Disqus - Latest Comments for digitaldigs

Re: on having nothing to write

digitaldigs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:21:36 -0000

An interesting definition Ted. (and sorry for the comment moderation, I'm getting killed with spam.) If advancement requires proliferation and variety, then we are advancing in myriad directions. I see your point though. To advance as a writer is to become able to make use of writing in a variety of ways. And then "advanced writing" is a course where students are asked to write in various ways? I suppose that would be a generic definition of such courses.

I wonder if advaned writing courses are giving way to more specific technical, professional, creative genres.

Re: close reading, open composition

digitaldigs — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:39:41 -0000

I understand where you are coming from Skydaemon. But I think I need to clarify a few things.

Your definition of close reading is a useful one. However, in my post, close reading is a term of art within English Studies that references a particular set of interpretation practices. It is much like sounds, and at least on the undergraduate level, it's the practice that results in essays with many quotations followed by particular kinds of analysis/critique of those quotations. The critical methods might vary depending on the theory at work (e.g. new criticism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, etc.), but they all share this close reading approach.

I don't see open reading/composition as an abandonment of the premise of communication. Generally, as writers, at the very least, we have the subjective experience of trying to convey some intention or message to our intended audience. Similarly, as readers, we have the subjective experience of trying to understand what a text is telling us. (We can explore how that subjective experience is produced and its relationship to the production of compositions at another time.) For 99%+ of messages this process is mundane and unproblematic. That's one of the reasons why symbolic behavior (talking, writing, etc.) is such a powerful evolutionary-cum-technocultural adaption.

Close reading in English Studies, from New Criticism onward, has never been for that kind of communication because it is a way of interpreting texts where the meaning is obscured (e.g., in a poem). Now it is arguable that meaning is indeed obscured, especially when one is going to rule out the argument that meaning is intentionally obscured by the author (which, while somewhat perverse in conventional settings, could happen, of course).

So students read a poem and can't understand it. What does that mean? It's much like you suggest, Skydaemon. The students are not the "legitimate audience" for the text. So it is not that the meaning is generally obscured; it's just obscure for those who don't know the proper way to read the text. A literature course is supposed to educate students to legitimize their readings, and new criticism was really a hack, a short cut to helping students produce legitimate readings given their abject ignorance of high culture.

When we move into the postmodern/cultural studies era, the sought-after meaning in the text shifts in a variety of ways where English scholars start investigating the cultural, material, and ideological forces at work in literary texts. Again, as with New Criticism, authorial intentions are moot. And, again, students lack the appropriate reading techniques to produce interpretations appropriate for the disciplinary context.

In our defense, I think all disciplines do this: they look at (pieces of) the world and produce knowledge that often makes little sense outside their disciplinary context. It would be hard for me to look at the discourse of economics or psychology and tell you if something is "true" or even useful. That said, I do believe, and have written here before, that I think the humanities, and English in particular, needs to connect back to the larger culture in a more powerful way.

But let me get back to the point you make. Your example of readings of the Art of War is apt. Obviously Sun Tzu isn't here to pass judgments. So the Art of War is popularly adapted as corporate strategy. How should we read this text? What happens if we read the text without access to the Taoist philosophy that runs through it? Meaning cannot possibly be "in the text" because meaning is a cognitive event registering in your consciousness. As a reader, one might have an ethic of trying to understand the meaning the author is trying to convey (of listening as I put it in my post above), but it just can't happen in the text itself.

Now I could take the Art of War, randomly select words or passages, and then write a poem inspired by them. That would be a composition based on a reading of Art of War. It might even be a great poem. And someone else might read that poem and gain insight into Sun Tzu. It's possible.

But generally we wouldn't accept that as an act of interpretation. (Umberto Eco, btw, has some good work on the limits of interpretation.)

What counts as a legitimate interpretation is a reflection of context. Read a novel for a library book group and go discuss it. What you say there won't fly for a literary interpretation paper in a college course. And your college course interpretation is likely to get eye-rolling (or worse) in your book group. Similarly a reading of Art of War as corporate strategy is unlikely to please your online Taoist discussion group. In none of these cases are we trying to be dishonest about our understanding of what the text is saying. Nor are any of these readings necessarily "wrong."

The idea of "open composition" is really about changing the discursive, communal practices and expectations of English studies. We practice close reading (this term of art). It has had its uses. But, in my view, it is a practice that is increasingly disconnected from the discursive networks we find elsewhere in the world. And I think we need to be more closely connected with those networks or we will find ourselves increasingly irrelevant.

Open composition is an opening gesture toward thinking about how English can study texts beyond close reading.

Re: English Studies futures market

digitaldigs — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:16:01 -0000

As always Skydaemon, I appreciate your response. I fundamentally agree with you, though I may see a few points somewhat differently. Having taught and run a professional writing major for 8 years, I dealt with these issues head on. Of course many of the students at Cortland were interested in creative writing rather than technical or professional writing, but we always stressed the importance of combining instruction in writing with developing subject matter expertise. In short, the requisite knowledge for a computer programmer and a technical writer in the computing industry overlap but also differ. Few students will go from HS to competent technical writer in the space of a four-year degree; the same would be true in most technical fields.

I do think that the well-designed contemporary English major could offer students the flexibility to be prepared for an entry-level technical writing, marketing, or PR job, especially if the major is combined with a relevant minor or second major. Alternately you could flip it around an minor in English.

In terms of writing instruction, I have always felt that an English major ought to ask students to write in a variety of genres, media, and rhetorical situations. And develop the rhetorical skills to analyze and respond to new writing tasks. To do this you might include service writing, internships, and study abroad, along with a variety of in-class assignments.

That said, I agree with you in general about the things that English lit classes don't do. Of course, they were never intended to do such things. And there remains a fair amount of resistance across the humanities to altering the curriculum to pursue more direct professionalization. And while I see the point of professionalizing, in a real way, if English became a professionalizing degree it would really cease to be English. And maybe that's the future, but until then I have this other idea.

Maybe professional writing curricula ought to be a part of every English degree. I wouldn't argue against that. But I think that we still need to argue for the value of literary studies knowledge, methods, and pedagogies for undergraduate students. I know that the faculty in English believe in the value of their work. I also know they may have the tenure and academic freedom to turn away from making such an argument. But in the end students have voted and will continue to vote with their feet. Without the students, the discipline will die. So we need to explain to students the value of majoring in English.

In short. Imagine you're 18 and entering college for the first time. There are 100 majors to choose among. You think you know what English is because you had it in HS. That could work for us or against us. Fortunately, we have first-year composition as a place where we see nearly every student and where we have a chance to get our message out over one or two semesters.

So what do we say about English? What can you do here?
-you will develop your creativity and personal expression
-you will write in different genres and media
-you will learn about culture and communication through the study of literature and other media

You can combine English with another more technical or specifically professionalizing major if you want, but English should help you develop a deeper, broader cultural context for analyzing specific communication challenges and the general rhetorical and creative skills to be a successful communicator.

Is our discipline doing those things now? In some places and in some ways, yes. Do we have a long way to go and a short time to get there? Likely.

Re: is artificial intelligence a rhetorical process?

digitaldigs — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:06:20 -0000

There are some really good thoughts here about the problems of developing AI and undoubtedly a central problem is the definition of "intelligence." I agree with Skydaemon that from a programming/engineering perspective, AI need not mean imitate a human and that in most cases where we have limited AI now, that would be undesirable.

I still think that demonstrating intelligence is a rhetorical performance. I can't know if a student is smart, but I can read her paper or listen to her in class and judge her to be so. All experienced teachers know the limits of this.

I like this definition of critical thinking as developing effective actions in the absence of clear criteria, defined objectives, or total knowledge (not that we ever really have the last one). When the actions called for are acts of communication, I would call that particular type of critical thinking rhetoric. B/c rhetoric has the old negative reputation (what Wayne Booth terms "rhetrickery"), it is easy to think of AI as imitation game as rhetrickery. When rhetoric is not "only" performance but also composition, then rhetoric becomes a practice of interface, and not just in the technical sense as with computer networks.

Rhetoric then is not just the process where through certain tricks I imitate intelligence. It is the process there through an interface/interaction with others I communicate, learn, and develop knowledge. And yes, perhaps this is poetics as well.

I would say that if you want to know what anthropomorphic AI is like then just look in the mirror. We are artificial intelligence, even though part of the process of cognition goes through meat, our intelligence is a techne, an artifact of human culture. Our human and human-like ancestors thought strictly meat-thoughts for tens of thousands of years. Then we developed symbolic behavior, and language that at least approximates the way we experience language, and (get ready) RHETORIC as we figured out how to use language to get stuff done. And AI was born. And networked thought was born.

We're it: the rhetorical AI.

Re: is artificial intelligence a rhetorical process?

digitaldigs — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:34:22 -0000

Thanks Skydaemon and Cynthia. One of the things I appreciate about blogging is how a somewhat off-hand blog post can generate responses that are much more thoughtful than the initial post. I am very interested in the ways that we think through and try to model intelligence. And I agree that such models often tell us as much about the person doing the modeling as anything else.

It makes sense to differentiate between the appearance of intelligence (e.g. the Turing test) and actual process of cognition. I am only somewhat playfully suggesting that intelligence is "only" rhetorical, "only" appearance. Unless we are cognitive scientists with fMRis in our offices, the only intelligence we encounter (besides our own) is in that appearance--the face, the text?, etc. Even the fMRI is appearance, a witnessing of cognition.

In the past I have remarked on subjectivity as interface, as desktop, as that which makes interaction and usability possible between humans--but then also as little more than a surface conceit that doesn't tell us much about what goes on under the hood. Of course that's just a trope turning us away from more humanist subjectivities. But the metaphor is easy to play with--plugins, software, memes/ideology as viruses and OS.

It's a fascinating (again, to me) recursive relationship how cybernetics offers models of the mind, and the mind offers models of AI. back and forth. I don't know if intelligence is "just" rhetoric but there's a lot of rhetoric floating about to be sure.

Re: a straighterline to higher education hell

digitaldigs — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:23 -0000

Bill. I agree with you that we can use media networks to free up FTF class time for activities that are best accomplished in meat space. Straighterline isn't that kind of product, or at least it wasn't when I wrote this article. As I think you are suggesting here, making these kinds of changes might result in new pedagogic challenges for faculty. I hope we rise to the occasion.

Re: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the writing classroom

digitaldigs — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:26:20 -0000

I agree Ted. I actually think there are a number of reasons for this. The "E" in TED may stand for "entertainment," but a number of the talks deal quite directly with education. I've shown the Ken Robinson talk several times in classes. However, more importantly, many of these talks address the subject of creativity, including the Gladwell speech you mention. So there's a lot there that speaks to our concerns.

Needless to say (but said anyway), they are also often excellent examples of good rhetoric at work.

Re: should we teach composition in composition?

digitaldigs — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:35:08 -0000

Thanks Derek. I agree with you here. Of course TA-delivered FYC is only one flavor and not the most common across higher education. Two-year and comprehensive 4-yr colleges have different challenges, which can also vary greatly depending on how much they rely upon contingent faculty (not that contingent faculty are necessarily better or worse than TT faculty, but they are obviously in a different institutional position).

Anyway, I agree that the fear with TA-delivered FYC is that it occurs in the kind of cynical context you describe, where the faculty don't care about it except as a way to fund their graduate students. In such a situation, no one would win. The grad students don't get the kind of teaching experience that they need, and certainly the undergrads aren't receiving the kind of curriculum we'd hope them to get.

Derek, I think you're also right on about the best possibility... where TA's are converted. Not necessarily converted to become "rhet/comp" specialists, but where they come to see that value of teaching writing and the value of rhetoric as a foundation for humanistic pedagogy. Just as the cynical version arises from a department ethos (or lack thereof), the best version also relies (I would think) upon a department commitment to the value of composition for both the undergrad students and the graduate TAs.

As to how that ethos would be expressed, I don't think I could say. That is, I think individual faculty would need to figure it out individually. We wouldn't need to agree (which is a relief since that's not likely to happen), except beyond the recognition of this basic ethos.

I think ... maybe... even Fish and I could get that far... That we could both recognize that teaching composition is something that ought to be done well and that we ought to put some more energy toward that goal.

Re: Michael Wesch on the YouTube identity and the history of whatever

digitaldigs — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:16:38 -0000

Twitter has me think of Benjamin, in particular the notion of how fascism offers us "freedom of expression" as a substitute for social power: life style instead of life, or the introduction of aesthetics into politics as he puts it elsewhere. From a Deleuzian p.o.v., of course, one couldn't imagine the tweet or the YouTube videolog as a free: there are many forces at work there. Indeed we might think of Web 2.0 apps as confessional technologies (a la Foucault), as exemplars of the repressive hypothesis par excellance! (Though maybe all of that is a little too easy).

No. I would say that as long as one is imagining freedom and democratic participation in the conventional ideological way, these technologies are crap: bread and circuses at best. The trick with expressing oneself otherwise is in recognizing first that the fantasy that authentic self exists and can be mediated always falls apart, that it relies upon perpetual ideological and technological reassembly. Without reassembly it's all just ones and zeros, voltages, light waves, etc.

Thanks re: the design. It seems to be getting positive feedback.

Re: creativity, composition, and the internet socialist/socialist internet

digitaldigs — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:35:06 -0000

I'm assuming that the real engineer is getting paid to oversee this three-year apprenticeship. And that this student will be receiving a broader education, outside of the narrow field of this particular career, in some other venue where people are getting paid to teach him/her? Meanwhile the engineer is likely only going to be training that student to accomplish limited tasks that meet up with the particular work that engineer is doing for his/her corporation. Is that going to be a sufficient education?

I guess here's my point about education. Hypothetically, you could get an education by downloading syllabi, reading the texts, listening to podcasts on iTunes U, etc. Maybe you could even throw in some kind of social networking of students. Maybe you even hire a mentor to shepherd you through the process and its still way cheaper than college. Then you have some certifying agency that uses testing or portfolio review or something to verify that you merit a degree of some sort.

Thinking in terms of a humanities degree. In my experience, the chances of a student passing even a minimal portfolio review in an English degree without close mentoring from faculty is fairly slim. Let's say that maybe 20% of the students who get degrees now could pull it off. And their educational experience would be diminished by following this route. B/c not everything you learn is on the test or in the essay you write.

Still, then you could stick that student as an apprentice with a PR firm or marketing or publishing or whatever. And I'm sure they would learn things. However, we know the old saying about those who can't do, teach. That may or may not be true. However I will say that just b/c you can do, doesn't mean that you necessarily can teach well. An apprenticeship may or may not be valuable. It certainly would not equate with an education in the humanities.

I guess as an educator, I think I provide something of value that you aren't going to get for free online. Maybe the outlier student can educate him or herself using the resources and communities of the Internet, but the vast majority of students require teachers. If that weren't the case then we would have replaced colleges with libraries a century ago.

And this is my main point. If we accept the premise that we are entering an economy where more citizens will need more education then I think we are looking at moving in the other direction, of offering a larger institutional support structure for higher education.

Re: creativity, composition, and the internet socialist/socialist internet

digitaldigs — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:55:21 -0000

I will accept your description of what's going on with open source. I certainly won't pretend to be an expert there. I will say that I think the model of collaboration associated with open source (fictional or not) would work for academic research in the humanities b/c the fundamental ethos of our scholarly practices is to share widely with the culture.

I'm not sure about the music example. If copyright didn't exist, what would stop someone from making digital copies of the music and sharing it for free? Without copyright (or something virtually identical to copyright) there would be no legal recourse, right?

Re: what do you mean I agree with Mark Bauerlein?

digitaldigs — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:55:43 -0000

Skydaemon, I appreciate the problem you describe. I think the value of teaching undergraduates about cultural studies (and I would put the feminist analysis of advertising images under that larger umbrella here) ought to be to provide them with methods for understanding the complexity of communication. For good or bad, such analysis does not result in absolute, verifiable, repeatable results. Sounds like you may not have had the greatest of classes on the subject though.

I've been giving more thought to this. And I think one of the difficulties Bauerlein opens up has to do with the issue of "returns." How do we measure returns to know if they are indeed diminishing? What returns could we ever ascribe to humanities research? In the quote I use from Bauerlein, he mentions Hamlet, so I'll stick with that for a moment. I suppose we could say that if one believes that Hamlet is an important literary work in our culture, then one would also value research that helps us to better understand the play. There are a lot of ifs and judgments in there. Perhaps the average man in the street would accept those premises, at least not to the point of paying people to do this work. But that's probably been the case for many decades.

So who gets to make the valuation of research? Academic freedom suggests that faculty do. That if something gets accepted for publication then it is valuable. But that freedom comes with responsibility. If we can't responsibly recognize that we have exhausted the useful study of our subject matter (and I'm not necessarily saying that we have), then perhaps we do not deserve the freedom we are given.

However, I actually think the question of "returns" is not the best frame. Because you could say that the primary return for research is tenure. And people keep doing research and keep getting tenure. So in that sense the returns are not diminishing. Of course the returns implied by Bauerlein are more intellectual and abstract. However those are much more difficult to measure by this economic analogy.

I think it might be more useful to think about this situation in terms of an information-network problem, where the situation in the humanities is an extension of the larger media network challenges we face. In short, we are buried in data. We produce far more than we can seem to consume. And there are two reasons for that.

1. Our motivation for publication comes from the material rewards we receive in tenure and promotion more than it does from a recognition of a real exigency for communication. We have to publish. We have to publish in a particular venue.

2. The "long tail" distribution of readers. Let's say there are 3000 specialists in a field. 500 of them write articles in a given year. Let's say you could read one article a week. That would give you an average of 300 readers. But it doesn't work that way because of the 80/20 rule, which means that articles in one or two main journals will be read by almost everyone and the rest of the articles by very few people. And you might think that's because those main journals have the best articles or the ones most relevant to the reader's particular concerns. But I think that's highly unlikely. It's more of a network effect than a rational process.

So I think the real question is how do we expand the readership for humanities research? In a historical moment of globalization, information explosion, and communications revolution, it ought to be a no brainer that the humanities can provide insight into our changing historical, ethical, aesthetic, and rhetorical contexts. These are forces that have brought us into war, shaken our economy, and shaped presidential elections. They are important. On a more personal level, they will shape the work we do and the communities in which we live.

And I don't think it is our job to pass judgment on these matters. But the humanities research can provide broader contexts to people as they make these decisions. Our research can offer a range of methods to people so that they can approach issues from different perspectives. And we can help people understand how to use the communication technologies that are available to them.

We can do this in the classroom. We can do it in the workplace. And we can do it through media networks.

These are rhetorical challenges, and we ought to rise to meet them. We can still write to each other in our journals, but we also ought to be reaching out with our writing more.

Re: creativity, composition, and the internet socialist/socialist internet

digitaldigs — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:01:46 -0000

Thanks Skydaemon. I agree with much of what you say. There's an interesting turning point in your definition of the differences between capitalism and socialism where it hinges on what a "reasonable person" would think. We socialize the police force and the military (though we also have private versions of both). Education is largely, though not entirely, socialized and less so at the tertiary level. Health care... well, you know. The entire premise of a capitalist market economy rests on the concept of private property, which requires a state legal system, including enforcement.

I think we agree with Lessig is saying that the conventional understanding of socialism includes a centralized govt bureaucracy and that Kelly's idea is not that. So calling it socialism is a little strange.

I would note that a hybrid economy need not be a free economy. It's true that there are still issues with monetizing social networks, but at least in theory it's possible to make money in a hybrid economy. Indeed, that's what makes it hybrid rather than just a sharing economy.

I for one don't think you can get a decent education in a sharing economy. Exactly who does one imagine will provide my kids with a valuable consistent education for free? Who is going to educate an engineer you'd trust to build a bridge for free? Sure the information, the textbooks if you like, might be free. But who is going to provide the actual labor of teaching? If there was no labor involved, we could have just sent our kids the library decades ago.

We're never going to get the quality of movies or books or music without people able to make a living doing these things. So I think Lessig's argument is that we absolutely need copyright to ensure that these things are possible. As you know, even open source software relies heavily on experts who are also making a living doing these things and are sometimes paid to work on open source.

I imagine hybrids will emerge in some industries moreso than others. I think higher education is one of those places since in many respects it is already a hybrid economy. If we were able to recognize and value that across our culture, then I think we'd all be better off than we have been over the last 30 years where the pressure to move toward marketplace logic has really damaged universities.

Re: Chronicle Article on the Internet and Student Writing

digitaldigs — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:17:15 -0000

Thanks Jill. I have had similar experiences. I don't use Facebook like my students do. My wife is way more into it than I am. My interests in social media are more professional than personal. I think you make a good point that b/c you write about technology you find more connections here. I do think, however, that the other humanities will slowly come on board with social media.

Re: product orientation in the age of networked composition

digitaldigs — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:10:58 -0000

I can agree with this Charles. I guess my question here is: what relationship pertains between feedback from which students might learn and feedback which leads to a more polished final product? Do the two have any necessary relationship? Would having students pay for surface-level copyediting interfere with their learning? We put so much energy in FYC into error correction. At least this is what we always here, right? Laments about long hours of grading or correcting.

What would happen if we just took the "correcting" business out of the instructors' hands? Would we get a better pedagogy in return?

Re: taking speed seriously in English

digitaldigs — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:45:03 -0000

Thanks Skydaemon. You offer some real insight into the changing compositional practices of programming. The simple fact is that speed has never been part of the academic ethos, let alone the humanities or English Studies. To the contrary, we have looked upon speed as unethical and characterize the market forces that demand speed of other professions as anti-intellectual.

Personally I find these moralistic arguments are falling somewhere between "wanting" and "uninteresting." They are "wanting" if one sacrifices other ethical-moral commitments that might be met through speedy intervention. But more importantly (at least to me), they are uninteresting because what I want to consider here is how speed creates an intensification of cognitive processes that leads to something new. I can't say what that new thing might be, so I can't place a value judgment on it (even if I wanted to, which I don't).

I do wonder if digital scholarship might incite some of the compositional practices you describe in programming. Sometimes a change in media can really shake things up. On the flip side, we don't need to be increasing the production of scholarship. We already have a glut! What we do need is to change the dynamics of scholarship, whether that means digital or not, though obviously I think it means digital.

Meanwhile I think your proposition of faculty writing in parallel to be a radical one. Of course we produce essay collections somewhat in this way, but here you're talking about something much more collaborative. The tough thing would be to find a half-dozen scholars in the humanities who would be willing to subordinate their differences to a common goal. Of course this happens all the time in virtually every other walk of life, but humanities professors are wired that way.

I think that's one of the major obstacles we face in building digital, collaborative scholarly communities.

Re: Chronicle Article on the Internet and Student Writing

digitaldigs — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:44:27 -0000

Not a problem. I understand how that is. We've all been there.

Re: taking speed seriously in English

digitaldigs — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:21:49 -0000

Thanks Bonnie. I'd be interested in hearing your take via Katz. Certainly Katz's concern with expediency in terms of the Holocaust is relevant to Virilio, who is deeply concerned with fascism and technology. However, I would also point out that speed is not always expedient. Sometimes it is just wasteful. That is, maybe what interests me about speed is intensifications beyond the point of expediency.

Re: on blogging and becoming a better writer

digitaldigs — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:18:07 -0000

Thanks Jane. I agree completely that blogging can add dimension. Minimally it adds hours but it can add so much more. I have asked students to maintain individual blogs. Mostly I have left the topics open with the notion that figuring out what you want to write about is as important a part of the assignment as anything else. In all truth, generally it has been difficult for most students to succeed at this assignment. There are tens of millions of blogs, but most people don't blog, and even most bloggers don't update that often. Still I think it has been useful for students to engage regularly with the inventive and rhetorical challenges of maintaining a blog, even if they don't end up keeping it once the assignment ends.

Re: Digital video and scholarship

digitaldigs — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:21:34 -0000

Thanks Ryan. I agree with your criticisms. I think there are several possible answers to the question of what video affords us and that the answers are tied to budget (i.e. what affordances can we afford?). I can certainly imagine, for example, History Channel-esque video on various histories of writing technologies or a Frontline-type documentation of the social and cultural conditions of basic writers at a community college or a more polemic, Michael Moore type spotlight on the issues of contingent faculty. To do these things well, you'd need expertise in production, direction, and cinematography, which I think means a team of people. You'd need quality equipment and a travel budget.

I agree with your insight into the potential of the camera as a investigative tool. Psychiatrists have been recording their patients for a century (Kittler writes about this).

We can't think of video as a substitute for writing on the monograph. That's for sure. I think it's not so hard to imagine a combination of video and slideware as an extension of the intellectual work of the conference presentation (whatever that is ;-) ). It's also possible, at least in my mind, to see video as a supplement to the monograph (e.g. the video introduction to the text as one possibility).

I'm going to take a look at your post.

Re: Digital Scholarship and Tenure

digitaldigs — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:15:21 -0000

Thanks Amanda. I agree "What we need is a publishing system that allows for *both* long-term findable access and a wider readership." That isn't a print journal, and it certainly isn't a blog either. I also agree that the problem of make-work scholarship isn't directly related to digital or print publication but is a different kind of issue.

I get your point that humanities scholarship doesn't need to be news. It doesn't have to have the kind of exigency that makes it important to know today but of little value in a week (i.e., the way most daily news is). However I do think the half-life on humanities scholarship is shorter than it was a generation ago. I would say that in digital rhetoric there's very little that's more than 10-15 years old that one would cite, and that's being generous. I'm sure other humanistic areas are different, but how often does one cite material from the 80s or earlier? I would think "rarely," unless one is doing some kind of historical analysis or citing a superlative, outlier text (e.g. I might cite Derrida or Deleuze).

I think this is one of the changes to which the humanities will have to adapt. The shift in the technological and material contexts of knowledge production and publication necessarily changes the way we use and value that knowledge. Continuing on with our legacy scholarship practices will not be feasible, as I think is quickly becoming evident. I think your example with making a link in Wikipedia is a great indication of how we might change our thinking.

Re: Composition ground zero

digitaldigs — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:50:41 -0000

Thanks Steve. I did take a look. It seems like you're doing some interesting things there. Maybe some day we'll get a chance to talk about it.

Re: composition and the graphic organizer

digitaldigs — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:21:29 -0000

Well, maybe not "whatever," but do I think my kids' time is largely wasted in school? I would have to say yes. In particular I think this kind of approach to writing instruction is quite damaging, and I've see its results a hundred times over, as has any rhet/comp professor.

Re: the joys of failure

digitaldigs — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:51:53 -0000

Thanks Stephen, you make an excellent point in your reference to game design. One creates an immersive, engaging experience by keeping the challenge and activity level balanced. Of course one could say the problem with baseball is that it requires a lot of standing around, even under the best circumstances. That's the mental part of the game, which is maybe hard for younger kids.

I would extend on your thoughts here to say that in education risk needs to be properly apportioned. The risk of failure and benefit of success need to be harmonized. There ought to be a kind of commerce between students and teachers as well in defining risks and rewards in relation to the difficulty of the task. I would hypothesize that there might be some pedagogical sweet spot in terms of challenges, risks, and benefits where the challenge is high enough, the risk is palpable but not perilous, and the benefits are tempting: the result is a genuine learning (and maybe even enjoyable/immersive) experience.

Re: the joys of failure

digitaldigs — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:13:55 -0000

Trying out the tweet my blog comment function using Disqus.