Project Idea

I would like to do a project with two parts. First, I would like to explore open-sourced project for teachers. Start to finish, I would like to demonstrate on three different terminals how two kinds of Linux--Ubuntu and Slackware--including presentation software, word processing software, full internet functionality, video and audio editing, and note-taking. Google Docs especially interests me, and I will explain current work in teaching with Google Docs, where students help create, compile, edit, and revise course texts, and bring those texts up to date as time passes.

In the same spirit, I will speak to the current condition of Creative Commons licensing. My belief is that it will change the way academics publish, the way students study, and the way performing arts are taken in.

These two fields are quit interrelated, and they are mentioned often in our course texts, particularly in Lessig and Jekins. Rhetorics and Technology opens with a discussion of Creative Commons licensing, and What Video Games Have to Teach Us involves both subjects.

This will be both a traditional academic essay and a diary of my "field work" on the computers to which I have access. With luck, I will post screenshots, technical difficulties, and even video on this blog or another site. I will try to integrate my open source project, full texts available on-line, and weekly class presentations for a Literature/Theory class I currently teach from only hard-copy texts.

Old Media, New Medium

Wysocki, Anne Francis, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, & Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2004.

Wysocki addresses the book as one which pulls the rug out from under the physique of the document (opening). Her introduction suggests that we have not explored the potential of visual writing, and that we should call new media any work which is designed with its own materiality in mind. This any the many examples of assignments in the book lead me to question the materiality of printed matter in its usual linear prose. Have we really not been given most of these same choices by printing presses? Jenkins’ use of sidebars was more innovative than the publishing choices used in this text, but the creative and enveloping use of images in ch. 5 of Writing New Media and the choices for emboldening some phrases did improve my reading experience.

The benchmark she uses for new media is this: “...any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced.” I believe essentially that the accepted linear form of printed prose achieves a feat that new media is not achieving today: linear writing is so simple a form that the reader can easily separate the ideas from the work exactly because the text does efface its own medium. Much of the pleasure of reading and research, for me anyway, comes from the mission of sifting through linear text to reproduce its outline and its principal points. The texture of the writing is my second joy. New media benefits from those same traits, but even well-designed new forms lead the reader and diffuse one’s attention.

Wysocki et al are interested in design not because it translates written words into more engaging forms, but because new forms are available for writing which beg new creative impulses. Selfe and Eilola’s assignments do not assume that students will begin with a written text and superimpose a structure on it, rather that available tricks, tools, and structures will lead writers to encode their ideas in a format other than straight prose.

In an assignment, Wysocki tells her students, “There are not (yet?) fixed definitions of what constitutes a visual argument” (38). I wonder what will happen once standards for visual arguments are established, should that ever be possible. If there were, would this be a dis/regard of a text’s materiality? I mean, will stipulating conditions for visual media change its present degree of flexibility? It looks that the reason studying these writing conditions comes from not knowing a set form. I wish we knew the set form for linear writing to properly teach a class, with all the accompanying devices and tropes for teaching that writing.

We might lose the thrill of the chase when we no longer have to sit through, or riffle through, linear texts, and that day is upon us. It seems a fair estimate, based on library database searches, that three times as many articles are available in full-text form online as were ready for our consumption three years ago. The authors offer, and Wysocki particularly suggests several times, that we are “bounded by the alphabetic” (54). I’d like to know what others in our class think—how bounded are we by it, and how much do we enjoy being fettered to whichever kind of written word restrains us? A musician might say that music is her art, but that the instrument is her boundary to explore, and for dedicated writers, the alphabetic is the instrument. These four authors, and especially Eilola, encourage teachers to learn a new instrument, even if just to complement our established (hoped-for?) skill.

Eilola’s chapter, “The Database & the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” (199-236) opens with assertions that remind me of Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality. Quotations from Stuart Hall offers tasty food for thought. The legal citations of cases of Basic Books and University Presses versus Kinko’s and local document services show that conflict between copyright holders and copying businesses, with the teachers who wanted cheaper course texts and the student-consumers notable absent from that court. His comparisons of audio-engineering via ProTools and envisioning ProNoun really rings in my ears. His use of search engine ordering looks like it could benefit from Google Trends—that service cannot compare many of the small-time websites I would spend time reading, but it does allow for cataloging searches over time, like those Mimi Nguyen’s chapter referenced in searching for Asian women’s presence online.

My favorite resource in this collection is the assignments—it makes a great thread to connect the authors to each other and the teacher-student-reader to the text. Many of these assignments are worth making notes over and saving. I can’t wait to hear others’ interpretations of the Box Artist chapter.

One overarching question:

Are traditional texts quite linear, and whether they are or not, have readers always taken in those texts in a linear fashion?

Reference:

These books are both Jerome McGann’s. The first is an explanation of the connectedness of written texts, and writing as a productive community rather than producing in isolation for mass consumption. The latter explains how scholars can use technology to connect texts and images for both archival and critical work.

The Textual Condition. (Princeton Studies in Power/Culture/History.) Princeton UP, 1991.

Radiant Textuality. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

Tutorial:

A quick six-minute introduction to Google Docs & revisions for teachers. I have every intention of using this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXQmbj3EpCg

Four-minute newscast on the ways teachers are using Google Docs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPjJK6LZdM&feature=related

A one-minute newscast on using Google’s VoiceThread in the classroom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKilOmo62JQ&feature=related

[citation needed]

] My English 101 teacher didn’t tell us we had to do that [

Warnick, Barbara. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2007.

I’ve been interested in meetup.com for a couple of years, principally because it helped a good friend of mine get un-depressed by forming some new alliances in his hometown. It also has potential to bring more of rural America to the ‘net, and, for instance, to bring more residents of nearby cities together. Elitism is the exception on Meetup, but I’ll note that one Lexington hiking group refuses any members who are not already participating members of Lexington’s other hiking group. My advisees last year started a Meetup group to get players outside the university to attend their local role-playing games. That’s only unusual because the “townies” were more willing to respond to a meeting within a mile of Richmond’s little downtown by reading about it on-line than they were to respond to flyers posted on telephone poles in the same area. I also know that Meetup has formed its base of employees by capturing defectors from Google. Writers groups exist in Lexington for several genres on Meetup, and they are much more active than, for instance, the Lexington meetings of current and former MFA students with whom I have worked.

( This link by CEO Scott Heiferman explains their hiring mission relative to Google’s. It’s worth looking over. https://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg2z5whw_41cb322p&pli=1 )

While I’m just getting the hang of this, I was interested in Warnick’s assertions about the texts on the Web as wholes where the reader anticipates a single author confiding in a comparatively intimate audience. She uses Barthes to support this argument (48), paralleling the way that texts always emulate and link up to other texts with the intended structure of hypertext. I noted that she seems almost immediately to contradict this (bottom of 48-49) with research she says agrees that web readers do not look for single authorship or even for a unified presentation. She uses that verb from deconstruction, “decentering,” as the action that hyperlinking performs, the work of cross-feeding from multiple texts to create a younger and more specific article on the topic of a web author’s choice. Warnick further employs Barthes to describe the primary (or the more trusted) sources for the knowledge that specific websites pull together: “ ‘... quotations from innumerable centers of culture.’” My concern has been that my students are not able to find those primary sources and judge whether either the primary or the tertiary sources are worthwhile. As they lose the author in a swamp of anecdotal information, they also have no luck establishing the authority of a work. There is no better place than the Web to equalize the authority of sundry writers. In the last five years, in my research experience, it is becoming easier to authenticate works through university libraries, while it has become much harder to track down initial sources for much-quoted material on personal (and professional) homepages.

Two examples from this semester include some lines from Dr. Seuss I was only narrowly able to track down on-line—they were often recycled that no one seemed to know in which book they were written—and the several encyclopedia sites which function by vapidly copying a recent version of a Wikipedia article and placing in on sites with advertising masked as more veritable resources. What takes away those sites’ credibility most quickly is that they don’t offer user editing of the articles.

If my students were earnestly interested this year in tracking down the sources for an encyclopedia article they found on-line, they would soon find that these derivative articles were lifted whole-hog from a wiki. If the information sounds solid and is not credited to a particular person by either source, they would be two-thirds of the way to that heinous rule of thumb: “If you can find it in three sources, it’s common knowledge.” Since neither of those sources had clear authorship (by MLA’s 2009 manual, for instance), they might also assume that a third and credible source existed elsewhere. At the moment, I can explain all these problems to my classes. Project this problem out a couple of years, though, and I doubt that they will have an “academic integrity” to fall back on, or that I will understand the web of cross-referencing involved.

This discussion is related to the way Warnick applied Toulmin outlines to IMDb and medical sites, which section I enjoyed very much. She explains twice that users of IMDb are interested in finding a clear set of information quickly and without accreditation. She does not say that the service is also designed to be accessed through automated scraping services, not just individual users, or that as with the medical field, the users do care that the information be accurate. That raises a good question for any research writer: what is the different between data that is correct and data which is credible?

Since I had a Meetup account but not a Twitter account, I thought I would share these two tutorials:

How to create a Meetup group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3yLvqYD3XI

Twitter for Business (first in series): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IIKs9QRY-U

Mike O’Neil on Meetup experts in business:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wS_vanfCI&playnext=1&list=PLF959B61AE70AF8EE

Since deconstruction came up in Warnick, I want to share one of the research resources I use to teach my students about subaltern studies, alterity, gaps, differénce, and decentering.

www.logic-classroom.info

Just today I went to that site to give a definition that they might understand better than Gayatri Spivak’s:

http://www.logic-classroom.info/study2.htm

Their diagrams allow me to explore a couple of points about logical successes (rather than logical flaws) with them, and they get more out of the diagrams than they do from Derrida.

(I am sorry to the class and to Dr. Adam for not posting this earlier. It was my mistake: I knew to read Warnick, but I thought we were saving the blog entries for later. I look forward to reading the rest of yours. --Glenn)

My new Twitter account

Please follow me on Twitter for class.
glenndjackson
http://twitter.com/glenndjackson

Affinities in /Sound Recording/

Morton, David L. Jr. Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2006.

Morton does a great job of chronicling early work in sound recording, specifically mechanical devices and early tube and capacitor systems. I was hoping for a treatment of sound recording as an art—but he delivers the promised life story of the technology. I always liked to record, and I would like to learn more about recording theory and audio engineering, as did my friends who went through the Recording Industry Management program with Middle Tennessee State University. Morton only has time to touch on that aspect of the field. His reserved manner of social commentary, where he nearly always defers comment, makes for objective and quality research.

One aspect of his treatment which I latched onto explains the way that sound engineers learned to manipulate the equipment. He claims (regarding the period from 1900-1930), “Skilled recordists were highly-prized employees who were barraged with offers from competing companies and who changed corporate alliances frequently” (58). My boys from MTSU’s RIM program all have jobs in the field, but they also all have side jobs or day jobs. No one would claim that an audio engineer carries much weight today, unless we count Glenn Ballard or Mutt Lange. Most recording techs enjoy a job security level comparable to working in a record store. Gearheads usually find work in this field, while tone aficionados usually grow desperate in a hurry.

In several passages, Morton alludes to that penchant men have for audio gear. Those who play connoisseur to the gear don’t usually play music in the studio, though they may record it, and a quick survey of the magazine rack at Kroger proves, as it did thirty years ago, that most audiophiles keep their stash of equipment in their own home, and never set foot in a sound room.

Regarding the period from 1910-1930, Morton claims, “The status conferred by having a personal secretary was one of the perquisites of upper management, and this was difficult to dislodge with a machine. Yet some men at all levels were drawn to the machine and used it willingly (even enthusiastically) to record correspondence” (48).

Note that “The Playboy Advisor” has for decades run two basic types of calls-and-responses in their advice column—sex or dating in one slot and audio appreciation on the other. (They also talk about wine and cars, but not nearly as often.) If we men have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, one is probably an epicure of audio.

Morton goes on to talk about the post-WWII period: “After the war, these people, most of them young men, often pursued their interests in electronics by assembling their own televisions, receivers, amplifiers, and loudspeaker enclosures” (132).

I am reminded, closer to my own time, of the veterans of Viet Nam, who so often craved recorded reels of family voices or local radio programs from home, and many of whom were intimate with surface-to-surface radios in Southeast Asia; many of them—I venture to say most—stayed deeply acquainted with audio gear for many years after their return.

Many other times he makes clear that gadgetry is one opiate of society. Morton realizes that the cutting edge has been a selling point for the industry more often than it has been a boon to audio quality. He says, “The [Stereo-Pak] system also had a strong emotional appeal to those who craved the latest technical gadgets” (159). He says later of an expensive type of home compact cassette player that it, “struck a chord with fashion-conscious New Yorkers” (170). Going back to 1900, Morton notes that sales of recorders has often gone hand-in-hand with service packages, accessories, furniture, and training. I draw a tacit connection from those points to the end Sound Recording, where he discusses copy protection technology—mostly ignoring the ethics—and predicts that the industry will consider its future role the sale of songs rather than packaged albums or bundled technology. I take solace in this last statement, and I wonder what our recession has brought us, and whether the industry will continue to feed us sympathetic and cathartic art:

The studios found one quite successful Depression product in the form of elaborate musical productions (77).

I found a good set of tutorials on keeping grade books in Excel. There are several in the series which specifically apply to grade-keeping, but I'll share a solid one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX7m_kTbvmE
Title: Excel Magic Trick #194: Grade Book Based on Percentages
(From the Excel Magic Tricks series.)