth Price. This issue of PMLA,
edited by Wai
Chee Dimock,
is devoted
to "Remapping
Genre."
