listening to repeating

A piece, titled “Teaching and Learning through the Digital Humanities,” that I wrote for English Matters (the UW English Department’s newsletter) is now online.

Give it a gander.  There are also some print versions finding their way into the mailboxes of alumni.

A big thanks to Jen Gonyer-Donohue for being a fantastic editor and conversationalist.

I’m happy to announce that during the next academic year (2010-11), I’ll be designing and teaching courses in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS) at the University of Washington, Bothell.

The first course I’m teaching, “Technologies of Expression: Sound Reproduction Studies,” is a 200-level course scheduled for Autumn 2010.  It’s part of the new Media and Communication Studies emphasis in IAS.  More below.

Course Description

Since the 1850s, sound reproduction technologies have changed over time.  As some were rendered obsolete, others became cutting edge.  In one sense, this course is an opportunity for students to trace the history of those technological shifts by attending to everything from the phonograph and magnetic tape to the turntable and the computer.  Yet in another sense, the course is a chance to explore how those technologies are culturally embedded.  For example, how have artists and writers integrated sound reproduction technologies into their work, and to what effects on other media, such as print?  Through advertisements and film, how were certain technologies marketed, to whom, and for what purposes?  And when, where, and for whom does a sound seem pleasant, a recording appear high fidelity, or an environment feel noisy?

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Just a quick announcement as the deadline nears: With Dene Grigar (Washington State University), I am co-proposing a MLA 2011 special session, entitled “Sound Reproduction and the Literary.”

This panel will explore the role of digital/analog audio when composing literature and criticism by emphasizing storage, fidelity, and sound design; audiovisual synchronicity; and audio recording histories and literature.

Please submit a 300-word abstract with a CV by March 15, 2010 to both jentery@uw.edu and dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu. Please reference the session name in the subject of your email.

Queries welcome. All panel participants must be members of the MLA before April 1, 2010.

This year, the annual MLA convention will take place in Los Angeles, between January 6th and 9th.

I just want to send a quick thank you to Bryden McGrath and Catherine O’Donnell for chatting with me about things related to technology, teaching, literature, and the AAC&U.

Bryden’s written a piece for the UW’s Daily, and Catherine’s done the same for the Graduate School.

I like that both of the conversations focused primarily on the material histories of technologies, rather than becoming preoccupied with cutting edge digital tools and gadgets.  These experiences make me want to drag my typewriters, rotary phones, cassette tapes, and record players into the classroom.

Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric is now out on McFarland.  You can get it there, or at Amazon, among other locations.  In it, I have a short piece, “Novel Cartographies, New Correspondences,” which just so happens to be the last chapter (#27) in the book.

What’s up with the oblique title?  The chapter’s a gesture toward thinking of how the production of new media can foster community-based learning and engagement with one’s local institutions (such as universities).  Put another way, how does web-based new media correspond with people’s actual, everyday practices (as opposed to simulating them or rendering them virtual), and how might it enable social change?

And so the chapter describes how neogeography is one such vehicle for correspondence.

Thanks to Heather Urbanski for being a fantastic editor.

Yesterday, on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design.”

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it’s stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship.

And I know “standards” can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren’t static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse).

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