listening to repeating

This coming week (from May 20th to the 23rd), I’ll be attending my third Computers and Writing conference, this year at Purdue University.  (The last two I attended were at Wayne State and UC-Davis.)

I’ll be involved in a few conference invents, including a Friday panel titled, “Tinkering with Rhetorical Expertise: Reappraising Functional Literacy,” with Derek Van Ittersum, Annette Vee, and Kory Lawson Ching.  Here’s a quick description of what we’ll be discussing:

This panel responds to efforts in the field to rearticulate functional literacy by turning to the trope of tinkering.  Rather than imagining tinkering as mending an imperfect text, we instead seek to reframe tinkering to focus on the experimental or clever solutions to technological and rhetorical questions.

I’m really looking forward to it, especially since I’ll be in most brill company.  During my portion of the panel, I’ll be speaking to the roles that code, prototyping, and making stuff might play in computers and comp.

On Sunday, with six other folks I’m also contributing to the conference’s final town hall, “Articulating New Configurations for Virtual Scholarship.”  Michael J. Salvo is moderating:

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

On Sunday, I returned from Computers and Writing 2009, which was held at UC-Davis.  The conference was great, and I met a number of people who are asking some really interesting questions about the use of new media as scholarship,  the role of code and platforms in composition studies, and collaboration and expertise in technology-focused research and writing.

I was also almost convinced to start using Twitter.  Almost.

I also talked about Latour a lot.

This year, C&W uploaded all sessions—including the keynotes, the panels, and the town halls—to iTunes U.  Check it out.  There’s video and audio provided.  My first  panel was in Session A1, “Publics, Intellectuals, and the Digital Humanities,” where I gave a talk entitled, “The Emergence of Collaboration and Expertise in the Digital Humanities.”  There, I reviewed three different interdisciplinary collaborations that I’ve been involved in, and I quickly (all too quickly) articulated what I learned about collaboration, expertise, and project sustainability from those efforts.  Throughout the talk, I referenced the work of Franco Moretti, Chris Kelty, and Bowker and Starr, and I also touched on the recently released “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.” 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.

This is attack!

Just uploaded the site for my spring course, English 111, Composition: Literature (“Animating 1919″). This is my first time teaching English 111, and the site still needs some work. However, I must say that I haven’t been this excited about teaching a new course. I’m particularly looking forward to combining modernist studies with digital humanities work. And although it’s on the site, here’s a brief description of the course:

What is literature’s relationship to history? What about literature might be considered “timeless”? How does literature help us understand the past? And how is the production of literature influenced by the material conditions of its time? To unpack these questions, this course focuses on a particular year, 1919, and Anglo-American literature and literary criticism somehow related to that year. These texts, though historically located in 1919, will no doubt still be moving about in English 111. In fact, movement or, more precisely, “animation” will be our refrain.

In the first half of the course, we’ll commit to most of our reading. Even if sitting down, we’ll be sure to mobilize different methodologies or “critical lenses.” For example, we’ll contextualize literature and connect it with historical events. To avoid getting rooted in a single approach, we’ll also attend to the wonders of literary form. Switching critical lenses will allow us to not only better understand literature’s relationship to history, but to also understand how particular methodologies influence how we make meaning. Indeed, the animation of a text is often a matter what tools are in the kit.

In the second half of the course, we’ll attempt to “animate 1919″ by collaboratively composing digital media projects related to literature. Here, to “animate 1919″ will imply taking an Anglo-American modernist artifact and making it move–imagining literature and history anew through digital work. Projects might include, but are not limited to, an interactive map of Winesburg, Ohio, a hypertext version of one of Marianne Moore’s poems, or giving sound to John Dos Passos’s “newsreels.” These collaborative projects will require both a specific methodology and some close reading of things 1919. What’s more, they’ll bring to the fore how and why literature matters in 2008, not that you were wondering.