News

Henry Jenkins and the MIT Media Lab from DWRL on Vimeo.

Stephanie Stickney talked to noted new media scholar and MIT Media Lab founder Henry Jenkins. In the following audio clip, Jenkins talks about how new media changes rhetoric and writing.

You can also read the transcript of this portion of the interview. You can also download the transcript (.pdf) of the whole interview.

Thanks to Jupiter Makes Me Scream for the music.

 Web Infographic from Colour Lovers by way of Cool Infographics  Screenshot from Youtube Screenshot from barbie.com QR code (links to Viz) created through Kaywa's free QR code generator 

This semester at viz., we continue to offer close readings of images and cultural artifacts, from the creepy-tastic Barbie video cam to alternative breast cancer iconography to coding class in The Social Network. However, there’s also been a turn toward image production, launched by the Big Question: what is mediated content? We’ve considered how QR-codes and infographics might work their way into the English or rhetoric classroom. In the coming weeks, look out for reviews and lesson plans involving Animoto and Sound Slides Plus, two accessible software tools for students to create visual narratives.
 
We've been seeking out opportunities for collaboration and reciprocity by featuring new, interdisciplinary voices and profiling innovative institutions and events on campus. We’ve toured the visualization lab of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. We’ve heard D.J. Spooky talk about the relationships between remixing, sound, art, and space. In the works are guest contributions by Leah Griffin of the Landmarks public-art project and Marjorie Foley in the Immersive Environments workgroup, among others.
 
Finally, this past week, a group of us in the Visual Rhetoric workgroup attended a Steve-in-Action meeting, sponsored by the New Media Consortium. Participants in the Steve project from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The MET, San Francisco MOMA, the Minnesota Digital Library , among others, had gathered here in Austin to discuss social tagging, development of the Steve interface, and how to evaluate the results of the three-year grant. We were invited to the meeting because of our collaborative research with the Blanton using the Steve interface. We will be blogging on HASTAC about our collaboration and our experience with the NMC, so keep connected to us via the website, or follow us on Twitter.

Last week, Scott showed us how to use some of Flash's basic tools for drawing. This week, he will cover the basics of movie clips and graphic symbols, and how to nest them to create animations. If you weren't able to make it last week, no problem, as no prior knowledge is necessary for this week's workshop.

Don't miss this opportunity to make your pretty pictures move!

Matt King will be offering a workshop on gaming in the writing classroom.  This workshop will address some of the theoretical underpinnings of rhetorical gaming, and it will also offer more practical suggestions for incorporating games into your classes.  Matt’s presentation will draw on his experience with the DWRL’s own Rhetorical Peaks as well as his experience at this summer’s Humanities Gaming Institute at the University of South Carolina.  Not a gamer?  Not a problem.  You don’t need to have a female half-elf avatar named “Bead-Bead” to consider how gaming informs the work we do as rhetoricians and how it can contribute to our pedagogy.

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due on Monday, January 10, 2011.

Spring 2011 issue: Writing with Sound

Today we live in a society defined--in many senses, and by almost all the connotations associated with the word as well--by the word 'current'.... The old hierarchies of linear thought, sublime (and sublimated!) engagements with art, poetry, music, science, and history are no longer needed to do the ideological work now conducted again along the lines of 'current.'  (Miller 32)

This call for projects begins with a sample, with the echoing of a familiar call to listen to a new kind of logic. The sample comes from Rhythm Science by Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), who encourages us to go with the flow, to find a good mix, and to listen for new ways of thinking and linking. In conjunction with Miller's appearance as part of the Digital Writing and Research Lab’s annual Speaker Series, we are excited to announce that the Spring 2011 issue of Currents will focus on writing with sound.

The issue will open with a compelling radio piece by Avital Ronell in which she--along with the flute accompanying her--insists that Nietzsche was a DJ. Remixing, it seems, is everywhere. For some time now, sampling and remixing has been a powerful metaphor for writing in digital culture; indeed, the College Composition and Communication Convention took remixing as its theme in 2010. The challenge now is to literalize the metaphor, to allow audio technologies to enter into the field’s descriptions of “the writing process(es),” which will change not just the way we think about and teach writing, but our processes, and so our “products,” as well. In order to encourage and embrace these changes, Currents invites—along with traditional academic submissions—audio essays, podcasts, oral histories, interviews, and other audio recorded genres, as well as webpages, videos, animations, slide presentations, etc., that address sound-related issues. Videos may be uploaded to YouTube.com and shared with currents@dwrl.utexas.edu. (Other video hosting sites may be used. However, YouTube.com meets more accessibility standards than sites like Vimeo.) Audio may be uploaded to SoundCloud.com and shared with currents@dwrl.utexas.edu. Both YouTube and SoundCloud allow for private sharing. During the submission process, please make your audio and video materials available to a limited audience. Audio/video/visual submissions should also include a 500-word document explicating method and performance.

Some potentially interesting lines of inquiry include but are by no means limited to the following:

• How does the mixing of audio recording and writing create new genres?  How do soundscapes and text work together?
• How do technical instrumentalities, such as, the materials used to record sounds affect the message? Can sound ever be virtual? 
• What have we not heard by focusing our attention on the printed page?  How can teaching with sound revitalize the rhetorical canons (especially memory and delivery), as well as the issue of "voice"?
• What roles do silence and accessibility play in the discussion of "voice"?  What does "voice" mean for deaf and hard of hearing individuals as students, professors and authors?  How can new technologies and pedagogies help educators meet the goal of providing direct and uninhibited language communication access to curriculum?  How can we listen to the "oral" histories, poems, songs, and stories that belong to the signing Deaf community and Deaf culture?
• How does the practice of remixing change the way we think about literacy?
• Multimedia encourages a shift in roles from writer to producer--what are the implications of this shift? 
• Alphabetic writing and audio recording both begin as inscriptions on a surface, but in what ways does the waveform of audio recording differ from alphabetic writing?
• How might workspaces in the world of audio recording change the way we write?
• Many theorists, rhetoricians, and philosophers have argued in favor of an "ethics of listening." What further rhetorical and pedagogical implications might such an ethics entail? 
• Through phonography, audio recording, and writing share a history, what parts of this history do recorders and writers need to bring to light, retell, and reimagine?
• Through dictation, writers have written with sound for a variety of reasons in a multiplicity of social and technological configurations, not all of which have been mutually beneficial. How might we imagine a productive dictating relationship that ethically distributes power? 
• From recording for the blind and dyslexic to screen readers, sound reproduction has often been used to extend our (sense)abilities. What kinds of dictation, transcription, reading, and writing tools are on the horizon of assistive technology?
• As the tools and techniques for capturing and storing literacy narratives and oral histories proliferate, we increase our ability to build and study archives of audio material from many different cultures. What literal and virtual spaces are shared by fields such as sound studies, ethnomusicology, rhetoric and literature?  What are the risks and benefits of building and studying archives? Who might be the secret beneficiaries?  
• In a classroom setting, how might the use of sound recordings introduce students to the affective and emotional textures of historical experience? In other words, how might sound influence students' understanding of historical context? 
• In terms of both pedagogy and research, how might we use sound to convey intangibles such as Barthes' "grain of the voice"? What other kinds of intangible, ephemeral, or otherwise ghostly affects and ideas are better captured through sound rather than the written word?

All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents in Electronic Literacy reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server. It is the policy of Currents that all accepted contributions must meet Section 508 accessibility standards (e.g., captioning for video and transcripts for audio). While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines.

Please direct all submissions and questions to: currents@dwrl.utexas.edu

Fac 9

The DWRL is bringing DJ Spooky to UT. Remixing is all the rage. But how do you incorporate remixing into the classroom? Come to this workshop to find out. We'll show you how to remix samples of literary and rhetorical texts to your favorite music. Then, we’ll cut those mixes down to ringtones. We’ll demo remixing ringtones lesson plans for your classes. And we’ll kick off a special contest wherein the best student-made ringtone wins a prize. (The winner will be announced at DJ Spooky's rip-mix-burn event on Oct. 12.) You are also a great candidate for this workshop if you:

* need a fun lesson plan to get over the mid-semester slump
* have a pal who is just too peculiar for a default ringtone
* are afraid to make remixes that are longer than 30 seconds
* like to combine things ill-advisedly
* like silly contests

 

Join the DWRL Design Specialist for this unique event in Fac 9.

Are you teaching a course in the Fall on the Rhetoric of French Horror Films Dubbed in Japanese? Would you like to get word out for a conference or workshop you're organizing? Are you interested in letting interested parties know that these unique and titillating events exist? Then you need a poster. Come to the DWRL's workshop on poster design on Friday, April 9 in FAC 9 at 1 pm. The workshop will cover using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to import images, create new images, manipulate text, format best printing quality, and design classy, yet unignorable posters that are sure to fill your classes and pack your events in minutes. With Summer and Fall registration just around the corner and end-of-semester and summer events just weeks away, this workshop will give you the skills you need to get the attendance you want!

At 500 billion gigabytes, if one were to print out the world's digital information and bind it in books, the resulting stack would reach from here to Pluto, 10 times. Institutions which are structured on analog-based technologies no longer can ignore the changed media landscape. Beyond scale and scope, the digital network substantially re-orders the archivization and dissemination of knowledge. While many Universities and scholars have begun to alter their practices, attempting to adapt to this re-ordering, more radical restructuring will be required. In order to remain relevant and engaged, academia will have to substantially rethink not only its goals but its means as well. Academia will perhaps even have to give up on many of its fundamental practices and ideologies—the book, tenure—which inform its existence.

Come join us in MAI 212

Check out Dr. Parry's online presence:

Outside the Text

Academhack

Twitter

Join the Visual Rhetoric project for this unique event.

The workshop will be focused on:

*Becoming familiar with online and institutional databases of images
*Developing standards for citing images and New Media
*Sizing and creating original images using Adobe InDesign
*Incorporating images in the rhetoric and literature classroom
*Uploading and managing images with Drupal

On a daily basis, most of us find ourselves uploading and downloading
images. While we may be proficient, there are ways to potentially
enrich our use of digital images in the classroom by advancing
technical skills, as well as becoming familiar with the best of image
databases. Join Viz. in FAC 9 on March 26 at 1 pm for a workshop
considering best practices for digital images. We'll tour several
private databases of images, such as ARTstor, as well as Creative
Commons images on Flickr and Google. We'll present some practical
skills, such as resizing using Adobe InDesign and html-coding images
for Drupal. The workshop will also involve discussion of intellectual
property and citation for images.

Here are some of the helpful pages referenced during the workshop:

This page lists important online image archives and database

Quickguides for Creating Web Images

Join the Rhetorical Peaks 2.0 project for this unique event.

Screencasting is recording the video and audio output of a computer into a short movie. While many screencasts are used as tutorials for software, there are other pedagogical purposes for this medium as well. Join us in FAC 9 on February 19 at 1 pm for a workshop outlining some of the possible uses for your classes and professional work. We'll be looking at both proprietary and open-source screencasting programs for use on Macs and PCs, and getting some hands-on time with Camtasia, a leading contender in the screencasting software genre.

Join the Geo-Everything project for this unique event.

Workshop will focus on:
· Downloading, installing, and navigating in Google Earth
· Making basic and customized placemarks
· Working with data templates
· Embedding text, images, links, video, and audio
· Creating collaborative maps
· Incorporating Google Earth into the rhetoric and literature classroom

Description:
Google Earth is a free and easy-to-use software program for building maps and spatially representing many kinds of data -- text, images, audio, video -- that can be aligned with a geographic location. These maps are three-dimensional and dynamic, and readers can interactively zoom and rotate as well as add layers of information in order to view the mapped locations, called placemarks, from a variety of perspectives, from the local to the global. Within the rhetoric and literature classrooms, the software is useful for many kinds of writing. It facilitates invention, as students visually identify intriguing linkages; acts as a medium for visual writing, as students transform words into images; and encourages collaboration, as students work together to chart and connect meaningful locations, thus organically and/or deliberately synthesizing arguments.

DWRL Google Earth Workshop Handout

Google Spreadsheet Mapper Instructions

DWRL GeoEverything Spreadsheet Mapper Instructor Guidelines

To help familiarize folks with the basics of the Sophie program, Professor Justin Hodgson will be offering a short introduction/workshop. To find out more, click here to see the promotional video to get aquainted with Sophie.

What is Sophie?

"Sophie 2.0 is open source software for writing, reading and visualizing rich media documents in an interactive, networked environment. The program emerged from the desire to create an easy-to-use application that would allow authors to combine text, images, video, and sound quickly and simply, but with precision and sophistication. Sophie's users are interested in creating robust, elegant, networked, texts and multimedia works without having programming knowledge or training in the use of more complex and costly tools. such as Flash" (www.sophieproject.org).

To continue the conversation begun at last year's workshop Social Justice & Evidence Based Assessment with the Learning Record led by Professor Peg Syverson, the Communications project will host a workshop on the Learning Record.

Please join us to learn about the LR generally and to hear about the latest developments in the LR Online using PB Wiki.

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

“Good game design,” writes James Paul Gee in “Learning and Games,” “has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games.” The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of /Currents/ features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University’s Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Currents encourages unconventional and emergent modes of scholarship. The editors solicit articles, games (with instructions and background), GAC curriculum designs, and other scholarly treatments of “gaming-across-the-curriculum.” All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server. It is the policy of Currents in Electronic Literacy that all published contributions must meet the W3C accessibility standards. While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines. Contact: currents@cwrl.utexas.edu or interrobang@mail.utexas.edu.