OCR Help.
A tutorial on optical character recognition, which has saved me a great deal of time in reading books as e-books.
For our general use with Word and the lab scanner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfxMookbT_I&feature=related
For a copier like we have in the department and also the one in the CATS Center for tutors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Ps5GJko0c&feature=related
Writing about...
Reading to Write or Teach
By request, I have paid attention this week to the ways I read a text for our class. Alternatively, I’ve been thinking about what I do with a text before I teach it.
Essentially, I keep the book and either just a pen, a pen and paper, or a computer in front of me. I read, and when I read an interesting passage, I read just a little beyond it to make sure that I’m not provoked for no reason.
If only a pen: I mark a vertical line in the margin for passages or a dot for good words.
If a pen and paper: “” then write down the page number, plus three words of my thoughts.
If a computer: “” plus a question or more expressions of my interest (or complaints).
When a text includes definitions, I type them up or write them up as outlines. For instance, I might divide the Neoclassical Period up into the Restoration, the Augustan Age, the Age of Johnson. I fill in the outline as much as necessary to explain to my students (or to jog my memory) on the features of the definition.
I also put stars—or rather asterisks—next to those passages or notes I believe will be most handy.
Later, I think about all of this while looking only at my notes.
This generates all the organization that I am liable to produce in the course of writing and speaking.
--At least until revision.
Regarding Technicolor.
Nelson, Alondra and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines, Eds. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York UP,
Editors Nelson, Tu, and Hines seek to answer, through the Technicolor anthology: “How will we know when the digital divide has been mended?” (1), and they select articles which demonstrate “the many interfaces where technology and race intersect” (2), with further treatment of gender, culture, and 20th-century diasporas.
Given the citation of the three “Falling Through the Net” studies, which we also saw in Literate Lives, I wonder how the use of cell phones has impacted the connectedness of individuals. In Nelson and Tu’s interview with the documentary filmmaker Vivek Bald, the documentarist of Taxi-Valas comments, “With cell phones, interactions become very individualized, one person to another, in a way that undermines the more communal space of CB, where a number of people can listen and participate at the same time” (94). When I moved to a farm in Casey County, Kentucky in 1997, I learned that only eighteen months earlier Chicken Gizzard Ridge Road, where the farm was located, had lost the party-line system. The neighborhood biddies were still depressed that they couldn’t answer their home phone, which had only recently shared a line with three other houses, and get all the news that was dirt on their next-door neighbors.
While I’m sure that several Native American Reservations would be lucky in 2011 to have a land-line phone per four houses, I question whether the advent of no-contract cell phones has sequestered the individual away from the community; I’m sure, though, that it has isolated the individual from the sense of a household. If my land line rings, it can only mean a wrong number or a solicitation. At the same time that my housemates can contact me anywhere I am (the basement, the yard, the road, or the store), I am somehow less available to the outside world when I am in my home—because it is no longer the household which can be contacted, but me individually. That increases the gap between myself and my cohabitants, such as my roommate, girlfriend, nephew, or brother.
What Vivek Bald needed to intercept the cabbies’ conversations was likely either a better CB or a footwarmer amplifier rather than a crystal (92)—but his problem was the same: he found the drivers isolated from not just the community, sealed off as they were in their cars, but also insulated from the community of other commercial drivers. The “virtual communities” they were involved with was a strict and tiny subset of the community at large: citizens > entrepreneurs > roadies > commercial drivers > Taxi-valas (> those trying to make Auto-biographies). I’m left to ask whether the virtual community here is much like the virtual democracy Nguyen outlines later in the anthology, virtual as in no cigar.
As with other platforms of technology, I ask whether our increasingly subdivided literacies are leaving us with knowledge so specific to each venue (or each gadget) as to make specialized literacy itself divisive. If you aren’t on my channel, I can’t hear you. If it’s not my music, I don’t want to hear it. If it isn’t an e-book, I won’t carry it with me. If you don’t have wi-fi, I won’t buy your coffee. Everywhere I have gone the last few years I have refused to bring “my” music with me (but please bring yours, I would love to be exposed to yours)--because I am afraid that my taste will inbreed and mutate, and I won’t be in touch with the new exposure. In other words, I believe that I will fall off the cutting edge and lose contact with the general wave of information and the current of popular culture. This translates neatly into academic in the specificity of academic “concentrations” vs. the broad appeal of interdisciplinary communication.
Bibliography of Smarter People than Myself
I will point to some of my favorite articles on humans as cyborgs, sentients, and simians—with reference to Donna Haraway and Bruno latour.
Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. Fordham UP, 2008
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34099123/Posthuman-Metamorphosis
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges.”
&
Star, Susan Leigh. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.”
&
Latour, Bruno. “To Modernize or to Ecologize? That is the Question.”
All in this great Technoscience 2007. Eds. Kristin Asdal, Brita Brenna, and Ingunn Moser.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/42813486/Modernize-Ecologize-Bruno-Latour
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard UP: 1993.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38504479/Bruno-Latour-We-Have-Never-Been-Modern
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