2009 Year-end Wrap Up

Festive Sphinx at the Penn Museum

Happy New Year! I haven’t posted much in December. This was due both to the crush of grading four classes and to the need to spend time with family. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t provide some sort of year-end wrap up.

First and foremost, Joseph Kelly at  כל־האדם has compiled Biblioblog Rankings for December. I came in at number 30, a situation due both to Joseph compiled his list based on a rating over three months and to a few older posts that still bring in tons of traffic.

The last statement leads to my second year-end reflection. My post How to Cheat TurnItIn and How to Cheat the Cheaters has garnered immense traffic over the last six months. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I hope that most of the students visiting this post reconsider their wayward academic ideas and that professors discover tips on how to discover and punish those students who haven’t. But of course, the reality is probably not so congenial to the life of the mind.

Other posts that garnered a lot of attention were the two I wrote on Kirtu: Kirtu’s Mountaintop Experience and Kirtu: Tragi-Comedy or Pure Tragedy?. A quick google and I realized that there is a simple reason for this: these posts come up number one on Google when you search for “Kirtu.” I find this personally gratifying and hope to write more on this Ugaritic Epic in the upcoming year.

Likewise gratifying has been the continued use of this blog to air ideas that later show up in papers and whatnot. If academic papers at conferences are beta testing for books and articles, then this blog is alpha testing. At the moment I’m editing the dissertation, but I perceive that I will start throwing new and varied ideas out into the ether throughout the year. I have at least three projects I hope to work on this year. One of them might even be “popular” in nature.

Finally, both Chris and Wes have posted lists of books they’ve read this year. This would an exceptionally long post for me given the nature of my vocation. However, I do hope to post a list of the pleasure reading I read in 2009 in the next day or so.