digital digs

life between mega-regions

As Richard Florida notes, while nations are based on imaginary boundaries, you can basically see mega-regions by looking at the night-side of the planet.

In other words, you can see here what Florida means by the Boston-NY-Washington mega-region. You can also pick out the sparser (less-mega?) mega-region surrounding the Great Lakes. Although the East Coast region doesn't quite reach Atlanta, I am reminded of William Gibson's BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis). From Neuromancer

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhanan. outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta.

networked composition and public pedagogy

Well here's my presentation from NEMLA, sort of. I messed with this video half of yesterday. On my computer the movie runs fine, but somehow when it got uploaded to Google the timing between the audio and the video got messed up. Still I think it works ok. If I get a chance I'll try to put up a better one soon.

the folded spaces of techno-nomadism

In an interview with Arthur Kroker, Katherine Hayles notes that postmodernism ends at the moment that the Netscape browser emerges. She contends that all the notions of postmodernism become literal at that point and that we enter a posthuman period.

Maybe. It's an interesting way of looking at things. Of course, for Deleuze these concepts were always material, never metaphorical. And in case anyone imagined we were leaving Deleuze behind, the current special report in The Economist addresses mobility and nomadism. Here, this article describes the Stata Centre at MIT

Building Scholarly Networks

I meant to get this posted right after I got back from NOLA, but you know how things can go.

While at the CCCC I saw an interesting panel, "Digital Research Ecologies: How Journal Web Sites Are
Answering New Media’s Challenges," with Derek Mueller, Douglas Eyman, Colleen Reilly, Bradley Dilger, and Collin Brooke. The central issue was information design/management both internally to a journal and among journals (and the rest of the academic infoscape).

It comes down to this. Think of a combined "Google-Amazon" where you get information harvested from across the web with the user experiences of Amazon. Now imagine this for rhetoric and composition: every journal article, book essay, monograph, conference paper, webtext, blog, syllabus, podcast, etc. Obviously "every" is a kind of idealized notion, and even if you could hypothetically have "every" piece of content, the important, functional issue would always be what you could find.

But in any case, if that's a kind of vision, what are the practical possibilities?

NEMLA presentation on networked composition

On Friday I'll be presenting at the NorthEast MLA conference in Buffalo, so I guess I ought to plan out what I'm going to say. Our panel on "multimodal composition" is one of two in rhet/comp I think, so I'm not sure what kind of audience we're going to get. Given the conference is primarily literary studies, I imagine there will not be many with much experience or knowledge of this subject. As such the presentation will need to be introductory.

So here's the basic point, probably familiar to anyone reading this blog: the emergence of networks (mobile, cross-media, wireless, social, etc.) reshapes the compositional and informational relationships among faculty and students. It's essentially pointless to attempt to reassert the previous relationships, which themselves were equally contingent upon technological contexts. Our concern then is to understand better emerging contexts and articulate practices that help to shape those contexts for our educational purposes.

Yes that's pretty general, and, no I don't plan to accomplish all that in a 20 minute presentation. So what will I do?

academic tourism

Oh yes it is that time of year again. Jeff offers some apt thoughts on NOLA and Mark Bauerlein's conservative baiting of rhet/comp. Here's the thing about Bauerlein. He seems to object to rhet/comp's cultural studies/liberatory bent toward gender, race, and class, issue of equity and so on. Instead he wishes the field would be more pragmatic, more responsive to the needs of the workplace to prepare students who can write well. He contends, perhaps accurately, that rhet/comp could gain more influence and support if it turned its focus in that direction.

It's interesting that Bauerlein doesn't level this criticism as his own field, literary studies. Lit studies is worthless, at least by the capitalist-marketplace standards he's employing here. In fact, lit studies is deliberately and resolutely worthless in this regard. Increasingly so, even, as the discipline resists any effort to update its concepts of literacy to address the changing world. I don't know why he doesn't make that complaint. Typically, the argument would be that lit studies has an intrinsic value, that scholarship and teaching in the field are self-validating. That said, I'm sure conservatives in lit studies object to the lefty criticism there as much as in rhet/comp. However, perhaps implicit in this argument is the notion that rhet/comp is not scholarly-disciplinary but simply functional. The objection then is not really to the particular scholarship but to the fact that there is scholarship at all in a field where he imagines research is unnecessary. After all, in the end, lit studies really needs writing instruction to be a practice that requires no special disciplinary understanding, as in many ways it continues to survive on the weak notion that lit studies faculty are well-qualified to teach writing, even though they have little or no knowledge of the subject.

The Two Virtuals receives Honorable Mention for the W. Ross Winterowd Award

The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition has received honorable mention for the W. Ross Winterowd Award for most outstanding book in composition theory in 2007. The award is given by JAC. Originally I wasn't planning on going to CCCC for the award ceremony, but Rhonda really encouraged me to go. It was good to get a chance to see everyone. I have to say thanks to Dave Blakesley, publisher of Parlor Press, and Byron Hawk, editor of the New Media Theory series.

Congratulations also have to go out to Byron for winning the Winterowd award for his book A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, and to Thomas Rickert. His book, Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject won the Gary A. Olson Award for most outstanding book in rhetorical and cultural theory.