My Daily Read Neil Fraistat
February 24, 2012
English prof and director of MITH Fraistat talks about his reading habits. By The Chronicle of Higher Education
English prof and director of MITH Fraistat talks about his reading habits.
By The Chronicle of Higher Education
Neil Fraistat is a professor of English and director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
A. After quickly scanning my e-mail, I read the sports section of The Washington Post, which provides a daily dose of horror for hometown fans.
Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile?
A. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and, of course, The Chronicle. The only ones of these I am sure to read in print is the Post in the morning and the Sunday Times; those rituals die hard. Otherwise, my choice of medium and device is promiscuous, depending on what Shelley described as “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change”: what is nearest to hand when I am at home, at the office, or traveling.
In general, I prefer reading on my iPad at home in the morning and evening, computer during the day, and iPhone during local travel. Print is usually reserved for breakfast and bedtime. Most recently I’ve started to use the Zite app on my iPad, which acts as a personalized magazine, aggregating for me stories selected not only from a series of subjects that I’ve customized, but also from analyzing my Google Reader and Twitter history. Zite and other apps like it may radically change my reading habits as far as newspapers, magazines, and blogs are concerned.
Read more...