listening to repeating

I’ve just finished the course site, including the syllabus, for BISIA 213, New Media Production: “Animating Print Texts,” at the University of Washington, Bothell.  Last year, in the spring, I taught a similar version of the course, which essentially asks students to use Adobe Flash and Audacity to animate selections from a literary something’s print version—to make text move, with sound.

Learning from a few mistakes during my last go at the course, I’m thinking of adding more constraints to the students’ animation process, especially time-based constraints (e.g., how long the animation should be).  I also want to spend more time on audiovisual synchronicity, since I only spent one module on it in 2009.  After all, persuasively synchronizing moving text with sound is one of the biggest challenges in the class.

Read the rest of this entry →

The class site for my University of Washington, Bothell, course is now live.  The class is BIS 213, Art Techniques: New Media Production, and the course theme is “Making Animated Objects.”   (As I was writing the syllabus, I was thinking how cool it would be, in the near future, to have a new media class with a “Shaping Things” theme.  Of course, students would be making spime instead of Flash animations.  Hmmm… writing the modules and prompts in my head right now.)

This class is most certainly assuming a workshop format.  I’m relying far less on lecture, literary criticism, or media theory than I am in, say, “Mapping the Digital Humanities.” We’ll be looking at a few examples of new media and electronic literature composed in Flash, and I’m using Lev Manovich’s work for terms and concepts.  Other than those pedagogical moves, the workshops will consist of modules on how to use Flash and, to a lesser extent, Audacity, in order to refashion a print text (e.g., a poem, an excerpt from a novel, or the like) and “make it move.”

Critically, the focus will be on how refashioning is an act of interpretation and how it necessarily alters how audiences perceive and navigate literature.

Technically, I’m reducing Flash to a software for animating text.  I’m not teaching Flash for web design, for instance.  (For one, I’m not really a fan of Flash-based web design.)

The class is portfolio-driven and project-based, and each student is completing six short stages in the process.  While I’ve drafted the modules and prompts for the stages, I’ll be posting them on the web as the quarter progresses.  Given it’s a workshop, I don’t want to have a set structure for learning until I’m more familiar with the learning climate and student expectations.  In short, while teaching students the basics in Flash, Audacity, and refashioning, I want to be as flexible as possible and see what emerges.

One thing I’m particularly excited about: One module includes an excercise where students “swap” Flash files, modify each other’s work, reanimate it, and share the changes.  It will be like peer review, but not at all.  Funny thing is: I would be reluctant to do such an exercise with an academic paper or essay.  I’d instead ask for margin or end comments.  Why is that?  Is it just me?  Or what is it about textual practices in academic writing that seems more . . . proprietary than with the modularity and variability of new media?  I need to flesh the answer to these questions out.   For one, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to use new media IN and AS my academic work.

So the CHID class, “Mapping the Digital Humanities,” which Matt Wilson and I co-designed, finally starts tomorrow.  I’ll be teaching it, and I’m incredibly excited about it.  For one, I’ve created over 50 pages of material for it.

You can visit the site (which, starting next week, will be passcode-protected for most of the quarter) to see the assignment prompts, modules, syllabus, learning outcomes, and the like.  With Matt’s help, I pretty much wrote them from scratch, pulling in parts of materials from other classes I’ve taught.

The class is portfolio-based, and the students will be designing their own digital humanities projects based on print projects they’ve done in the past.  They will also be collaboratively mapping the UW-Seattle campus.  With the individual projects as the focus, however, most of the readings will be directed (rather than assigned to the entire class), and class time (in a computer-integrated room) will be spent on learning and testing technical competences (e.g., in XHTML, CSS, GIS, and data modeling) through the lenses of cultural history, literature, and some critical theory (as it relates to technology).

Here’s a list of a few new things I’m trying:

• Using a class Google account (for Google Reader and Google Books) to aggregate and share information across projects.
• Grading (on the 4.0 scale) the portfolio assignments, outcome by outcome, and allowing students to revise each assignment (except for the final one) only one time.
• Teaching in a computer-integrated room for every class session.
• Drafting modules (subject to revision) for class sessions and circulating them on the first day of the quarter.
• Using Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs of the modules and assignment prompts and to include links (e.g., to other modules, prompts, readings, images and videos) in them.  Put together, the modules and prompts become a digital textbook of sorts.
• Giving a quiz (on XHTML and CSS).  I’ve never given a quiz in a humanities class.
• Visualizing the course in a map.  The map includes the assignments (on the left and right), critical practices and technical competences that the students will be expected to learn (in the middle), critical traditions subtending the curriculum (bottom left), and the class goal (center).

I’m sure there are a number of other new things, but that list’s sufficient for now.  In the near future, Matt and I will be presenting the “Mapping the Digital Humanities” curriculum at HASTAC III.

But for now, class starts tomorrow!

+ “Experiments in Galvanism,” by Garnet Hertz.  Description from this site:  “A miniature webserver is implanted in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container. Through an ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani’s original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal. you can move him realtime.”

+ a quote from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: “I am not much different from a frog’s leg, which an electrical current has caused to kick. I am kicking, kicking with the spirit of your husbands, your brothers.”

+, of course, the A-Z for Galvani’s “animal electricity”:

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time now. It’s about the spring course, “Animating 1919,” and, more specifically, a collaborative digital media project that emerged from that course. One of the groups in the class did something really, really smart: They animated the first newsreel from Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel using Flash and some serious attention to the physical text itself. Here’s the final video:

What I like about it is that it’s Flash without being flashy. They kept it simple and deliberate, and, what’s more, they were able to frame it around questions about materiality and texture. The texture of the digital. Digital texture, as they called it. I like that. A lot.

Why? Well, for one, it refrains from rendering digital media “flat” or without depth, as if they don’t have a materiality of their own. Also, it lays bare the connections and intermediations that can be made across textual studies and digital humanities research. These are overlaps that I never imagined being interested in; nevertheless, what this video does so well is capture the material richness of language and the printed text and make it move. In so doing, it demands a new type of reading (of the text in multiple materialities), highlighting the simultaneity and noisiness of Dos Passos’s newsreel without even using sound.

To situate the project on the institutional and pedagogical registers, it is, I think, an example of what Alan Liu wonderfully refers to as “Literature+.” Not only did it involve collaboration, the creative use of digital technologies, and the synthesis of technical skills with critical competencies, but it also demands interdisciplinary acts of interpretation and making—of working with, across and through texts, their materiality and cultural embeddedness, and how they make meaning over time, in time.

What I’m getting at is that digital humanities trajectories like this one need not be reduced to fetishizing technologies and all things new and 2.0. They can be, sure. However, where they are truly productive is in their process of making a digital texture that’s about more than interfaces.

I’m looking for a translation of the prefix to the third section of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” That prefix reads:

I understand that the quote comes from Aristotle’s De Anima (or On the Soul); however, I have not found consistency in the translations. The most common, it seems, is: “No doubt the mind is something divine and not subject to external impressions.” Anyone else have a translation?  The same?  A different one?

I also just realized that there are some interesting connections with Eliot’s 1919 “halt at the frontier of metaphysics” and the course on animating 1919. Those connections are not quite what I originally had in mind, either, namely the potential associations of animation with the mobilization of an essence and its attendant ideologies (e.g., the essential canon for which Eliot might argue). Of course, a theory of animation does not have to follow that line of inquiry.  Nevertheless, I now realize that particular line is a possible reading of the course.

But the translation? Anyone?