Tech Tonics

Dissertation Abstract--the one for publication

2010-05-23T08:08:00.001-07:00

ABSTRACT

GENRE, DATABASE, AND THE ANATOMY OF THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE

Elizabeth J. Vincelette
Old Dominion University, 2010
Director: Dr. Jeffrey H. Richards

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye’s in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity—under the guise of knowledge accrual, investigation, and discovery.

Criticism from digital humanities, new media, historiography, literature, and archival studies informed this research, in particular critical theory on genre and epistemology, and research on physical and digital archives. Because the definitions we apply to our digital technologies are under development, this dissertation participates in the overall emergence of terms in digital humanities theory.

Several case studies analyzed the interface and underlying structures of four literary digital archives to consider how they represent the material past, and how design of visual elements and functionality manifest characteristics of the anatomy genre. The case studies suggest that literary websites, exhibits, and archives participate in the anatomy genre, but that some sites are more “anatomical” than others, and some sites do not align with the genre at all. The ability to designate a digital project as an anatomy depends more on encyclopedism, detailism, and its continual updating, than on any other factors.

In addition, my own experience constructing a literary digital archive from historical manuscripts informs this investigation of genre, in particular my role as the researcher-archivist and how identity affects my approach to the archive. Historically, metacommentary has always been part of the anatomy genre, and this study positions methodological criticism as an expression of metacommentary.
The study concludes by considering the implications of literary digital archives for scholarship and research, including effects of power, institutional impact, and the profession of “English” itself, especially in light of the anatomy genre’s tendency towards proliferation and unfinishability.

Photo of the Day

2010-05-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of Sunny's kittens. I miss having them around, but with the stray, un-neutered male nearby, I had to do something. The first time she was pregnant, it happened when we didn't think she was old enough. After the litter (nine!), we went to get her spayed only to discover she was anemic and needed medication first....but, guess what happened before she was well enough? Kittens again. It's a great reason to get your animals spayed or neutered when they are young. I didn't expect to be an owner who would have kittens twice! They were gorgeous, though, and all found good homes.

diss definition

2009-12-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

It’s always hard to answer the question, “What’s your dissertation about?”

I have one answer for non-academics and another for scholars.

My own idea of what it is has changed over the last couple of years. I now see it as a “textual studies” dissertation more than anything else. For a while I wanted to say it was a “digital humanities” dissertation, which it still is, I suppose, but that was before I realized (after reading a bunch of things) that DH isn’t exactly a “field,” and that I’d better situate what I’m doing in a field.

Matthew P. Brown comments that if "textual studies" is "understood as a concern with the transmission of the book and the manuscript as physical objects taken up by human agents and conveyed through material media, we can begin to glean its relevance to studies of communication, interpretation, subject formation, and historical change" (81).

Brown’s definition suggests a broad notion of textual studies that incorporates the history of the book, including the most recent manifestation of textual evolution—electronic text. Within English studies, both textual studies and new media concern electronic textuality, as does the additional sub-discipline known as digital humanities.

Brown, Matthew P. “Cultural Studies, Materialist Bibliography and the New England Archive: Editing an Elegy from King Philip’s War.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 81-89. Web. Academic Search Complete. 20 September 2008.

Walt Whitman Levis Commercial

2009-12-09T05:35:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a Levi's commercial that uses the Walt Whitman poem "O, Pioneers!" as its soundtrack.

I used it in my classroom to discuss popular culture representations of literature in American media. Today I decided to gather more information about it and quickly found a number of people writing about the commercial online.

People are divided over whether there's some sort of corruption of taste happening with such a use of Uncle Walt. That sort of opinion espouses a "high culture," Arnoldian point of view.

I think Whitman may have liked the idea, self-promoter that he was.

Photography

2009-12-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a new photography website here: http://elizabeth-vincelette.webs.com/

SEO 2

2009-12-06T14:36:00.001-08:00

Because digital humanities addresses where new media and literary-historical materials meet, Elizabeth Vincelette has participated in a number of conferences across the field of English studies. Over the last two years, she has attended and presented papers at CCCC in New Orleans, LA, Computers and Writing in Athens, GA, and the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. See

www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc

OTHER CONFERENCE LINKS HERE

Vincelette has also taken a course in the TEI, or Textual Encoding Intiatiative, at the DHSI (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) in Victoria, British Columbia. The DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute, is devoted to the development of digital humanities scholarship and provides courses for scholars seeking hands-on training in computing skills relevant to the humanities.

For her dissertation project, Vincelette will digitize and encode an archival collection from the late nineteenth-century. The collection contains a number of materials related to the newspaper The Independent.

Publications include an article in the online journal NeoAmericanist entitled “Press One for American English” (http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall, 2008). A forthcoming publication regarding parody, authorship, and copyright, is in the works.

The following is an abstract of “Identity and Ideology: Press One for American English”:

In the American imagination, the myth of the mainstream projects an ideal of English as the legal, official national language, a belief that conflates socio-historical attitudes about language with nationalistic ideology. A music video on YouTube, entitled “Press One for English,” debuts at a time of increasingly vocal protests about nationwide English-only laws. The video represents a piece of pop-propaganda dependent on both its lyrics and its visual icons to advance its ideological stance on language. Regarding English as an earned right identifies it as symbolic capital, a political symbol used to identify what it means to be American, as well as to control that identity. The social order expressed in the song suggests a collective ideal of an America in which today’s immigrants are expected to assimilate by learning English, just as was “always done” by immigrants in the past. The song uses entertainment as a vehicle for nationalism—and ultimately for a type of propagandist pedagogy to promote the American dream, a linguistic self-reliance that expresses national identity and becomes part of a civic story dependent on assimilation.

SEO

2009-12-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

SEO--search engine optimization. I suppose this is on the fringes of what I study with composition and digital media, but it's a fascinating turn in the once-utopian scene of the Internet.

I'm interested in a book called Google Bombthat's selling well.

So, here's a sample of an SEO type of post that performs the type of work needed to promote oneself:

As a doctoral candidate, Elizabeth Vincelette is currently writing her dissertation on digital archiving from a digital humanities perspective. Creation of the archive, entitled Independent Women, will take place over the next two years, along with the theoretical portion of the dissertation.

For the second year in a row, Vincelette will attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (see http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive), in Victoria, BC, in order to participate in training in the TEI, the Textual Encoding Initiative. TEI is a form of XML used in digital humanities scholarship to encode textual materials.

As part of her dissertation project, Elizabeth Vincelette will encode historical manuscripts related to the newspaper The Independent. Materials include letters, poetry, manuscripts, and a collection of autographs. The materials originated in a scrapbook, which appears to have been kept by a woman in the 1880s. The correspondence in the collection dates from 1880-1881, so it is likely that the materials were placed in the scrapbook near that time; evidence for that time frame is found in the collection itself in a letter.

Vincelette will select materials from the entire collection in order to create a digital archive pertaining to the women authors in the collection. Her focus will be on women’s authorship in nineteenth-century American periodicals.

Elizabeth Vincelette has two publications to date, including “Press One for American English” (available online at http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in the Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall 2008), which is not yet available online. She has a forthcoming publication on copyright and parody on YouTube.

For the last two years, Vincelette has attended a number of conferences, including CCCC in New Orleans, Computers and Writing (see www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc ) in Athens, GA, and the Watson conference in Louisville, KY (see louisville.edu/conference/watson/2008%20Watson%20Conference%20Program.pdf). Upcoming conferences include CCCC in San Francisco, CA, and Women in the Archives in Providence, RI (see http://www.wwp.brown.edu/about/activities/wwp20/schedule.html). Her research interests include American literature and digital humanities.

Her blog, Tech Tonics, is at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/.

Job Market

2009-12-04T07:22:00.000-08:00

Emerging digital humanities scholarship concerns the relationship between database and genre. The Fall, 2007, issue of PMLA contains a forum on the topic. In her forthcoming dissertation, Elizabeth Vincelette will consider the generic aspects of literary digital archives and their implications for literary and historical studies in the humanities.

As part of the dissertation project, she will work with archival materials, focusing on a collection of letters and manuscripts relating to a run of The Independent, a nineteenth century Congregationalist newspaper that had its heyday in the Antebellum era. The paper focused on social and religious issues. Most materials in the archival collection are limited to the years 1880-1881.

In particular, Vincelette is interested in the writings by women in the collection. Materials include poems, short stories, and a number of letters exchanged between the authors and the editor of the newspaper.

In 2008, Vincelette received a scholarship to attend the DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The Institute (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) is located in Victoria, BC, and is housed at the University of Victoria. In 2009, she will attend again to take a second course in TEI, or the Textual Encoding Intiative.

The following is an excerpt from a synopsis of Vincelette’s dissertation project:

My study is about a type of website that doesn’t have a standard or agreed-upon name, but that is recognizable as a form. When grouped together, these websites can be considered as an emerging genre—literary databases with the purpose of collecting and recovering women’s writings from archives, or from obscurity. The writings collected at what I’ll call “digital recovery archives” belong to textual history, to literature and other textual forms filed in boxes in archives, spooled on microform reels, or perhaps moldering in someone’s attic—letters, diaries, scrapbooks, recipes, signatures, art. Creating a name and inscribing a working definition of the digital recovery genre would help understanding of how digital humanities might change the canon. How do we, or do we, inscribe limits on what we consider intrinsically worth knowing? While recovery archives do not fit an established literary category, they share characteristics and can be generalized. Considering genre means considering limits, a paradox when a digital archive is by nature potentially limitless. Yet a creator who singles out any subject sets limits—choosing women who were well known in their time and unknown in ours; women who never intended or expected their private writings to be exposed and published; or women who are now canonical, but were unknown in their times.
Scholars can control what exists online as “representative women,” but also can invite the expansion of their numbers, enlarging our understanding of women writers and how knowing them changes how literary history is known. In a brief overview of several case studies, as well as my own (ongoing) experience constructing a digital recovery archive, I will attempt to inscribe characteristic of this emerging genre.

To read more, visit Elizabeth Vincelette’s blog, Tech Tonics, at http://techtonicsblog.blogspot.com/

Corrigenda, Errata, and a Soiled Fish of the Sea

2009-11-25T05:08:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the archive will expose a misguided line of reasoning, a scholarly pursuit of an idea built on an error. A famous instance of this was esteemed literary critic F. O. Matthiesen’s fascination with Herman Melville’s phrase “soiled fish of the sea” in the novel White Jacket.

A look at the manuscript reveals the phrase to be “coiled fish of the sea.” It was a misprint.

So what do we make of Matthiesen’s analysis of the soiled fish? Matthiesen’s peers were kind and didn’t discount all of his work on the idea. Tom Paulin (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-the-art-of-criticism-3-getting-it-wrong-1569176.html) sums up their reaction:

The craggy textual scholar Fredson Bowers was dismayed by the vulnerability of Matthiessen's judgement, though in fairness he includes a remark by one John W Nichol, who said that the "change" - "mistake" he means - does not invalidate Matthiessen's general critical position: "It merely weakens his specific example." Nevertheless, Nichol adds that such a "textual slip" could in the proper context have offered "an entirely false conception.

Nichols was forgiving. Matthiesen was, doubtless, embarrassed.

This episode in literary, critical history preoccupies me, not so much in my theoretical work, but as I construct a digital archive. The number of mistakes I’ve found in metadata—and those found by others working on the project—are more than I’d like to admit, and my project is small.

There’s a point at which concession is necessary for practicality.

Blog has moved

2009-10-30T05:26:00.000-07:00

Please visit this blog at its new location:

http://elizabethvincelette.com/

This Blog Has Moved

2009-09-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

It's a Wordpress blog now at my own URL: http://elizabethvincelette.com/

The Wordpress blog is prettier and more functional. I'll leave what's here on Blogger, though, even though I was able to export it to the other site.

Anatomy of Melancholy

2009-08-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

Now last of all to fill a place, /Presented is the Author’s face; /And in that habit which he wears, /His image to the world appears. /His mind no art can well express, /That by his writings you may guess. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, from The Argument of the Frontispiece

Anatomy & the Database Genre

But for such matters as concern the knowledge of themselves, they are wholly ignorant and careless; they know not what this body and soul are, how combined, of what parts and faculties they consist, or how a man differs from a dog. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, “Division of the Body” (Pt. 1, Sec. I, Mem. II, 146-147).

We see—Comparatively. Emily Dickinson.

Digital humanities research has only recently begun to consider database as a genre. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars must resort to metaphors, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, Borges’s labyrinths or library, and Jerome McGann’s fractals. Northrop Frye argues that “in every age of literature there tends to be some kind of central encyclopaedic form, which is normally a scripture or sacred book in the mythical mode, and some ‘analogy of revelation’” in other modes (315).

In our current age, the central, encyclopedic form consists of database, a term I will use interchangeably with digital archives, a move that requires some explanation. I use the term digital archive to differentiate digital from physical collections, and by digital archive I mean literary digital archives—specifically, databases with the purpose of collecting literary texts or manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera written by or pertaining to documents created and used by authors who are part of the “literary world.” Folsom comments that we often “hear archive and database conflated, as if the two terms signified the same imagined or idealized fullness of evidence” (“Database” 1575). Jerome McGann criticizes Folsom’s use of the term database, and Folsom replies that the Walt Whitman archive is, in fact, a database, when database is defined as “a vast vault of unseen data that are retrieved and organized by our metaphoric commands” (1609). It is impossible to write or talk of these archives without metaphors—namely words associated with print conventions and physical archives (as in Folsom’s “vast vault” in the previous sentence).

Manovich is less concerned with the technical types of databases than with their cultural implications, so his definition of database acknowledges the computer science definition while developing an argument about the social and cultural effects of database on narrative and on database as a genre. He contends that every web site is, in fact, a sort of database. The exchange between Folsom and McGann later prompts Price to argue that “in the course of denying the applicability of ‘database’ as a term suitable to the Whitman Archive, McGann overlooks that our search engine is entirely dependent on translating XML files into database form” (“Edition”). Price contrasts the “strict definition” of database as a technical term referring to a “collection of structured data that is managed by a database management system, most commonly based on a relational model,” and a “looser” definition that works metaphorically (“Edition”). At odds is how technical and precise to make the term database, and like Folsom, Price, and Manovich, I use the term metaphorically.

Ed Folsom argues that database is a new genre of the twenty-first century, but I argue that it is, instead, a manifestation of an old genre, the anatomy. I offer the metaphor of anatomy to describe the database genre not as just another trope to add to the list of metaphors, but as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. Kenneth Price suggests the term arsenal as a term for literary digital archives because the word derived from an Italian word for “workshop,” a term that emphasizes craft; the problem with the term, according to Price, is its militaristic connotation (“Edition”). While the term arsenal brings with it an etymologically-meaningful history and the emphasis on creation, I believe the term anatomy provides a richer metaphorical basis from which to consider literary databases. Because digital humanities scholarship is under development, any application of terminology presents a problem. Price discusses the current instability of terms for electronic scholarship and how our terms are inadequate, calling for a “new term that is vivid enough to be memorable, elastic enough to cover a class of like things, and yet restrictive enough to allow us to include some scholarly undertakings and not others” (“Edition”). Anatomy is such a term.

Visible and Invisible

2009-08-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

Part of my 3rd Dissertation Chapter:

Remediating the Archive

Our idea of what is secret and powerful often depends on what we can see. As our technologies change, our ability to see more changes, and our notion of the unseen shifts to smaller and smaller scales or depths. Technologies that magnify develop alongside our efforts to display what we see; a history of technologies and representation is too large a topic to be covered here, but I will briefly compare early reactions to photography to our perception of digital reproductions. Conservative reactions to digital textuality are skeptical of the usefulness of computing tools and their claims of revolutionary potentiality, which mirror early reactions to photography. Folsom writes of how critics disparaged photography because of its “relentless appetite for details, for every speck that appeared in the field of vision” and how it “insisted on flaws and extraneous matter that a painter would have edited out of the scene to create beauty. But beauty, Whitman said, democratic beauty, was fullness, not exclusion, and required an eye for completeness, not a discriminating eye” (1575). Here, Folsom moves from a critical view of elaborate detail as excessive, to excessiveness as required for democratic beauty. That is, ornateness becomes inseparable from the communal—or, in the buzzword of digital humanities and new media—from access. Naomi Schor discusses how prior to the twentieth century, photography astounded people by its ability to render details that were difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye or that were otherwise ignored (47). As a medium, photography prompted people to notice what they had previously deemed invisible; invisibility could mean two things, both important to the following discussion—that the invisible was important because of its invisibility—secret and mysterious—or, that the invisible was disregarded (pun intended) because it was impossible to see.

Dissertation Introduction

2009-08-04T10:00:00.001-07:00

Eakins, "The Gross Clinic," 1875

Here's a little piece of my dissertation introduction:

This dissertation project emerges from my desire to bring together my interests in digital media, history, and literature, a process allowed by what has come to be called “digital humanities.” My ideas align with those of the editors of A Companion to Digital Humanities, who argue that the goals of digital humanities include “using information technology to illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and use of information technology” (xxx). My project will theorize on and enact the construction of a literary database—or literary digital archive.

I seek to expand digital humanities scholarship and see this dissertation as an extended response to a forum on “The Changing Profession” from the Fall, 2007 special issue of PMLA entitled “Remapping Genre.” The forum included an article by Ed Folsom called “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” with responses by Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman, Katherine Hayles, and Peter Stallybrass. But my interest in the topic began to take shape a year before I read the forum when I encountered Patrick Leary’s article “Googling the Victorians” for a class and knew that my approach to literature would never be the same, that there was work in English studies working on the intersection of digital media and literature, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

I begin by considering the status of digital humanities as a nascent field. In the March, 2008 issue of The Nation, William Deresiewicz dismissed digital humanities as one of a host of problematic sub-fields in English studies that have led to the fragmentation of the discipline. Several months later in the Summer, 2008 issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Wendell Piez defended the field as a necessary contribution to English studies in the digital age by emphasizing the commitment to creation in digital humanities—the production of texts and not just textual criticism. In 2009, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp argue that digital humanities is not a “unified field but an array of convergent practices” that move beyond print and use digital tools in the humanities as the primary means of knowledge production and dissemination; furthermore, they see it as “generative humanities,” an interdisciplinary meta-field. Its theory is emergent, and writing within the field entails participating in creating its terminology. This dissertation addresses the need for a stable terminology while developing the definition of the database genre. What I call “digital epistemologies” grow from how information and technologies are used in combination. The aesthetics of our digital technologies, unlike those of books, are underdeveloped and under development, and digital humanities itself is under-theorized.

The acts of delimiting by definition and creating knowledge through academic research generate dissonance. Robert Scholes comments that academic research assumes a “progress toward more adequate descriptions of reality” (172). We set definitions and we resist them at the same time. Bruce McComiskey posits that the “disciplinary opacity” of English studies presents an obstacle in “both academic and public contexts,” and that some scholars want to avoid confining the definition of English in general (2-3). Likewise, digital humanities requires a loose definition. The word discipline carries with it the connotation of enforcement, power, and rule. Textual production and consumption—and subsequently, knowledge formation—work discursively, in combination, and often unpredictably.

Digital Humanities Manifesto

2009-07-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Check out Todd Presner's blog regarding the Digital Humanities Manifesto.

To quote Presner:
The purpose of the Digital Humanities Manifesto is to arouse debate about what the Humanities can and should be doing in the 21st century, particularly concerning the digital culture wars, which are, by and large, being fought and won by corporate interests. It is also a call to assert the relevance and necessity of the Humanities in a time of downsizing and persistent requiems of their death. The Humanities, I believe, are more necessary than ever as our cultural heritage as a species migrates to digital formats. This is a watershed moment in the history of human civilization, in which our relationship to knowledge and information is changing in profound and unpredictable ways. Digital Humanities studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these technologies.

Anatomy books and Interactivity

2009-07-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Somehow I was lucky enough to come across a terrific blog that has a post on anatomical flap books, something I didn't know existed. After I do some research on these flap books, I plan on incorporating them into a couple of paragraphs in my dissertation. Like Ms. Trettien, the author of the diapsalmata blog, I'm intrigued by the relationship between old and "new" media, particularly the idea that new media is not, in fact, so new.

The image above is from the Hardin Library at the U of Iowa. The creators of the site say the following about trying to capture the experience of interactivity: "The detailed views of the various flaps were taken at a very slight angle to better simulate the perspective of one using the book. Including the fingers and hands of the user in the images also helps to lend a sense of proportion and depth to the images. Each of the plates measure 48 X 36 cm."

Part of my dissertation focuses on what facsimile means--how we interact with a facsimile, what we expect, what we perceive. The OED has the following on etymology of the word:

[Orig. two words, and before this cent. usually written as such, L. fac, imper. of facre to make + simile, neut. of simil-is like. The form factum simile, occurring in quot. 1782, is often stated to be the original; but of this we find no evidence.]

I think this look at the etymology proves fruitful--basically, it expresses the facsimile is an imitation, but often we regard facsimiles as exact copies. We treat them that way. Facsimiles are copies, but they are not exact. A scanned image is not exactly what it appears to be--that is, a scanned image actually is binary code--ones and zeros in a data file. I have much more to say about this...later...

Facsimiles are copies, but they are not exact. A scanned image is not exactly what it appears to be—that is, a scanned image actually is binary code—ones and zeros in a data file. I have much more to say on this, but later...

Edgar Poe's Eureka

2009-06-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to share (okay, a little self-promotion) that my publication in the Fall 2008 issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review is now available online at The EAP site. The essay started as a class paper and evolved into the article after a tremendous amount of hard work. What I didn't know at the time was how Poe's Eureka would overlap with my dissertation topic. Mostly, it's the circular reasoning aspect of Poe's prose-poem, but also the related paradoxes and the encountering of the sublime. Anatomy has these things.

Here's an excerpt:

In Eureka, Poe’s narrator reads, “We will come at once to a proposition which he [John Stuart Mill] regards as the acme of the unquestionable -- as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is: -- 'Contradictions cannot both be true -- that is, cannot coexist in nature.’” In other words, Poe implicitly argues that contradictions are the essence of truth in a near-celebration of circular reasoning. Poe sees beauty in contra-diction, in speaking against, revealing his belief in the religious unification of aesthetics and science. The satire of “Aries Tottle” questions Aristotle’s statements about God and the universe; the “real” Aristotle felt that the universe had very little “direct bearing on any belief in the existence of god” and was “non-committal” about it. But Poe is anything but non-committal. He depends on Greek/Ptolemaic cosmology, which had been modified in medieval philosophy to be “compatible” with Judaic and Christian theology. Poe views this division as in need of reconciliation, and Eureka is his attempt at such reunification.

Many of those things apply to the anatomy--unification of aesthetics and science, use of satire, and contradiction.

New Formalism

2009-06-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

After being questioned about my own work as formalist, I've been on a reading tear to see the history of the intellectual debate about formalism in English studies. I know it's been out of fashion for some time, and formalism is practically used synonymously with "totalizing." But I wanted to know how and when that attitude about formalism began. What caused the shift away from formalism in literary studies? Is formalism really "dead," or is there a new version of it? And, in fact, am I "doing" a sort of "new formalism" with my work on genre?

When I was in high school, our teachers were trained to analyze literature per the New Critics school--Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, etc. I wasn't permitted to hint at an author's intent or make any assumption about anything beyond the text. Pure analysis of the text, itself...or so we were taught, because there is an assumption of "purity" in that sort of work, and it doesn't take long to get to Platonic textual ideals when you follow that line of thinking.

When I was an undergrad the thinking was shifting to theory, but I didn't know it. So, flashing forward about 15 years, graduate school brought a surprise with a host of "isms" I knew little about. I had to reconsider my approach to text, which meant beginning a process of positioning myself, asking myself what "ism" I "belonged" to or fit. It's not something I like doing. It's easier for me to say what "isms" I am not than what ones I possibly am. For now, I'll just stick with saying my fields are American literature and digital humanities and leave the "isms" out of it.

But I still have a nagging feeling about "new formalism," which seems to be a label, after all. I found this article by Marjorie Levinson about it--http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article/home

More on that later.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy, and Formalism

2009-06-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to realize how much I'm going to have to explain my use of Northrop Frye in my dissertation. It seems like Frye is a little more dangerous than I expected because of his "formalism." Thing is, Frye isn't the same as the New Critics, and I think Frye looked much more at process and was, in fact, historical.

I started looking around for some support and found Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process, by Nella Cotrupi, 2000. I'm checking it out today because from what I've read (here at the review http://www.amazon.com/Northrop-Frye-Poetics-Process-Studies/dp/080204316X and elsewhere), Cotrupi rehabs Frye, who is usually seen as out of style. But I have a hunch that Cotrupi sees something I see, too, but that I'm just beginning to articulate, and lucky for me, she's written a book about it.

One of my friends told me I have to be careful bringing up Frye because it's "easy to get an eye roll." I'd like an eyebrow raise, so someone might be a little surprised and then want to know more about what I'm doing, but an eye roll...no thanks.

Wordpress and Themes and Not Moving Yet

2009-06-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

I said only two days ago that I'm moving the blog over, but then I started to want to get fancy with it and discovered the world of Wordpress themes. So probably I'll wait a little longer. I fell in love with the theme above because it has that romantic look I'm fond of...but I have to wait because...

I always seem to think I have more time than I do, but I'm heading off to Canada soon for a digital humanities "summer camp." Here's the link: http://www.dhsi.org/home/schedule

If you look really hard you might see "Elizabeth Vincelette" in tiny letters as a presenter in the grad student part of things. I'm going to try out the "anatomy" idea, and I'm hoping to be able to develop the theory to include some more solid statements about database as a genre. It's hard to make claims my knowledge of TEI and XML is shaky and so under-development.

Editing a 50-page dissertation chapter to a ten-page conference paper is tough, too, especially because the "anatomy" is such an esoteric thing. I think I'll have to quote a little more than I'd like for a conference paper, but I think I need the clout of the experts when I'm making my argument.

Moving this Blog Soon

2009-06-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

It's time for me to move this blog to another site, over to my own domain at

http://www.elizabethvincelette.com/category/elizabeth-vincelette/

I'm going to leave this one as it is, though, and probably link back to it as I develop new ideas that I need to connect back to old ideas.

Thanks for reading.

Eakins--Anatomy--Body in Motion

2009-04-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

Omnium Gatherum

2008-09-22T05:57:00.002-07:00

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. Rembrandt, 1632.

I began thinking about the World Wide Web in terms of an anatomy, which at first glance might seem bizarre. To get the idea one must be familiar with the Renaissance concept of an anatomy, not just in the sense of the physical examination of the body, but as a type of text.

An anatomy is an extended prose analysis of a subject, which by design (genre?) claims to be all-inclusive, exhaustive, complete. Most critics think of Robert Burton's 1621 tome The Anatomy of Melancholy when taking up the topic. Burton spans the topic of melancholia in many hundreds of pages--maybe a thousand--depending on your edition. It's like the Bible. The Anatomy only pretends to be a medical book, because in it, Burton amasses a vast array of information, cramming commentary on life, learning, his feelings, the nature of the universe...you name it--and all with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek--or with a wink--choose the cliche.

Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism takes up the term "anatomy" because he addresses classification, announcing in his "Polemical Introduction" that his "approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective" (3). Frye, too, is playing. How could he do anything but when he call the opening to his own anatomy "Polemical Introduction." How to read that title as anything but an ironic announcement? Ironic self-awareness like Burton's, but with fewer words.

Irony: So there’s this illusion of completeness, and the anatomist knows it. The desire is to try to become more and more detailed, working over time, amassing, arranging, digging deeper…excavating. It’s self-satirizing.

I have much to work out with this topic, but I want to put this idea against archival theory and the problem/paradox of the archive—the impossibility of its completion. The Internet is as much an “omnium gatherum” as an anatomy, accumulating through links/hypertext. Even the “hyper” in hypertext points to the impulse, the desire for some mythical, complete record, knowing the impossibility.

I read a terrific article today that led me to these thoughts--"Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy," by R. Grant Williams [ELH 68 (2001): pp. 593-613].

So, it made me think of the painting with this post, and stranger yet, a Stephen Crane poem--

I saw a man chasing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

"It is futile," I said,

"You can never---"

"You lie," he cried,

And ran on.

Gif Gadget

2008-04-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

A cool little tool that I wanted to share. These folks at "Glickr" are part of flickr, no surprise, but you can upload right from your own files and not through flickr in order to make a gif animation.

Here's the link for the tool: http://gickr.com/

But the crummy part is the Blogger doesn't exactly animate it! See the picture to left, how it's not moving to the next picture. Turns out that for you to see my animation easily, you have to look elsewhere:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/grmbegf8gg.gif

This is the easiest way around the problem, and other ways will have to be resolved in another post.

The slideshow/animation can add some pizazz to your website without encroaching on tacky. It's so easy because the tool handles making the show entirely. One thing I will want to do at a later date with my gif animation is edit my pictures in Photoshop in order to make them all have about the same appearance of being zoomed on the photographs; right now the women are of different sizes. I'll also use Photoshop to make all my images an oval shape. These nice design touches will make it better, but even as it is, I think it's nifty.

Who are these women in my animation? Part of my dissertation, I hope!

Postmodernism & New Media

2008-04-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

In Writing New Media, Wysocki, et. al., address how our postmodern technological culture demands new literacies and new ways of teaching. The authors consider the intersection of composition studies and postmodern theory, calling for activism. Compositionists must realize the instability, the fluidity, the relational nature of composition in its myriad forms. As an act, composing is, and never can be, neutral.

Selfe's essay, "Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text Designer," argues that information technologies affect our culture, whether or not students have access to new media creation--the software and hardware required; that is, students are surrounded by new media creations even if they are cut off from the means to create. Because of its ubiquity, new media must be taught, particularly visual literacy.

Selfe argues against the traditional privileging of alphabetic texts, but one of the inevitable problems I see is the expectations of the academy--the burden placed on English departments. Because of our use as the labor force to support all types of writing at the university, we often aren't supported in teaching new media, as it might not, according to skeptics, help students pass a writing requirement. Of course, we wouldn't agree...

I can't easily separate my thoughts about the expectations placed on English departments from a video I watched earlier this week. I'm digressing from my post about the book, but I'm working out how all this is related...It's a disturbing commentary on the state of our profession. Click below to watch:

Uncle Tom's Cabin and New Media?

2008-04-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

Most people wouldn't put Uncle Tom's Cabin in the same sentence as "new media." Yet, one of the most "famous" literature web sites/archives is entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-media Archive." The site can be found at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/

Of course, the first thing I have to address is if "multi-media" means "new media," and I'm going to say, "Yes." I'm going with Wysocki's broad definition of new media.

I'm intrigued at how a literature site can use multi-media/new media regarding a text that was written prior to the Civil War. The novel had a long, rich history well beyond being a best-seller, spawning numerous theatrical adaptations, songs, and films. Thus, the site uses sound to share some of the songs, as well as movie clips. The page on songs is impressive (and worthy of an article, since there's so little on sound out there): http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/songs/sohp.html

I see the future of literature in sites like this. I know that's a big, and potentially controversial, statement, but like anything else, literature must adapt to our mediated culture.

from Gutenberg to Gadgetry

2008-04-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

In Multimodal Discourse, Kress and Van Leeuwen discuss McLuhan's idea that new media tends to repackage old media. Case in point: Amazon's new reader, the "Kindle." I also read an advertisement for Sony's version of a digital reader in Sky Mall magazine, available on most airlines.

I've read up a bit on the reading devices and see how these are instances of new media repackaging old media. Here are a couple of good sources about the devices:

*a Newsweek spread on it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983/page/1

*reviews at CNet http://reviews.cnet.com/e-book-readers/amazon-kindle/4505-3508_7-32751890.html

Here's an idea for a paper--"Remediating Reading: from Gutenberg to Gadgetry"

Archive as a Multimodal Site

2008-04-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

Kress and Van Leeuwen have me considering archives as multimodal sites. I have a lot more thinking to do on this, but my beginning idea is to explore both physical and digital archives as multimodal sites. I know Jim Purdy in his dissertation considers the design of digital archives like JSTOR as multimodal sites.

I'm looking specifically at digital archives that represent American studies and am in the process of developing a rubric to assess how such archives work. One thing I should point out right away is that I'm going to have to define "digital archive"--that it's basically a web site, but a site with the purpose of archiving texts--anything from historic letters to electronic editions of novels or poems. There's a lot out there on the web, but not a whole lot of work yet on this sort of scholarship.

Kress and Van Leeuwen in Multimodal Discourse consider how magazines represent discourses, and it makes me consider how web sites represent discourses, because I think they operate much like magazines. If it's an academic website, say for some topic in "English studies," however large that might be, how is "academic discourse" depicted? What sort of ideology does a design of a web site invoke? (Visual rhetoric...)

What is expected of an academic web site? What sorts of colors and what organizational scheme? For example, how would the design of a site about literature differ from a site about multimedia or linguistics? What sorts of images would be used?

Would most literature web sites have a romantic feel? Is there a discourse of literature that usually involves romantic views of history? How does such a discourse operate in or reflect our culture? I think many web sites dealing with literature have similar visual rhetoric to Levenger ads (see the Levenger catalog here:http://www.levenger.com/)

So, does the design and visual rhetoric of English studies usually end up with images or tweed elbow patched professors, spectacles resting on an open book, and leather-bound tomes (or leather library chairs)? Do these images of "English" really represent the current state of our field?

Rhizomes

2008-03-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

I was reading the following article, which discusses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor--one of the topics in our readings this week:

Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007): 1571-1612. 41 pp.

Folsom adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s “preferred image of the rhizome” as a metaphor for online database because of the lack of centrality and endless potential of rhizomorphic growth (1573). The rhizomatic structure of database, according to Folsom, allows unexpected and previously impossible connections for the researcher, often because texts can be experienced in juxtaposition that would have heretofore been less likely for a researcher to experience. I’ll call it “rhizomorphic knowledge structuring,” which I see as encouraging serendipity (idea—performativity and research methods?)

Folsom refers to Manovich’s The Language of New Media, in which Manovich considers database as a genre. (I read the Manovich chapter and respond later.) Folsom is especially interested in how Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. (I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed?)

The idea of the ideal is at play, the notion that archives are somehow open to infinite authorship; a site can be added to or can link to a massive (perhaps endless) web of information. I know, this is utopian rhetoric, for which Folsom gets criticized . . . I’m going to go with the idea that while choices made by scholars in what “gets” represented speak volumes about institutional or cultural power, the reader might have power never before possible—again, within certain constraints, which I know presents a paradox.

The article leads me to consider how genre itself operates as a container. What are the borders of genre? Consider Lakoff and Johnson’s ontological metphors…

Not so Naturally Speaking

2008-03-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I didn't pay the $100 for this gadget gone awry. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a speech recognition program that I'd hoped would help me get quotes out of books and into Word easier. Wasted hours of training it to listen to me, and $25 dollars later, I was breathing fire.

What a terrific idea...but not for the kinds of jargon I deal with using scholarly discourse. I suppose I could train it to learn words such as "rhizomatic," but I just don't have time to teach it to save me time....

So, is this technological determinism, that our gadgets control us?

Technological Determinism

2008-03-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

McCluhan, “Two Selections...”
Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory...”
Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,”

All three readings address the effect of technology on society and include observations about the communication process, from the relationship between individual human perception and media to political and cultural shifts that emerge in communication.

McLuhan relies on historical and literary examples more than Enzensberger and Baudrillard, who concern themselves more with the Marxist implications of media in this particular set of writings. At the center of all of this (I’m being deliberately facetious by positing a center) is how the individual’s experience becomes altered by technology—the Frankenstein effect. Is technology a curse or a savior? No easy binaries here, so maybe we can propose a dialectic, as Enzensberger and Baudrillard discuss.

All three writings address Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” at least once, in which Benjamin considers the ability of a work of art to contain an “aura,” which he defines as the sense that a work has of belonging to a particular space and time. Aura posits a value in art that traditionally created a distance of the art object from the viewer, which was a metaphysical, even mystical, power of art held over from art's historical association with ritual and religion. Aura creates a paradoxical distance that is experienced in the presence of the original art and is not a distance of physical proximity. But new technologies allow more audiences to see an original work of art in a reproduced form, such that aura is lost. This loss is, however, democratizing, since more people have access to a work of art than in the past. The "loss" of aura signifies a liberation of art from elitism and marks its "ownership" by the public. Such public ownership is not unlike that of audiences of publicly available online literary texts, works of art that could potentially be more accessible than ever before in the past.

The individual’s response to art thus reflects—or is part of—the process of automation, a transitory and ever-moving, evolving, self-reflexive relationship. But it’s critical to see that technological determinism is at work in these readings. (I wrote the following on a class wiki last semester.) Technological determinism is a phrase used to describe the belief that technology shapes (determines) the course of a society. It posits that more than any other force, technology causes social change, a view which subsumes other controlling factors, such as economics, patriarchy, or class, for example. Not only could technological determinism be seen as opposed to social determinism, it could also be seen as robbing the individual of agency.
In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2000) argue that Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969) constitutes technological determinism, as well as McLuhan's work (including Understanding New Media, 1964). Bolter and Grusin outline their view of technological determinism explicitly, arguing that they "propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (p. 77).

There are a number of topics that develop from these observations—one could consider Taylorism and Fordism; power and Foucault; the huge topic of intellectual copyright and the Internet….the author and the artist…

Vietnam Veteran Interview

2008-03-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

Sound Project--Learning how to edit sound using my personal interview with a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Link to hear the file:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/q29crvf5wc.mp3

For my sound project, I interviewed a family friend, John Brickhouse, who had served as a crossbow sniper in Vietnam. The original interview lasted for 71 minutes, and at first I was unsure how to edit the raw material, as it was difficult to decide what to keep, to cut, or to rearrange.

I researched the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project run by Texas Tech University (http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory/participation/). Their site includes guidelines on how to conduct the interview,along with an extensive questionnaire of 115 questions. Per their suggestion, I gave John a copy of the questionnaire in order to prepare him for the interview. I was especially concerned with making him comfortable, and circled which questions I was planning to ask; I encouraged him to let me know if any questions made him uncomfortable, and I did not waiver from the planned questions during the interview.

I also prepared by listening to interviews on the shows This American Life and StoryCorps, and based on the examples, I chose to edit my own voice as much as possible from the interview. The one time I am heard on the track is when I ask him if he has ever visited the Wall, and I included it because his answer would not make sense without the context of the question. My intended outcome was to edit the material to create a cohesive narrative, which focused on John’s words and not my questions. I had to be careful as I deleted segments of the interview that what I retained made sense. As it stood without editing, the interview had a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end, as the questions created by Texas Tech encouraged an exposition, clear development, and closure.

As a writer, I instinctively knew which parts to cut or keep based upon which themes emerged. I was aware of the interview as a composition, not only as it was happening, but during and after my arrangement. I chose not to rearrange questions and responses, even though I considered it a number of times, because the questions already followed a narrative pattern. Instead, I spent most of the editing time removing pauses, and as many “ums” and “ahs” as I could. I found that some of those utterances could not be removed without making obvious clipping sounds, even if I tried to “clean it up” with some smoothing tricks in Audacity.

I have several versions of the interview saved, including the raw original of over an hour, a 45-minute version, and a 13-minute version. I had originally planned to submit the 45-minute version as my project and to share the short version in class, but after cutting it, I prefer its impact in the shorter form and submit that as my final project. Cutting material took at least ten hours over a three-week period. By not working on it for extended periods of time, and instead approaching the material in short fragments of time, I was able to “hear it anew,” so to speak, the same way as when a writer sets down a late draft of a paper to let it rest a few days before the final edit. It is always easiest to reconsider edits afterwards.

The most dissatisfying aspect of the interview is the hiss on the track. I used Audacity’s noise removal option with some success, but removing any more hiss created an uneven wah-wah distortion. After visiting a number of forums online, I realized that I had to accept the hiss as it was, as a number of other Audacity users had encountered to same problem and concluded that little could be done (and that for a free program its strengths far outweighed its weaknesses).

I’m extremely satisfied with the final composition and am pleased to publish it to the class when we meet and on my blog. I considered which statements would most affect my classmates when we listened to it as a group, but I also considered that the long version of the interview could be published to the Texas Tech archive. Because I believe that oral histories are a vital part of the ongoing story of America, I plan to ask John’s permission for that publication after I share the interview with him in person. I am honored that he shared his personal—and often painful—history with me.

No Respect? Multimedia Publishing & Pedagogy

2008-03-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

Joyce Walker writes about how “we do not yet have a a very good understanding of what happens to our efforts to write in scholarly ways when we move into digital environments” in a recent issue of Kairos (10.2). Walker’s article (composition?) enacts new media scholarship, and is thus what Ball calls for in her article, “Show not tell,” in which Ball argues for the academic use of multimedia in the classroom and in publication. Such publications need to (must) garner institutional respect, especially considering how sometimes they don’t “count” as publications at all for tenure-track faculty.

Katie Retzinger, Ashley Hall, (and more) & I authored a pretty substantial wiki post on this article last semester for Texts and Technologies. Here’s the link: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Ball%2C_Cheryl:_Show%2C_not_tell:_The_value_of_new_media_scholarship
I hope you’ll visit that wiki because it has a lot of info on it that the class created together!

Walker’s article is genuinely interactive and invites readers to travel to different online spaces. It is non-linear and non-sequential and functions as a database. In The Language of New Media, Manovich considers database as a genre. Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed? Is narrative “under threat” by database?

Such a question would buy into Manovich’s metaphor of a battle between narrative and database. In this battle, narrative needs protection, as chronologies and traditional scholarship comes under attack. Certainly, online publications like Kairos remediate traditional textual venues. Bolter and Grusin’s term “remediation” refers to the overarching tendency of new media to imitate and incorporate forms they “seek to supersede” (1593). I see a relationship here to the tendency of quotation in postmodern art, which is at once an homage and a departure. (class wiki link to Bolter & Grusin: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bolter%2C_Jay_David_%26_Grusin%2C_Richard:_Remediation:_Understanding_new_media.)

See what Katherine Hayles says in a recent issue of PMLA in her article “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts” (PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007):

“The indeterminacy that databases find difficult to tolerate marks another way in which narrative differs from database. Narratives gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable, whereas databases rely on enumeration, requiring explicit articulation of attributes and data values” (1605). So, there’s this vital paradox at work, that databases are simultaneously flexible and inflexibile. But I disagree with Hayles because I think databases can still “invite the unknown” in the same way narratives do, and as with narratives, it’s in the usage (that is, in the reader’s work). Hayles cites a few famous literary examples of unknowns, but I see these as constrained by authorship as any database could be—constrained by authorship and the physical pages of a book which is like the constraint of data in a database.

For how long will scholarship and pedagogy privilege the physical pages of a book?

END OF POST

Mixing the Memory: Individual, Cultural, Public Memory & Sound

2008-03-04T04:53:00.001-08:00

I’ve often heard that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory. And you hear about how people will ask you if you remember where you were when you found out about Kennedy being shot, or the Challenger blowing up, or September 11. But what about remembering sounds? Do certain sounds trigger memory? Can that memory be both individual and public, or cultural? How does or can new media participate in an evolving relationship between memory and sound?

Regarding cultural memory, Sturken (2004) argues that its “forms of remembrance” indicate the “status of memory” within a culture, a convergence point at which the “shifting discourse of history, personal memory, and cultural memory” meet (p. 401). And in a discussion of public memory-making, Prelli (2006) outlines the importance of rhetorics of display in rhetorical study, arguing that rhetorics of public memory try to resolve tensions between showing and hiding, remembering and forgetting.

We all can hear a song and remember and event in our lives, or a certain time of our lives—songs of our childhood, teenage years, or songs from a wedding, funeral, or movie. DJ Spooky’s c.d. from Rhythm Science features sampling from old films and songs. Such sampling is not just about sound but is about sampling the past itself. Original audiences of the sampled clips mix memories of the original with the experience of listening to the new composition. Think how much films and television have affected our memories, not only of visuals, but of sound. I wonder how much new media will contribute, such as YouTube. Can it be that out of the thousands of videos containing pet-tricks and angst-filled diaries, something might emerge that writes the script of public and cultural memory?

Sturken, M. (2004). The wall, the screen, and the image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In C. Handa (Ed.), Visual rhetoric in a digital world: A critical sourcebook. Boston: Bedford.

Prelli, L. (2006). Rhetorics of display. Introduction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

END OF POST

Composing the Archive

2008-02-26T12:07:00.000-08:00

“Memory demands newness. You have to always update your archive” (Miller 113).

At the very opening of Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller argues that rhythm science is a “circular logic, a database logic” (4). What follows is a mash-up and mix of art, sound, philosophical, and cultural theories expounded with a loopy exuberance. The writing performs what it purports, detouring and turning back again in a celebration of sound as sense—personal, public, present, and historical.

Although Miller doesn’t specifically refer to database logic again, the logics he discusses blend into an amalgam—maybe, more properly, an algorithm—of ideas, not fixed, not linear. Especially not entropic. His is a generative world. Like the universe itself, there’s no center and no edge, just like the logic of a database. There’s movement, progression, digression, regression.

A rhythm scientist is an archivist of sound, text, and image, according to Miller (16). Implicitly, the archive itself is dynamic, not just its creator. And who is the creator of an archive, anyway? It’s not just the person who collects, but the person who uses the collection. There’s this built-in potentiality—stored energy—ready for an infinite carnival. Arhives (for Miller, his collection of recordings) serve as supplements to memory—vectors of memory and composition. We mix the archive. We compose it. We access the past though it and compose the future from it.

Paradox reigns in the world of rhythm science. Nothing is original, and yet everything is.

END OF POST

Sound Sources

2008-02-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

Here are some links for sites that have sounds for free. I pulled all sorts of things for the sound clip in the post below this one (Sound Logic).

http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html

http://www.grsites.com/sounds/

http://www.soundsnap.com/

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml

http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/

END OF POST

Sound Logic

2008-02-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

Thinking about sound, I considered how sound could be used to construct a project like a visual argument. How could sound be used to argue, or in a broader sense, how can sound be used rhetorically? If we can create a visual argument in Photoshop, which takes a rhetorical stance with very few words, could we do the same with sound, using sound elements that are mostly not words?

I decided to see if I could create a short segment of sounds that had some sort of narrative—a beginning, middle, and end—so I am going with traditional linear narrative. I thought it would be a good way to learn to mix sound in Audacity. What I ended up with is more straight narrative, and not an argument—or rhetorical stance—at all, but the experiment taught me a few things.

I realized how much sound mixing must follow logical patterns. I’ll call it sound logic. For example, if you hear a person walking and opening a door, the choices of what to add next will create a story. Will the footsteps continue, suggesting the person has gone through the door? Will more footsteps be added to suggest another person has arrived? Will the door shut (another sound that would need to be added), and then the footsteps stop, suggesting the person went through the door and has left?

It makes me think of narrative points of view, which I’ve always thought of as visual, like the focalizer and focalized of narratology and film studies. We have the same things for sound—so, if the person I referred to above has gone through the door, and we now hear no more footsteps, we’re “listening” from the point of view of being inside the room with the door. We’re not “listening” from the point of view of the character.

I realize, though, that I can’t separate my thinking about how to construct sound for a narrative from visuals. I’m definitely privileging visuals, since when I created my experiment, I thought about what I was seeing in my head and used that to determine the logic.

To sum this post up, I’ll say it was really fun to make this, and I found some good sites I’ll post where I found free sounds. I hope you’ll listen to my creation, which is about 43 seconds long. Click below to hear:

IMPORTANT---it will loop when you click play, so there's a gap at the end after the door shuts!

http://www.box.net/shared/1t6oiuz0oo

END OF POST

GermanTechnoBuzz Remix

2008-02-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

The sh*t song! I added a track with the woman's voice cut to just the word "sheize." I wanted that track to be a constant, but for variety, I changed her voice to a 25% lower pitch three times. So it's her original voice and then progressively lower three times on that track.

I wanted the beginning and ending the same.

At the end, the techno track goes away and leaves voices only. I put the woman's voice on all three tracks and overlapped them to make a maddening chorus...at least, that was what I was going for!

click to here it:

http://www.box.net/shared/py43bncowg

END OF POST

JamStudio Try Out

2008-02-19T09:46:00.000-08:00

I have very little experience songwriting. JamStudio helps me do it. I played with it for ten minutes and wrote this song. Click to hear it, and once JamStudio's site pops up, hit the large play button in the left-middle of your screen. Fun!

http://www.jamstudio.com/Studio/FWSongShare.asp?SongNum=43159&SongId=43378

Bricolage and Gesamptkunstwerk

2008-02-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

Re: Rickert, T., and Salvo, M. “The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 296-316.

Rickert and Salvo posit erasing the binary between real and virtual worlds altogether with their concept of “worlding.” The “prosumer”—a consumer + producer—participates in the creation of art. Romantic and Modernists privileging of the artists has morphed into a postmodern celebration of the audience as artist in the new media landscape the authors describe.

We’re at the beginnings of understanding how new media affects our perception of the world, according to Rickert and Salvo. Exploring our experiences with sound will help us understand “worlding” and how new media texts influence production and reception.

Rickert and Salvo argue that creative use of sound can offer new opportunities for invention in the composition classroom, a “bricolage-like aesthetic of merging different idioms, such as transforming noise into signal and finding new sources of input” (300). This idea of bricolage is vital to their argument, a “do-it-yourself” mantra that’s repeated in the online text we read (…And They Had Pro Tools at http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/rickert_salvo/start.htm).

It brought me back to a wiki entry that Katie and I made last semester on bricolage, available at http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bricolage. In particular, we wrote that “[i]ntuitive thought processes, rather than reason, guide the bricoleur in his or her construction—the building of problem-solving,” and that bricolage “can be seen as a reaction to traditional—that is, masculine, empirical, and positivist—reasoning.”

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Jam Studio

2008-02-17T09:10:00.001-08:00

Last semester my classmate Diane Cook and I did a project on JamStudio in Texts and Technologies. I think the software provides virtually anyone the ability to compose a song, and I think it would be a way for us to make soundtracks for the movies we’re going to make for this class.

JamStudio jamstudio.com took the automated sound arranging program called Band-in-a-Box and combined it with the best of what Sony’s program called ACID and Apple’s Garage Band offered. Neither of the latter programs supported chords, and neither was online nor free. JamStudio remediates these older programs because how it’s written, in FLASH, which means it can run online without an install.

The program represents a stellar example of Web 2.0. The access benefits are that it’s free (and easy to use). A detraction would be if someone didn’t have computer equipment available or if they didn’t have high speed Internet.

JamStudio encourages play, an aspect of the rhetorical canon of invention. The user can add and subtract chords and various instruments easily, allowing for instant results; an arragy of choices allows the inventor to create and arrange which instruments, the number, and type of instrument. For example, the user can choose to have one acoustic and up to three electric guitars. Each electric guitar has 43 possible sounds to choose from, and the acoustic has twelve sounds.

The software also remediates the necessity of memorizing cords and their progressions. Memory is inseparable from improvisation, an important skill for a musician—JamStudio allows novices to improvise. It does the work of memory, in a way. Memory is related to kairos (context—place & time, audience, and culture).

Music is delivered via postings on the site, but delivery can occur in a multitude of sites--not only online in other online forums or web pages. A user has the potential to reach large audience and many people the creator does not know if s/he posts on the JamStudio forum, where s/he can get feedback.

Delivery can be public or private, as the user can put their work on MP3 devices or online. The song can be exported into and then edited with Audacity. After that, if you wanted, you could put the song on a site like Box.net and make your file into a link..

Overall, the program requires the user to be more computer-saavy than musically saavy. Musically, it is advantageous to know basic chord progressions, but not necessary to use Jamstudio to play around with chords and how they go together. It’s fun, too!

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Talking about Talkuments

2008-02-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

I wanted to try Audacity & Box.net. I tried to make a Talkument, and I didn't script it--tried to follow the advice of Shankar--so you get all the "ums" and natural pauses. I didn't use the microphone I have because it sounded like I was speaking from the bottom of a well...so you might catch my parrot in the background...

This is a little less than two minutes long:

http://www.box.net/shared/5ruj4iwkcc

Captivated by Capturing Sound

2008-02-11T17:44:00.001-08:00

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and people were amazed and captivated by the capturing of sound. The ability to make something heretofore ephemeral into something permanent resulted in a paradigm shift in possibilities.

Now, over a century later, after innumerable sound recordings, we still face the “hierarchical relationship between written and spoken forms” (Shankar, 2006, p. 374). Likewise, Shipka (2006) remarks that a multimodal theory of composition does not take talk and writing as assumed starting points—and that we need to consider the potential of sound. Institutional traditions and power structures have (and still do) maintain written expression as the legitimate compositional form. What sorts of power shifts would have to occur for something like “spriting” to gain legitimacy?

Shankar (2006) observes that the “ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge” (p. 374). Yet, there was a brief time in American history when that wasn’t as true as it is now, during the “lyceum movement,” when lecturers traveled on circuits—people like Emerson—and people would attend the speeches for entertainment and self-edification. And here we are now at some sort of new industrial revolution, in which our media require new composition theory as we find new ways to entertain and educate ourselves and others.

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Testing the Truncating

2008-02-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it. Sigh. I really had wanted to do this for my Photoshop Remix, but it didn't work!! My guess is that because I copied and pasted from Word, I can't do it, and that maybe there are some tags I need to remove....which gets way over my head!

Photoshop Remix

2008-02-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Men have become the tools of their tools” in the first chapter of Walden. Part of the genius of the statement, like with any great literature, is its adaptability to issues beyond its own time. Thoreau wrote the statement as part of a larger argument in Walden in which he lamented the detachment of man from nature. His thesis has lasting appeal, as people have continued to feel controlled by technological advancements. While my visual argument does not suggest that people need to contemplate nature as a cure for the modern (postmodern) condition, it does update Thoreau’s belief in a loss of control at the hands of our own creations. Whereas Thoreau lamented the railroad, I lament the laptop, among other things.

Janet H. Murray (2003) argues in “Inventing the Medium,” that scholars have not been “inventing the postmodern condition—they were merely chronicling it, registering and giving for to the cultural anxiety caused by the loss of faith in the great human meta-narratives of sacred and secular salvation” (p. 8). My argument attempts a visual expression of the cultural anxiety we feel from being tethered to our devices, such as cell phones, laptops, and navigation systems—even when we think they are helping us. The idea of being “wireless” masks the underlying understanding that we are actually totally “wired” most of the time and seldom set aside our technological toys.

While brainstorming ideas of ways to depict a person as “wired” to something that controlled him, I thought of a marionette with its strings held by an unseen hand, resulting in the central image in my argument. The original businessman image (from Adobe Stock Photos--at top of post) is funny, pathetic, and slightly disturbing. I chose this image from about five pictures of marionettes because of its humor and because it was easy to manipulate for my composition. The original picture does not have anything holding the strings, so I was able to cut and paste images of the “tools” I thought expressed the dilemma of modern man—and woman. I had to extend the length of the strings using the clone tool to make the scale look right, and I also used the liquefy/warp/pinch tool to make the strings look like they were moving. The image was fairly complete on a white background, but I thought that including the stage not only added dimensionality, but developed a metaphor of man as a puppet on a world stage.

I think simplicity is the composition’s greatest strength. The argument is immediately recognizable, which was my driving goal. While working, I kept repeating to myself the famous quote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Note—in class I attributed it to Oscar Wilde, but it is from Hamlet, which is rather far off the mark!) A visual argument’s strength relies on its ability to explain itself, which doesn’t mean that a reader shouldn’t be able to discover layered metaphors in a visual composition, but that less truly is more.

The composition’s weakness stems mostly from my newness to Photoshop. If I were more experienced, I would smooth the line between the man and the stage better. There is still something about the contrast at the top of the stage curtain and the foregrounded objects that I dislike, but I don’t have the skill to know how to fix it. I did adjust the contrast of the shadow in the curtain top, but I think adding the drop shadow to the man and strings part of the image was the greatest improvement I made to blending the layers.

I am especially pleased with how the keys turned out. I felt that I wanted to develop my visual metaphors beyond the man, the “tools,” and the stage, which for a while had me trying to make the fabric on the curtains look like binary code. A better choice, and easier, was to spell out the quote on computer keys. I started by making a blank key one from an image of a key in Adobe Stock Photos (at top of this post).

Now that the blank key is on this page without the text on it, I can see where I could have better blurred where I erased the original text on the key. I tried to use the burn tool there, but it became too dark. No matter, because in the final composition, the flaw is not noticeable. I chose the font on the keys to try to look as much like that on computer keys as I could. When I added Thoreau’s name below, I chose a font style that resembles an old typewriter’s style for contrast. Also, I added the date of the quote in order to comment on how these anxieties in our culture are far from new.

My project uses Photoshop to comment on cultural anxieties we all feel, a move which has implicit irony; I use a sophisticated medium (that caused me stress) to comment on the stress we feel from our technology. I felt this irony while creating my project, especially when I considered how Lev Manovich (2003) calls Photoshop the “key software application of postmodernism” (p. 24). Even more thought-provoking, Manovich (2003) warns that as

digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artists come to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of become a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues—a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. (p. 14-15)

My project, however, should not be relegated to a scholarly ghetto (though the voice in my head wonders if blogs are often just that). Even though my creative process was not at all similar to how I approach an essay, my argument is not irrelevant because it doesn’t depend on written text. While there are similarities to written composing in how I layer ideas and develop arguments, for the visual argument, I wanted immediate impact. I needed a completeness in my visual design that could be readily seen—which is not to say that a written composition does not also need immediate impact, but that with a visual composition, the impact must be felt by the audience much more quickly. My rhetorical choices depend on arrangement even more than a text-based argument would, and my argument’s authority depends on design. In sum, I used the same rhetorical canons as I would in a written text—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but rely more on arrangement than I would have in a traditional essay.

References

Murray, J. H. (2003). Inventing the Medium. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manovich, L. (2003). New Media from Borges to HTML. In The New Media Reader. Eds. Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Montfort, N. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Truncating Posts

2008-02-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

I'm no expert, but I will share my experience for anyone who wants to shorten posts and create a "more" link. I think blog pages look much better when they are streamlined, so I messed around with Blogger help and some hacker sites to give my posts a "read more" sort of feature.

Blogger Help has an article on Expanding Posts. The link won't work--probably because it's something a member uses...anyhow, here's how Blogger has it categorized if you want to search the HELP contents for how to do this:

How can I create expandable post summaries?

Thing is, like all of my experiences with this sort of thing, it didn't exactly work. I'm going to give you some tips if you decide to try it.

1. There was no "backup" button like Blogger said there was, so I copied and pasted it into Notepad in case I needed the original code. It turns out that there are only two changes, so when I messed up, I just deleted on the template and never did use the backup.

2. Tip: what came in VERY handy was you can hold down the CONTROL key and hit F the same way you do in Word to find the code you want! So, when the instructions say to find such and such, just search it. Still...see #3

3. I couldn't find where they were telling me to put the code, so I messed with different places, and found it would work if you put it after the part near the top where it has my template info after a dashed line. (Sorry, I couldn't put the example on this post because it would read the code!)

4. One HUGELY annoying thing you can't really help is that it's going to put the "read more" tag on every, single post, even the ones where you don't have more. The only fix is to type in END OF POST on your posts if they don't continue. I think it's crummy, but it is what it is. It's early in the semester, so I went ahead and edited my posts for it to be on all of them, but from now on I will have to remember to add it to short posts....OR, I can just expect that an interested person who clicks might find there's nothing more to see.

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Interactivity, Participatory, and Sometimes Democratic

2008-02-04T15:35:00.000-08:00

The common thread through the readings for this week ("Happenings," "Augmenting Human Intellect," "Sketchpad," "The Construction of Change," and "A File Structure for the Complex") concerns interactivity, or the level at which a creator/operator/user runs the machine. The readings point towards what we now call interactivity, which often leads to discussion of "participatory" enviroments allowed by new media--which at their best might allow democratic expressions, and at their worst might threaten privacy and safety.

But the writers for this week's readings weren't quite there yet, as precient as the essays are. The authors reveal the complexity of what we take for granted, and I realize how little I know when I'm confused by reading the most basic engineering theories.

I was especially interested by Ascott, who in "The Construction of Change" questions the relationship between knowlege and perception and how that plays out in art and science, and in how we organize information. Ascott even appears to predict how restructuring art (through technology) will lead to interdisciplinary ventures.

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Automatons & New Media History

2008-02-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

Since we've been reading about new media history, especially the idea of man in the machine (or machine in the man), I'd like to throw in a new topic, an automaton that was famous for nearly 80 years.

In 1769, the automaton debuted in Europe, von Kempelen's chess player. Audiences went wild over the automated chess player in its "lifetime," and notables who saw it included Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, among others. In the 19th-century, Poe wrote an article entitled "Maelzel's Chess Player" about the phenomenon. Poe used the terminology "pure machine" to indicate an apparatus that operated without the direct influence of a human operator--

Nothing has been written on this topic which can be considered as decisive — and accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. And such it would undoubtedly be, were they right in their supposition.

People were entranced by the idea of what they thought was a machine thinking. It turned out that there was a man hidden inside the contraption, which has been reconstructed in the more recent past.

There's a wikipedia article on it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

The Poe article is online at http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm

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Tool of Their Tools

2008-02-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

This is my Photoshop first draft, very rudimentary, but it's a start. I have quite a lot more I plan on doing to the fellow before I'm done with him. It gets my concept across.

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Photoshoppin' Agin

2008-01-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

Ah, the top is better. Yay, I did it!

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The Library of Babel

2008-01-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

A Borges story usually involves some sort of maze with overlaps of time and place. Adopting a garden of forking paths as a metaphor for hyperlinking or information retrieval means imagining the self in a time and a placewhere one must select a branch to follow. In the story, Borges situates international characters in a wartime setting in order to suggest the labyrinthine nature of narrative, time, and cultures--a maze, but not one without a map of sorts.

Like much of Borges's fiction, this story is self-aware, and its metafictional quality is like the metatextual nature of most (almost want to say "all") new media. In the story, a book can be infinite, and the shape Albert first imagines is circular, until he realizes that an infinite book has endlessly forking paths. These paths intersect and build on one another like Vannevar Bush's trails through the memex, pointing at the question of infinite storage addressed by Turing in his article on A. I.

These mazes and trails made me look again at the post I made last week on rhizomes because I was headed in this direction already when I commented on Murray, who refers to Deleuze and Guattani's metaphor of a rhizome as a way to understand new media structures. The forking paths are like forking roots in a plant's subterranean system. Stored information can be imagined as having the same structure.

In another story by Borges I once read, Borges imagines a library of Babel, in which people hope to contain the mysteries of humanity, but where there is too much information, to the point that nobody can make sense of it all, and where language itself collapses. The librarians are like high priests lording over books that are unreadable and useless.

This week the readings had me thinking about how the way we organize information affects public memory--which overlaps with my Photoshop Universe post. Does memory leave a trail? Can we have an infinite library in the Internet? Or are we left with a "library of Babel"?

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Photoshop Universe

2008-01-29T05:19:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about how Wysocki defines new media more broadly than Manovich and Murray, who define new media as more digital. In particular, I thought about how she says that new media texts cause us to look at all texts in a new way. New media, then, makes us read all texts with different patterns--literally, how the eyes move--and with different expectations.

Since its birth, photography has been used not to represent the exact world--"reality"--but to represent the world as the photographer sees it, wanted to see it, or wanted to project it. I'm thinking of how Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs were composed and how there was this collective intake of breath when people learned he had dragged the bodies around before taking pictures when the topic was on the news some years ago. It was nothing new to historians.

The issue forces us to confront how we construct reality and what we accept as reality. Here are a few related to Brady's work, but these could be about any photographed subject:

1. To what degree is public memory of the Civil War created by Brady's photographs?

2. Does how we construct our (civic, national, etc.) memory of the Civil War change when we know the photographs were arranged? (i.e., does it matter that he did it?)

3. How do these questions contribute to considering where art and history intersect?

Okay, it seems I'm wandering (wondering?) far from the "new media" topic, but I wanted to take a historical angle on photographic manipulation. It's another case of what I call "the past as it never was." Photography never did or could represent reality "perfectly."

So I need to bring this back around to Wysocki, who says new media causes us to look at all texts in a new way. Certainly, Photoshop causes us to question photographs--and I know I'm not saying something new or earth-shattering here, but learning how to use Photoshop has made me consider how much of what I see in photos has been retouched. (I used to think of Photoshop mostly of obvious montages, but Deke has opened my eyes to the world of improving the average.) The larger issue at work is how this changes our record of histories--personal, public, civic and national.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins* addresses the issue in a chapter called "Photoshop for Democracy." Regarding political activism and pop culture, he suggests that "crystallizing one's political perspectives into a photomontage that is intended for broader circulation is no less an act of citizenship than writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper that may or may not actually print it. For a growing number of young Americans, images (or more precisely the combination of words and images) may represent as important a set of rhetorical resources as texts" (222).

*Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

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Better!

2008-01-26T11:07:00.001-08:00

I know that the first time I tried this, I basically made it way more complicated than it needed to be!

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Not a prizewinner!

2008-01-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

Um, I think I need another date with Deke.

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Rhizomes, braid, or mobius strip?

2008-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

Addressing new media means creating new paradigms and reacting to existing paradigms. Janet Murray asserts that new media “braids” together engineering and humanistic perspectives to create an altogether new space fraught with anxieties and potentialities. Part of Murray’s definition of new media references Deleuze and Guattani’s metaphor of a rhizome (see p. 8-9) as a way to understand new media structures—hmmm, I would say architecture, but I might need a plant metaphor. I recalled seeing D & G’s rhizome concept in an article I recently read in PMLA by Ed Folsom, creator of the online Walt Whitman archive. In that article, Folsom considers archives as rhizomatic as he considers databases as a genre.

All this talk of branching roots and subterranean structures makes me think of questions raised in today’s readings, not just in Murray but in Manovich and Wysocki as well, though to a lesser degree there.

1. Does a new paradigm for understanding (digital) information more accurately reflect actual experience and human thought?

2. Does a rhizomatic structure preclude hierarchies in arrangement of ideas or categories?

3. How does shifting to rhizomatic paradigm disrupt linear narrative? How does this, in turn, change our understanding of research and of history? Do these things become non-linear or less linear? Is there ultimately some sort of disruption of chronology or new understanding of time happening here? (Okay, I’m going far here, but Manovich crosses into this area and sounds like he’s saying none of this is altogether new.)

4. Are these "braids" or rhizome infinite? Do new media structures allow us to represent knowledge as infinite?

All of these questions and the readings themselves keep circling the same questions about defining new media and how to situate it in terms of modernism and postmodernism, in particular. Manovich, for instance, looks at how we understand new media information as having an appearance of unity and a sum of its parts at the same time. Time, again.

I do have one problem with Manovich. He comes up with the idea of new media as metamedia and as the “encoding of the modernist avant-garde.” I see how he comes to a “new” avant-garde (and therefore to postmodernism), but Manovich doesn’t address one aspect of the avant-garde (of the 20s) that I do see as germane to new media—the idea of the role of the artist. (Murray dug into this a bit.) As I recall, the role of the artist in the avant-garde of the 20s created a space for the artist that was a break from society, with the artist in an adversarial relationship with those who don’t understand his/her art.

I don’t think that applies so much to new media, but it does leave me with a final question (and the desire to contradict myself)—Is the “new media artist” allowed more participation in society (even in democratic ideals) than the traditional avant-garde (whoa, the oxymoron) artist?

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Welcome

2008-01-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome. This blog grows from a new media class assignment as part of my final steps to being ABD. Is that like saying "almost almost" ready to work on my dissertation?

With the image here, I'd like to introduce my interest in American themes, however broad a topic that may be. It's a photo of the Tetons I took last summer, a view I love and return to often. For me, pictures like this speak rhetorical possibilities, revealing the relationship between American optimism, sweeping landscape vistas, power, nature, and nationalism.

I love how the clouds, the mountains, and the trees complement one another in movement and shape. The thing is, the shot was mostly luck, and that leaves me with something think about. How much of composition is serendipitous?

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