Imagining Sleep
Remember how I’ve been alluding to a “project” that I started working on in January of 2007? This is it: ImaginingSleep.com. I’ve decided that it is done enough so I can start to talk about it, and ask for feedback.
First, some background:
As you may know, when I left my last academic job (to start chasing then baby Sammy) I was in the midst of a book project on sleep and dream in 19th-century France. This was the book that would have gotten me tenure, presumably, and I already had a publisher interested. After we moved to the Bay Area and I started to feel out what my new life was going to be like here, I found that I didn’t want to pursue that particular book anymore, but I didn’t want to drop the subject of sleep and dream entirely either. When I was teaching at F&M, I had the chance to develop and teach an interdisciplinary course on the subject. I loved it. I loved being able to explore beyond the boundaries of my academic specialty. Friends were saying, “Why don’t you write a general book on sleep and dream?”
That was a thought.
However I wasn’t really sure what would anchor such a book. As a way to think about that, I’ve created this website. It’s an online course, but also a resource site, as well as a place for me to keep track of what I’m thinking about and reading.
It’s also now the home of my podcast!– “The Somniloquy.” These are audio lectures, written specifically for ImaginingSleep.com. Podcasting has been a fun new medium for me to play with. There are 3 podcasts published to date, with many more planned, once AC (my producer) and I figure out a regular work flow.
So THAT’s what I’ve been up to. If you have both inclination and opportunity, I welcome feedback– about the website and the podcast– content, usability, problems you encounter, etc. This is all very much a work in progress and the podcasting in particular is a grand experiment. The first 3 episodes are rather rough around the edges, but hopefully we’ll get better at it.
One bug I’ve already learned about is that the “Click to play” on the podcast page does not work. “Download audio file” does seem to work. The podcast is not yet indexed on iTunes, as we’re having trouble with the meta data that iTunes seems to want to grab from the website. Anyone with knowledge or experience with publishing on iTunes, please contact me, and I’ll forward the info on to my SysAdmin. Yes, it’s the same guy as the Producer 😉