Speaker Series

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.

Paul Miller performs in the Texas Union ballroom | photo by Anastasia Drabicky

Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid performed Tuesday Oct. 12th, 2010 in the Texas Union Ballroom. Miller was presented jointly by the DWRL and the University Unions Student Event Center's Distinguished Speakers Committee and Music and Entertainment Committee. He explored the overall theme of sound in contemporary art, digital media, and composition. His rip-mix-burn lecture covered a wide range of topics from photography to hip-hop to environmental issues to his new iPad/iPhone app. Though his topics were diverse, his message was clear: if we want to adapt to the changing culture, we need to continue to develop our tools, techniques, and logics. The logic of the fragment is everywhere in our culture. Miller captured that logic and represented it to a roomful of about 300 students, staff, faculty, and guests.

Listen to a sampling of Miller's talk:

Check out the full talk and the Q & A that followed.

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

Watch this video in HD on Vimeo.

This talk by Cynthia Selfe of Ohio State University focuses on autobiographical literacy narratives from the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) and demonstrate the informational value of these vernacular digital accounts for students and teachers of composition, as well as members of the public. The DALN is a national archive of autobiographical recollections about how individuals learn to read and write; the conditions under which they continue to do so; and the influences and values which shape their literate practices. The DALN, like the Mass Observation project in Britain, depends on the voluntary contributions of individuals and traces the "everyday literacy practices of ordinary people" which often remain invisible in our culture—especially during times of dynamic change (Sheridan, Street, Bloome). These first-hand social media accounts—which exist in a variety of digital formats (e.g., print, video, audio) and are accessible to members of the public through a Web-based interface—constitute a valuable digital resource for research on literacy, for the teaching of composition, and for the public.

Watch this video in HD on Vimeo.

Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of media as “spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,” offers a perspective from which to consider Gregory Chatonsky's hauntingly simple 2004 interactive installation, "Se toucher toi: installation pour trois espaces à distance." Chatonsky’s work is proposed as an instance of the shared experience of withinness of media through which we interdependently construct truths. These reflections borrow upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s 'The ground of the image (Au fond des images)' and other texts in the course of revisiting what Joyce has called “the interdeterminability of points of perception.”

This talk was given at the DWRL on April 2, 2009.

Watch this video in HD on Vimeo.

Lisa Maruca received her Ph.D. in English in 1997. Since then she has published work on the eighteenth-century book trade, including 'The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760,' which was published by the University of Washington Press in 2007. Currently, Dr. Maruca teaches in the English Department at Wayne State University.

Dr. Maruca’s talk is titled “Eighteenth-Century Cyborg Writing: An Unnatural History of Literacy.” Coined in the 1960s, the term “cyborg” has been deployed in environments as varied as TV sci-fi and academic cultural studies. But the melding of bodies and machines has a history as ancient as humanity itself. This talk discusses the ramifications of the cyborg metaphor for understanding eighteenth-century print culture and the construction of instructional literacy technologies.

In early modern England, student writing was seen as aphysical skill based in the transcribing of others’ texts. Starting in the eighteenth-century, however, the marketing of new educational media and methods cast the process of reading the machined text as purely cognitive, transcending both the material artifact and the embodied student reader. An analysis of how the print trade's economic motivations created new conceptual relationships among reading, writing and the body provides insight not just into eighteenth-century literacy practices, but pedagogies of composing with today's new media as well.

Dr. Maruca delivered this talk at the Computer Writing and Research Lab in February 2009.

Watch this video in HD on Vimeo.

Gregory Ulmer's talk at the Computer Writing and Research Lab in October 2008.

According to Ulmer, Electracy is to digital technologies what Literacy is to alphabetic writing. Each is an apparatus (social machine) including technology, institutional practices, identity formation. The invention of electracy is underway in all three dimensions of the apparatus, with a major role to be played by the arts and letters disciplines. Avatar is to electracy what writing is to literacy. Has it already been invented, or is it a project for the coming electrate generation?

Dr. Ulmer is a professor of English at the University of Florida where he is also the coordinator of the Electronic Learning Forum. His most recent books are From Literacy to Electracy (2003) and Electronic Monuments (2005).

Watch this video in HD on Vimeo.

Cynthia Hayes speaking at the CWRL in October 2008.

Haynes, who is an Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition at Clemson University, discusses how ‘avatar nation’ is making headlines around the world. She describes how the proliferation of avatars into mainstream culture situates academia on the bleeding edge of a nation desperate for someone to take the diplomatic lead in an historic rhetorical negotiation.

In an unprecedented move, virtual citizens of World of Warcraft and Second Life have joined forces and seceded from all their native nation-states. According to her, the world is on the brink of an avatar mass exodus. It’s serious—it’s real. It’s going to tank the economy. It’s going to mean the end of the virtual world as we know it, right down to our Molten Core. If we don’t go virtual now, we will find ourselves on the threshold of rhetorical hell ... where only action heroes rule and hockey moms wait in the wings to take their place.

Victor Vitanza speaking at the University of Texas at Austin's Computer Writing and Research Lab in the fall of 2007.

Dr. Vitanza is Professor and Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University. His talk is entitled "Scars" and is an exploratory piece for his current project Design as Dasein. This text is the third in a trilogy, following Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric (SUNY 1997) and Chaste Rape (under consideration for publication).

Dr. Vitanza returns to UT for the first time since 1991. His first visit was in 1986 when Jim Berlin invited him to deliver a paper called "Critical Sub/Versions of the History of Philosophical Rhetoric," a paper that was eventually published in Rhetoric Review. In 1991, he visited UT again to deliver a paper on Jean Jean-François Lyotard's Differend.