The New Is

Thanks to Collin Brooke for pointing to David Weinberger's "The New Is," which is a short piece on the value of social tagging. Collin summed up the piece by quoting Weinberger's three guiding principles:

Links, not containers: A page is what it points to.

Multiple tags, not single meanings: A thing gains more meaning by having multiple local meanings.

Messiness, not clean order: The best definitions are ambiguous.

As Collin notes, Weinberger takes a historical approach to this topic, as can be seen from this passage:

From Aristotle's way of thinking came a history of thought and politics that made certain assumptions: Because knowledge and being are fused, just as there is only one reality, there is only one structure of knowledge. The best people to put this structure together are experts. Because of the economics of parchment and paper, experts filter what we need to know. They become gatekeepers, priests of knowledge.

The digital age undoes all of these assumptions, changing the nature of knowledge and even of meaning itself. We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn't what it is.

Until now, the structure of knowledge has mirrored the way we've structured the physical world: We take a pile – think of your laundry – and split it into lumps, and then split those lumps into further lumps, until we have piles that are not worth splitting any more. So, we create a library classification system such as the Dewey Decimal System, or a Periodic Table of the Elements, a Tree of Life, or a business organizational chart. But when we're dividing up our laundry, we have to put our socks into one pile or another, but not both (the Law of Identity). Why should the same restriction hold when we're dealing with ideas? Why can't ideas go in many piles? Why can't a single intellectual leaf hang from many branches?

This is precisely what happens in the digital age. If you are trying to decide where to put a digital camera in your physical store, you're going to have to pick one or two areas. If you're listing it on your Web site, you'll put it in as many categories as you can because you want people to be able to find it. Is the digital camera photography equipment, a vacation accessory, a sports item, a featured sale item? The answer is: Yes. And if you can think of other categories in which to list it, you have an economic motive to do so.

This makes a mess of your site's organization. But that's a good thing. In the digital age, messiness is not a sign of disorder. It is a sign of a successful order. Messiness is a virtue.

It's clear, to me at least, that social tagging is a digital mnemonic practice. In a sense, it is the smart mobs version of personal mnemonic systems (both simple word associations and large scale place and image systems), which often work by idiosyncratic association. As Weinberger notes, individuals may tag idiosyncratically: A photo of London may never be tagged as "London" but instead may be tagged with "my vacation" or "Underground" or "Big Ben" or "winter in the park" or any combination of these, and more. For those searching for London, they won't find this photo unless a second person adds to it the London tag. I don't want to stretch this comparison too far, however. While idiosyncratic, personal mnemonic systems are essentially closed systems (or at least fall on the closed end of the scale), and while social tagging, as both a social and a digital practice, is an open system, I don't think its all so clear cut that we can just assign closed an open labels to these practices and leave it at that.

Nevertheless, for pre-digital mnemonic technologies, the more associations/meanings you attach to a word or to an image, the less mnemonic function it has. Technologically, therefore, the system does favor closure rather than openness. And, on the other hand, because it's as easy to add one tag to digital information as it is to add 100 tags, and because good search programs aren't bothered by multiple associations, digital mnemonic technologies do favor openness, multiplicity, or what Weinberger calls "messiness" (more on messiness below). Along these lines, while comparing orality, textuality, and electracy, John Miles Foley labels these opened and closed practices as filing and tagging.

While I want to agree -- do agree -- with them, I'm struck by the slipperiness of it all. Take, for instance, the print index. An index is a closed system, but is it really an example of clear-cut filing? Is there no tagging going on? I've found that the most useful indexies have overlapping categories and make use of cross-referencing. While it does not have the openness of social tagging, it's not the one-to-one classification system Aristotle posits in his Law of Identity. I'm also thinking here of Walter Ong's index card files with all their cross referencing, what I've referred to as Ong's index card database. Even while a printed index, an ordered index card file, or even the Library of Congress classification system are examples of filling, of discrete categorization, they can and do engage in and make use of tagging, of multiple and overlapping categorization. The externalization of writing -- the ability to store, access, and share information outside of ourselves -- helps mitigate the disorder that comes with multiple associations. While the logic of writing and print favors filing, discrete categorization, the practice of writing is more fluid, more open, than its logic would suggest.

A paradox? I don't think so. Orality, as Ong has long argued and as Foley argues throughout his Oral Tradition and the Internet, is an open system. And yet, at the same time, orality's openness is limited. While meaning and categorization are fluid in oral traditions, without recourse to external, more permanent, more fixed, storage, there is a real limit upon the number of associations one can work with. As I've already noted, whether one is working with a memory palace, a proverb, a story, or rhyming poem, each additional association attached to the mnemonic device dilutes its overall mnemonic power. To put it another way, while oral tradition is more closely connected to the human lifeworld, it's not so good at keeping in mind multiple realities -- the past is what is remembered and what is remembered tends to reflect what is.

Lessons from all this? Not sure, really, as this is really thoughts on the fly. But it seems clear, to me at least, that while contrasting writing with the oral and/or the digital, we need to make sure we're not overly simplifying writing. We need to keep in mind the complex medium dynamics of writing while we're figuring out the complex medium dynamics of oral tradition and of digital technologies, and I note this as much a remembrance for myself as a warning for anyone else.

Oh, as a side note, I like Weinberger claim that messiness is a virtue, not because I want to embrace messiness, but because, as I've explained earlier, in medieval memory theory it was not forgetting but information disorder that was considered a sin against the virtue of Prudence. As Weinberger points out, messiness (complexity) is not the same as disorder, and that too is worth bearing in mind.

art of memory | database | David Weinberger | digital culture | electracy | John Miles Foley | memory | metadata | oral culture | oral tradition | print culture | social networks | tagging | tags

A Response to "Is It Time to Shut Down Engineering Colleges?"

In an Inside Higher Ed article "Is It Time to Shut Down Engineering Colleges?," Domenico Grasso, the dean of engineering and mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont, argues that if America is going to reclaim a leading role in engineering (in both producing those who entering engineering as well as educating them), we need to revise the engineering curriculum: in short, that they need fewer technical classes and more humanities courses:

Faced with the increasingly complex design challenges of the 21st century - an era where resources of every kind are reaching their limit, human populations are exploding, and global-warming related environmental catastrophe beckons - engineers need to grow beyond their traditional roles as problem-solvers to become problem-definers.

To catalyze this shift, our engineering curriculum, now packed with technical courses, needs a fresh start. Today's engineers must be educated to think broadly in fundamental and integrative ways about the basic tenets of engineering. If we define engineering as the application of math and science in service to humanity, these tenets must include study of the human condition, the human experience, the human record.

How do we make room in the crowded undergraduate engineering curriculum for students to explore disciplines outside math and science - literature and economics, history and music, philosophy and languages - that are vital if we are to create a competitive new generation of engineering leaders? By scaling back the number of increasingly narrow, and quickly outmoded technical courses students are now required to take - leaving only those that teach them to think like engineers and to gain knowledge to solve problems. Students need to have room to in their schedules for wide ranging elective study.

As an undergraduate, I was a humanities major surrounded by engineers. Literally. I spent all but one semester living in the dorms known as the Engineering Quad where one had to be an engineering or science major to get in (I began my college career as an English and biochemistry double major). A good number of my closest friends in college were engineers. Class rank was a real issue for these men and women, and as it turns out, a good number of my closest circle of friends were at the top of their classes. The best of them, the most successful of them, took more humanities and social science courses than required. One was torn between engineering and art. Another between engineering and music. A third between engineering and history and philosophy. Others weren't torn but took as many humanities/social science courses as they could. Is there a correlation here? I don't know. I could just be that they had the opportunity to take extra courses because they weren't retaking Calculus III or Advanced Thermodynamics for a second or third time. What I do know, however, is that my friends at the top of their classes were called in by the Dean of the College of Engineering, who then strongly encouraged them to take a special two-term humanities for engineers honors course during their sophomore year.

I do believe, however, that undergraduate college education should be cross disciplinary. I believe that thinking critically means being able to see beyond a narrow perspective. I disagree with those academics who believe that academic specialization means adopting disciplinary blinders. So, in short, I agree with Grasso that our engineering education needs more humanities and social sciences to produce critical thinkers who can work not as problem-solvers but as problem-definers. I don't agree, however, that we should shut down colleges of engineering.

But there's a flip side to this, however. The amount of science and technology courses the average non-science and engineering major is required to take is pitiful. It's no secret that the American public has little understanding of science and technology even while many of our most pressing and contested social and political issues are issues of science and technology. Ultimately, it won't matter how well trained our scientists and engineers are if the American public, if the average voter and the typical policy maker, doesn't have the basic knowledge necessary to grasp, let alone make informed decisions about, some of the most pressing and important issues facing us today.

While I have, at times, thought that we could do away with business degrees at the undergraduate level, I don't think we should be closing our schools of engineering. I don't think, however, that is what Grasso is really arguing for. Rather, he's arguing for increased humanities and social science education as part of the engineering curriculum and I agree with that. And just as our engineers ought to be more knowledgeable of "the human condition, the human experience, the human record," our non-scientists and non-engineers need to be more knowledgeable of science and technology.

We need to increase the amount of science and technology the average undergraduate takes. In addition to the fundamentals like Introduction to Chemistry or Introduction to Geology, humanities/social science majors should be taking a broad range of upper division classes geared for non-majors or that look at the intersection of science/technology and other disciplines. Two of my favorite courses, taken as electives after I'd stopped being a biochemistry major were "Life in the Universe" and "Evolution, Creationism, and the Origins of Life," offered by the departments of Physics and Astrophysics and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology respectively. The former blended astrophysics, biology, philosophy, and religion, and the later blended biology, sociology, and religion. As a biology major, one of my wife's favorite classes was "Plants and Human Affairs" which was a mix of biology, history, sociology, and economics. Her research paper, the paper I think she most enjoyed writing as an undergraduate, was on the Tulip-Bulb Craze of the 1630s. We need more classes like these and more students need to be taking them. The sad fact is that right now most science and engineering majors get a better education in the humanities and social sciences than most humanities and social science majors get in science and technology. This, too, needs to change.

curriculum reform | Domenico Grasso | engineering education | higher education | humanities education | science education

A Guide to Digitizing History

Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

This book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years.

Digital History, by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, is a "free online version" of a book published by U. of Penn Press. I don't know how, or if, the online version and the print version differ.

via Archivalia

digital scholarship | digitization | history | humanities computing

Mac Resources

Mac Tips and Tricks

MacTV Videocast

via digital b

Mac | Macintosh | MacOS

Odysseus' tomb found

According to a Sept. 27, 2005 article in the Madera Tribune, Odysseus' tomb has been found.

POROS, Island of Kefalonia, Greece - The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca.

This could be the most important archeological discovery of the last 40 years, a find that may eventually equal the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s 19th Century dig at Troy. But the quirky people and politics involved in this achievement have delayed by several years the process of reporting the find to the world.

Yet visitors to Kefalonia, an octopus-shaped island off the west coast of Greece, can see the evidence for themselves at virtually no cost. Read whole story.

via Jerz's Literacy Weblog
Cross-posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive

archeology | Homer | Iliad | Odysseus | Odyssey

Teaching Hogfather

Starting Tuesday, I'll teach my first Pratchett novel -- we're reading Hogfather, and I wanted to give my class a brief introduction to both the Discworld and some of its controlling concepts. (For those of you not familiar with Pratchett's Discworld, Wikipedia's entries on "Discworld" and "Discworld (world)" are good introductions.

Since Hogfather is specifically about the power of belief, I focused on what The Discworld Companion calls the "physics" of Discworld: Life force, The Power of Metaphor and Belief, and Narrative Causality. (The Discworld exists on the edge of Reality where the real and the not real are in constant struggle, thereby allowing Discworld to exist.) In short, Life force means that since life has a tendency to exist, things that exist on the Discworld are alive (even things like thunderstorms and buildings, though most people don't know how to communicate with buildings and few people want to get up close and personal with thunderstorms -- well, that's not true, a malevolent thunderstorm (and is there any other kind?) can be a nasty thing. Likewise, metaphors are often literalized as real things and belief is a source of power (witch magic, as opposed to wizard magic, is based on "headology," the knowledge of how to use belief, both your own and others, to make things happen, and stories have power and can define what will happen (my favorite, if small, example is that a million-to-one chance tends to succeed because, narratively, million-to-one chances always work. And finally, narrative causality governs everything, but this doesn't mean much for most people most of the time because it's hard for those in a narrative to understand the larger narrative pattern, and because most people most of the time play narratively unimportant roles like the poor customer who unjustly suffers the wrath of the clerk because they happen to be the one in line behind a rude bastard).

While these laws govern all Discworld novels, Hogfather specifically plays with these ideas, and it's with this novel that we'll really start thinking about the social role of story telling and John Niles' theory of Homo Narrans. (Back in early August, I mentioned Niles' book and quoted from the beginning of Hogfather, which sets the stage for a story about the power of Story.)

Looking over the entry on Hogfather in Annotated Pratchett File v.9.0, I found a lovely quote from Pratchett. When he was working on the novel, someone asked him what the book was going to be about, and he replied:

"Let's see, now...in Hogfather there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone [sic] just been killed by a wardrobe.

It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell."

Without given away any significant plot point or really giving any hint of what the novel is about, Pratchett summed up it up well: "It's a book about the magic of childhood." And it is, in part. The fact that Story, the traditional stories that shape and give meaning to our lives and connect us to our past and our serve as the medium for our cultural knowledge, is often considered the domain of children is both of great interest to me and something that greatly disturbs me. As Tolkien tried to remind us almost 70 years ago in "On Fairy Stories," somewhere along the way we (adults in modern Western European nations) have forgotten the power and importance of Story. Niles' book Homo Narrans is about the power of Story, about story-telling as the defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Kevin M. Bradt's Story as a Way of Knowing is also another good take on the importance of Story (I write about it in the second half of an entry in a Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive)post. The recovery of Story and its related elements is also behind what Shippey calls "the Grimmian Revolution" (comparative philology and mythology which began with the Grimm brothers) and will be the focus of Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth, the Festschrift for Shippey I'm co-editing with Andrew Wawn and Graham Johnson -- Story helped make the Western European nation states.

Story is so much more than the magic of childhood. And yet, even Pratchett who does know better, feels compelled to describe it as such. Well that's not entirely fair as the novel is about belief (or lack thereof) in the Hogfather, Discworld's version of Santa Claus. So, really, it is accurate to say that Hogfather is about the magic of childhood. But Pratchett's point, as was Tolkien's point, is that the magic of childhood is powerful, deep-down stuff. It's the magic that keeps the world going even if we adults, both the adults of the Discworld and adults in our world, have forgotten to pay attention to it.

Hogfather | John Niles | Kevin Bradt | T.A. Shippey | Terry Pratchett | Tom Shippey | Story

Jack Foley on Walter J. Ong

9/26 Update: Talking with my boss today, I learned that Jack Foley had sent us this material back in August 2003. At that time my boss knew they'd be hiring someone to process the collection, so he put it aside and forgotten to pass it on when I was started the job almost a year later. When I posted this last week, I saw the August 28 date on the accompanying letter and didn't pay attention to the year. The show was broadcast on March 10, 2004 and is available as both streaming audio or .mp3 download.

I learned today that Jack Foley will have a radio show tribute to Fr. Ong broadcast on November 5 at 3:30-4:00 p.m. PST on the Berkeley, CA station KPFA-FM as part of his weekly "Cover to Cover with Jack Foley" show. It may be broadcast via streaming audio at that time, and after the show it should be archived at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=106.

Foley also recently published an article on Fr. Ong, "Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003): In Memoriam" in the online magazine Alsop Review.

Cross-posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive.

Jack Foley | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong

"Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments"

Leaving a comment on someone’s weblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not.

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post.

Via Clancy who posted this to TechRhet and to Gina who forwarded it to me since I've got TechRhet (and just about everything else) on nomail.

blogs | blogging

Yoko Kanno

I got the Cowboy Bebop CD-Box featuring Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. Earlier this year, I'd already picked up the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Soundtrack. Yoko Kanno's (and the Seatbelts) versitility and range is nothing short of amazing. My only wish for the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack is that there is non-live version of "The Real Folk Blues." There is an alternative version titled "See You Space Cowboys Not Final Mix Mountain Root" but it's all in Japanese. While it's a great song in and of itself, for me, what makes "The Real Folk Blues" is that in the middle of this bluesy song with Japanese lyrics is the line "the real folk blues" sung in English.

Don't just take my word for it, however. Here's another rave review of Yoko Kanno's work.

anime | Cowboy Bebop | Ghost in the Shell | The Seatbelts | Yoko Kanno

Call me bemused....

Last week, I suggested to the English Graduate Organization, that we put together a formal request asking our department to include more computer/digital technology in our program. I suggested this address four related issues:

1. To request an increase in the use of computer technology and computer-assisted instruction in graduate courses so that we can experience these technologies from a student perspective (which I believe to be an important component of learning how to teach with computer technology).


2. To request an increase in the level of training in computer-assisted pedagogy, both in terms of workshops and formal courses. This may include asking/suggesting that we seek to create a culture of knowledge within the department and that graduate students assigned to monitor our computer-assisted instruction classrooms have some knowledge computer-assisted pedagogy or be actively interested in developing such knowledge.


3. To request that we be exposed to the theories, methods, and practices of humanities-based computing and digital technologies as it pertains to English Studies.


4. To request a more formal certification in computer-assisted pedagogy along the lines of Purdue's Instructor Goals for Integrating Technology, available as .pdf from
   http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/ICaP/instructor_resources/english106_resources/technology_resources.

I was thinking about this issue over the summer when someone on the Digital Medievalist listserv asked if Medieval Studies graduate programs should require a humanities computing course and what such a course should cover. The poster was leaning towards a course that was more conceptual than a course that focused on using specific software to do specific activities. Since this issue was on my mind, I responded:

As a graduate student who is both a medievalist and a technorhetorican (I'm even on the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication), I would say yes, all humanities graduate students need an introduction to humanities computing, and I've long been thinking that the conceptual approach you suggest is a good way to start.

As we all know, digital tools are both changing the way we do work in the humanities and they are creating new methods, theories, practices, and opportunities. I'd argue, actually I have been increasingly arguing both locally and in other forums, that to ignore the issue of humanities computing and the increasing role of digital technologies and digital culture in graduate education is quickly shifting from being an issue of not being on the cutting edge to being an issue of negligence on the part of that program. In other words, it's rapidly becoming not an issue of humanities computing on the one hand and the disciplinary subject on the other, but humanities computing becoming one of the various methods and practices of engaging the disciplinary subject.

But I'd go farther too (this is the technorhetorician and the Ongian in me). It shouldn't just be about digitizing material, but also the production and consumption of native digital texts, and understanding of digital culture, digital noetics and practices, and the logic of new media. In other words, not just how to digitize primary sources, but how digital technologies is and can change the way we do scholarship and the way we interact with both knowledge and the world.

For instance, how can the logic of new media -- the cut-up, the mix and remix, juxtaposition, association and linkage, to name a few -- change the ways we can make arguments, explore our subjects, and share and preserve information? [Channeling a bit of Jeff Rice here.] In what ways might the mediated experience of a virtual recreation of an archeological dig change the way archeology is done (for one, would the added financial and physical constraints of creating a real-time virtual reality model of the dig outweigh or be outweighed by the possibility of future archeologists (or the original archeologists) reexploring a dig in much the same way architects create virtual reality models to "walk" through their designs? Or how does our understandings of digital culture help us rethink our understanding of past cultural processes as it has already done for orality and literacy studies and book history? Or, for that matter, how can our understanding of earlier cultural processes help us understand digital ones (see, for instance, John Miles Foley's Pathways Project, or the work being done in textual and bibliographic studies).

We discussed the issue a bit (someone asked why this was needed because we did get some training in computer-assisted instruction), so I asked, to make my point, if anyone at the meeting could name specific ways in which computer/digital technologies were being applied to the study of their field or to literature in general. Those who were objecting could not, even though for a few of them their own dissertation directors are engaged in humanities based computing.

It was silly of me to think that by pointing out that a number of literature faculty in our department are engaging in digital scholarship and computer-assisted pedagogy in their undergraduate literature courses, a fact most graduate students in the department aren't aware of, would be a pretty clear sign that the methods, theories, and practices of humanities based computing and digital English Studies aren't making it into our graduate education.

I learned today that my proposal is actually part of a larger move to force a rhetoric and composition agenda upon the program. Call be bemused indeed. Call me bemused that I specifically discuss the Sidney Bibliography database and in-progress Walter J. Ong database and the electronic edition of Modern Chivalry as some of the digital projects/scholarship being undertaken by our literature faculty and some how this issue gets framed as a movement by the handful of rhet/comp graduate students trying to storm the ramparts (if you're worried that we're trying to take over, maybe you should stop voting us into 3/4 of the English Graduate Organization officer positions -- you've been voting us into these positions for years).

Call me bemused that here at Saint Louis University in the department which Walter J. Ong called home, in the department where Fr. Ong studied under Marshall McLuhan, there is so little understanding and so little discussion of how digital technologies are shaping English Studies.

And call me bemused in that while a good number of rhet/comp people can't get beyond seeing me as a Medievalist who dabbles in rhet/comp as a hobby, people in my own department can't get beyond the fact I do rhet/comp and computers and writing no matter how much literary studies I do. When I die, if my obituary can read "He was a RhetoricianMedievalistCompositionist" and no one objects, if no one says "But...but...he wasn't a rhetorician/compositionist" or "But...but...he wasn't a real medievalist," I can die in peace.

Digital Medievalist | English Studies | humanities computing | Jeff Rice

Exploration Guide: Educational Uses of Blogs, Wikis, etc.

Sent to the CCCC Blogging SIG listserv by Nick Carbone: The TLT Group's Exploration Guide:  Educational Uses of Blogs, Wikis, etc.

blogs | pedagogy | wikis

Scottish National Dictionary Updated

The New Supplement to the Scottish National Dictionary has been added to the online Dictionary of the Scots Language at http://www.dsl.ac.uk. For those unfamiliar with the Dictionary of the Scots Language:

The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the 12-volume Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary (SND). DOST contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and SND contains information about Scots words in use from 1700 to the 1970s (modern Scots). Together these 22 volumes provide a comprehensive history of Scots, and a New Supplement now (2005) brings the record of the language up to date. These are therefore essential research tools for anyone interested in the history of either Scots or English language, and for historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots or may contain Scots usages.

In the DSL, these two dictionaries are being published together in their full form for the first time. Thus, information on the earliest uses of Scots words can be presented alongside examples of the later development of the same words. By making the DSL freely available on the Internet, we also aim to widen access to the source dictionaries and to open up these rich lexicographic resources to anyone with an interest in Scots language and culture. Its educational uses range from university research to help with the production of Scots materials for young children.

The DSL is brought to you by Scottish Language Dictionaries, an organization dedicated to developing dictionaries and promoting the languages of Scotland. Among their projects is the Scuil Wab, an online resource for learning Scots (primarily targeted to primary and secondary education).

Scottish dictionaries | Scottish Language Dictionaries | Scottish National Dictionary | Scottish Language | Scots

Blogging with my students

As I think I've mentioned earlier, I decided to have my introduction to literary studies students use a course blog to keep public journals, to share resources, and for discussion. For a grade journal of B, I'm asking them to make two posts/week, one general entry and one snippet research entry. I got the idea for snippet research from Sharon Cogdill. It asks them to do spend some time each week doing some research related to the course and sharing what they learn with the class. The idea is to have the students help fill in the background and contextual information related to our readings. For instance, the novel Hogfather plays with and draws from myth, legend, and story, especially those related to Christmas, the Solstice, and the end of the year. Likewise, Yeats regularly draws from Celtic mythology in his poetry. Rather than have me fill in all this information, I've provided a number of potential resources and I ask the students to choose topics based upon the reading. The idea is that as they read, they should choose something that seems interesting and they want to learn more about (and I'll make some suggestions in class and on the blog too).

I told them that I'd do two entries a week with them and I've been enjoying it. Most of my posts these first two weeks have been "example" posts. Before turning to our first formal literary text, we're doing readings from Rob Pope's The English Studies Book to establish both some terminology, background, and theory. Our first day's readings focused on Pope's discussion of language, literature, and culture as the three main fields English studies (which Pope, explains, can also be thought of in terms of rhetoric, intertextuality, and discourse). My first journal post narrowed in on language, and I used Pope's idea of textual intervention to examine the first line of Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier": "If I should die, think only this of me," which they were also supposed to work with.

I rewrote that line five different ways and discussed what the changes in meaning helped reveal about the original line. For instance, one of my five rewrites was "If I should die, imagine only this of me" and I explained

By replacing “think” with “imagine,” this rewrite focuses on the action the addresser wants the addressed to do: to think about him in a particular way. Using "to think" rather than "to imagine" may mean that the poet is asking the addressed to remember something that is true rather than something that is not (i.e., while I could be a jerk at times, we had many good times too, so remember the good rather than the bad). Or, conversely, the addresser may be trying to shape a remembrance of him that isn't true. By using "think" rather than "imagine," the poet may be trying to deny something that is true (i.e., while I may have been a jerk, think of me as a responsible guy). Tied very much to this is the use of the word 'only.” The use of "think only this of me” suggests that there are things the addresser does not want the addressed to think about or remember about him.

Also during the first two reading assignments, I had the students read Pope's history of English studies and its origins, from English being used to "civilize" and "make British" colonized peoples, literature as a source of moral education, the origins of textual studies in Biblical hermeneutics, Classical studies, rhetoric and composition, literary history, philology, and literary appreciation. (We also discussed where English studies seems to be going (inclusion of theater, film, cultural, communication, and media studies.) A lot of stuff to throw at an introductory course of non-majors, but as I briefly touched on in class and elaborated in a journal entry, we live in a democracy in which the public has a powerful voice in shaping education. Being part of an educated electorate means, ideally, that they have some notion of the assumptions that drive our debates over education. While I'm not going to tell my students that they shouldn't believe in a traditional curriculum centered on dead white European males (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, and maybe a couple of others!) and I'm not going to tell my students they need to believe in a multi-cultural curriculum that embraces the non-Western, I want them to understand the assumptions and values that both positions (and the positions in-between) and the traditions they come from.

My third journal entry was a riff on a student's exploration of the word literature as "the body of written works of a language, period, or culture." The student's entry focused on literature as something written and on literature as a window to other cultures and times. My riff played with the notion of literature as something written and oral tradition. "Does this mean," I asked, "that Homer's poems, or Beowulf or a Xhosa praise poet's poem are 'non-literature' that only somehow magically become 'literature' once they're written down?" Of course, the answer is both yes and no. I explained the notion of oral tradition and oral performance and how they're different from a written text, and briefly noted that historically, people have used the lack of written texts that conform to modern notions of the literary as a sign that other cultures were primitive, and also noted that this applied not just to non-Western cultures but to Anglo-Saxon culture -- there are English departments which insist that English literature did not start before 1100 CE or with Chaucer).

Finally, my most recent journal post was an example of snippet research (we began those this second week). We started talking about New Criticism on Thursday, so I compared the definition of ambiguity offered in The English Studies Book to that in the Oxford English Dictionary and three literary dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopedias in our library's reference collection. I summarized the various definitions, produced my own, and explained what a New Critic looks for when one works with ambiguity in a text. I then pointed out (again), in an announcement post, that The English Studies Book lists key terms for each section and that researching these terms along the lines of what I did with ambiguity is an ideal snippet research topic for those in need of one. Hopefully, some of them will follow that lead as they'll soon be applying these terms and theoretical approaches to the texts we're going to read.

teaching, teaching literature

The (old) New Invention and the Art of Memory

I've been wanting to discuss juxtaposition, mixing and remixing, and the cut-up, some of Jeff Rice's favorite terms, as practices of rhetorical memory all summer (and maybe I already have). Jeff's recent post on the need for a new definition of invention has finally pushed me to post. The problem, he argues, is that:

I've often found the invention process to be in the pattern that emerges (the avant-garde practice, later made digital within Ulmer's mystory). But the invention process is also in the merging of points, the connections made by surfing, by visiting, by tagging, by considering relationships where they do not yet exist. The invention process realized by the Web is not predicated by a claim nor by the need to demonstrate support (though, of course, such moves can occur). Instead, it is realized within connections, a rhetorical situation (as Jenny says) that is more ecology than situation. We see this invention made possible in online commerce (Netflix, Amazon). The time has come for a pedagogy of this kind of invention. It's not that we have the option of choosing "different ways to begin writing" as Lauer paraphrases Aristotle. It's that we are always choosing.

In short, that "The Web does not motivate support for persuasion as much as it allows for connections, interlinking, relationships."

As with most of what Jeff says, I couldn't agree more. What strikes me about this new understanding of invention is that it reminds me a lot of an old understanding of invention that practiced in the Middle Ages. An invention that worked hand-in-hand with memory. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the medieval notion of memory as a machina memorialis. The expanded version of the quote in the banner, which I provided in my first post, is as follows:

“[C]onceive of memory not only as 'rote,' the ability to reproduce something (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating 'things' stored in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes - a memory architecture and a library built up during one's lifetime with the express intention that it be used inventively. Medieval memoria was a universal thinking machine, machina memorialis - both the mill that ground the grain of one's experiences (including all that one read) into a mental flour with which one could make wholesome new bread, and also the hoist or windlass that every wise master-builder learned to make and use in constructing new matters.” - Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 4.

As I explained in a comment to Jeff's post, I think the Web and new media are beginning to expose the fact that our traditional understanding of rhetoric is not the Rhetorical Tradition as it has always been practiced or even accepted during antiquity and middle ages but rather a tradition that has become privileged for various historical, political, material, and economic reasons. As Jeff notes, the problem with our understanding of invention is that it's rooted in the assumption that the purpose of rhetoric is persuasion. It's the same understanding of rhetoric that leads many compositionists to want to deny (or refuse to investigate) the fact that in the medieval period there wasn't a strong boundary between the art of rhetoric and the art of poetry. Both are about making, and memory, as the machinery of the mind, as the tool of invention, was applied equally to both.

As I suggested in my GRN presentation at C&W (abstract), artificial memory systems are databases. The art of memory is not about the storage but the retrieval and use of what is stored in memory, and one uses that material "inventively" for the purpose of "constructing new matters." Juxtaposition, mixing and remixing, and the cut-up aren't new techniques but old ones remediated: they're part of the old practices of memory rediscovered as the logic of print continues to loose its dominance over our discourse practices.

art of memory | composition | invention | Mary Carruthers | memoria | memory | rhetoric

404s and Plans for a Rhet-Comp Wiki Textbook

No, the two do not have anything to do with each other.

Matt Barton's announced plans to start a rhetoric and composition wiki textbook and is looking for suggestions, comments, and, I think, contributors. The wikitext's being started as a project with his Computers and English course.

Lisa Schamess muses on 404s and internet archeology in her post 2 Cool 2 Be 404

404 | internet archeology | rhetoric and composition | wiki | wiki textbook

In-house Digital Technology Advocacy

While my department's got a two great computer classrooms (Kathleen Welch wrote about us in TCQ 14.3, we have little support or training in computer-assisted instruction. For most instructors in my department, teaching with computer technology means using WebCT to deliver course materials and post grades, accessing online databases and other sources for research, and word processing. There's no systematic training/. Few professors integrate computers into their teaching beyond WebCT, so few graduate students see how computers are and can be used in both composition and literature. We've never had a computers and English or computers and composition course taught at the graduate level in recent memory (back in the late 1960 or early 1970s, we offered programming for literary studies for a few years until that professor left for another institution). Even the teaching composition course is often taught with little or no attention to computer-assisted instruction (to be fair, one of three professors who teaches it has used MOO and online portfolios in the course).

From time to time, I've offered workshops and tried prodding here and there, but to little avail. I know a large number of the graduate students would like to learn more, but as most of the faculty don't see it as their job to actively support or encourage such training, most don't learn much. They realize it's important, but they also quickly realize that their professors aren't interested in helping them develop this knowledge. Likewise, while the faculty knows that these students ought to know about digital technologies and computer-assisted instruction, they don't see it as their job and assume it will be done by someone else. That someone else is the faculty member who oversees the computer lab. Unfortunately, while there has always been discussion about getting a full-time staff member to oversee the day-to-day running of the lab, it's never happened, so all the energies she can devote to that aspect of her job is in running the lab (though, I think teaching a dedicated graduate course on computer pedagogy/digital English/computers and composition now and then should be part of her job). Finally, most of the graduate assistants she's given to help staff the lab rarely have the knowledge and skills necessary to make them more than warm bodies keeping the lab open, and for those who are interested, by the time they've learned, their gig is up and someone else is in the lab to start the whole process over again.

I've tried the subtle approach by pointing to Purdue's "English 106 Technology Goals for Instructors" (available as .pdf from http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/ICaP/instructor_resources/english106_resources/technology_resources/index.html), but that didn't go far. So, this year, I'm changing my tactic.

Our English Graduate Organization has been effective in changing department policy before, and as a former multi-term president, and an officer of some sort all but my first year here, I've been active in many of those changes. Last spring I started talking up the idea of having EGO formally request that the faculty incorporate more computer-assisted instruction and computer-assisted instruction training into graduate courses, and we've got it on the agenda for our first meeting. I think it'll pass. While I don't think we'll see a bunch of graduate courses using CAI next semester, I know that a formal request will be taken seriously. Some of our newer hires, people I know who have some training in CAI from their graduate student days, may be encouraged to bring some of those strategies and technologies they used when teaching FYC into graduate classes, and I bet we'll see a computers and English/computers and composition course offered in the next year or two. I'll be gone by then, but I'm one of the only graduate students in the program who doesn't need it.

I want to make this a two-pronged approach, however. I also want to see us implement something like Purdue's guidelines so that our instructors have a real sense of what it means to be proficient, and so that when they go on the job market, they can speak specifically to what they mean when they say that they have experience teaching with computer technologies.

Does anyone know of other systems like Purdue's that we might be able to use as a model?

teaching | teaching composition

Word Verification

Sorry for having to turn on the word verification for commenting, but the spambots have finally found my blog.

VirtualDayz: Blogging on Memory and New Media

A number of posts on memory, new media, and memory and new media makes this a blog to keep an eye on. The focus is on personal memory and narrative rather than the cognitive and social, which are my particular interests, but it's difficult to build strong walls in memory studies. Personal memory is always socially constructed and social is always, in some ways, personal. And the cognitive is never far away no matter what type of memory you're considering.

For instance, this entry on Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, which is summarized as:

I've been reading Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, a memoir by British film scholar Annette Kuhn (1995/2002). A blend of cultural criticism and cultural production that engages both the psychic and the social, the hybrid text brings together a series of autobiographical case histories that use private and public images from Kuhn's past as prompts for “memory work,” which Kuhn defines as “a method and a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories” (9-10). In a manner reminiscent of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Kuhn reflects on her family album, as well as on news photographs and film scenes, to “unravel the connections between memory, its traces, and the stories we tell about the past, especially-though not exclusively-about the past of living memory” and in the process to reveal “the collective nature of the activity of remembering” (Kuhn, 4, 6).

In part, Kuhn is interested in "how images make meaning," and we read images both as individuals and as members of a social group/mnemonic community.
While Elayne Zalis, the author of VirtualDayz, is more interested in Kuhn's autobiographical case histories, I'm much more interested in the lessons Kuhn learned from those histories, which Zalis summarizes as such:

1. Memory shapes our inner worlds.
Unconscious processes often are involved, thus explaining why remembering may introduce thoughts and feelings that defy rational explanations (160).
2. Memory is an active production of meanings.
"Memory is an account, always discursive, always textual. At the same time, memory can assume expression through a wide variety of media and contexts” (161).
3. Memory texts have their own formal conventions.
Because they tend to be metaphorical rather than analogical, memory texts typically have more in common with poetry than with classical narrative. They may be represented as “a montage of vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, 'snapshots', flashes” (162).
4. Memory texts voice a collective imagination.
Oral histories, for example, frequently mix “historical, poetic and legendary forms of speech, whilst still expressing both personal truths and a collective imagination” (165).
5. Memory embodies both union and fragmentation.
Traditionally, the telling of family stories has provided the model for remembering in other types of communities, e.g., of ethnicity, class, generation, although “the condition of modernity” has introduced new modes of relating to and producing memory that suit the needs of individuals in “the era of mechanical reproduction and electronic simulation.” During this era, Kuhn argues, new outlets are offered for “the circulation of collective memory: sound recordings, photographs, television programmes, films, home videos are all part of the currency of daily life.” Equally significant, as she notes, are “new ways of imagining a past that . . . transcends the life of the individual.” Yet, as memory texts proliferate across a range of media, at the same time “memory-communities” shift, and collective remembering changes, too, going in any number of directions-becoming divided, fragmented, blended, united, and/or enriched (167).
Although I'm not sure exactly what time frames Kuhn references here, and I question some of the generalizations she makes, I find her comments on media especially pertinent to considerations of memory and memory work in the digital age, an inquiry her book paves the way for but doesn't address directly.
6. Memory is formative of communities of nationhood.
"With its foothold in both the psyche and in the shared worlds of everyday historical consciousness and collective imagination, memory has a crucial part to play in any national imaginary” (168). This thesis warrants further clarification-What is a “national imaginary”? What are the implications of Kuhn's position regarding the “historical imagination of nationhood” (169)?

I find it interesting that Zalis seems hesitant to accept at least parts of 5 and 6, which I accept as givens. In fact, there's nothing in those six statements that I don't already accept as basic tenets, though I should read Kuhn's book to see what the specific generalizations are. What is new to me is the use of "national imaginary" mentioned in 6. While I've never come across that term before, I love it and am going to start using it. The use of images and the national imaginary play important roles in my dissertation, which is, in fact, a study of "historical imagination of [Anglo-Saxon] nationhood."

Annette Kuhn | autobiographical memory | memory | social memory

New to the Oxford English Dictionary

The online OED start page has either changed, or I've just been too focused on using the dictionary to notice before, but there are both a "Latest new and revised entries" and a "Featured additions" link. It's nice to see that techno-shaman, techno-shamanic, and techno-shamanisim have finally made it into the OED. Other newly added words include: alley-oop, ankle-biter, anti-lock, art house, autopen, boyf, brown dwarf, carbo-load, clip art, co-pay, dipshit, disconnect (this is new?), get-go, ka-ching, light speed, versioning, vidiot, wuss, and wussy.

And I see from Connected Internet News that Podcasting will be making its way into the OED soon.

Oxford English Dictionary | podcasting

First day of class, one week later

Like many, I try to do more than just cover the syllabus on the first day of class. In composition courses, I usually try to get them to talk about their experiences with past writing courses, with their notions of "good" writing, and I begin introducing rhetoric, the rhetorical context and rhetorical triangle, and argument. In literature courses, we start thinking about some key ideas or themes. For instance, with the last literature course I taught, Science Ficiton, I brought in the opening pages of two science fiction and two mainstream novels which I used as a starting point for such issues as the novum, "science fiction thinking," cognitive estrangement, etc. This time around, as I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Studies, I brought in two brief passages, one from a novel and one from a poem retyped to look like prose. Both are by Tolkien and portray Tom Bombadil and Old Man Willow:

Snippet 1
Up woke Willow-man, began upon his singing, sang Tom fast asleep under branches swinging; in a crack caught him tight: quiet it closed together, trapped Tom Bombadil, coat and hat and feather.
"Ha! Tome Bombadil, what be you a-thinking, peeping inside my tree, watching me a-drinking deep in my wooden house, tickling me with feather, dripping wet down my face like a rainy weather?"
"You let me out again, Old Man Willow! I am stiff lying here; they're not sort of pillow, your hard crooked roots. Drink your river water! Go back to sleep again, like the River-daughter!"
Willow-man let him loose, when he heard him speaking; locked fast his wooden house, muttering and creaking, whispering inside the tree. Tom, he sat a-listening. On the boughs piping birds were chirruping and whistling. Tom saw butterflies quivering and winking; Tom called the conies out, till the sun was sinking.

Snippet 2
“What?” shouted Tom Bombadil, leaping up in the air. “Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. Old Man Willow!”
Setting down his lilies carefully on the grass, he ran to the tree. There he saw Merry’s feet still sticking out—the rest of him had already been drawn further inside. Tom put his mouth to the crack and began singing into it in a low voice. They could not catch the words, but evidently Merry was aroused. His legs began to kick. Tom sprang away, and breaking off a hanging branch smote the side of the willow with it. “You let them out again, Old Man Willow!” he said. “What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” He then seized Merry’s feet and drew him out of the suddenly widening crack.

The first is from Tolkien's 1934 version of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil," which was published in Oxford Magazine.* The second is, of course, from The Lord of the Rings.

It's pretty clear that the poem is a poem even though I've changed the stanzas to look like prose paragraphs, and when you read it out loud, it's got a regular rhythm which can be broken back into its stanza form:

Up woke Willow-man, began upon his singing,
sang Tom fast asleep under branches swinging;
in a crack caught him tight: quiet it closed together,
trapped Tom Bombadil, coat and hat and feather.

Even though almost none of them had spent little more than a day or two discussing versification when reading a Shakespeare play, they could all explain why they knew the poem was a poem and where the line breaks should be. Tolkien wasn't trying to write high Modernist poetry, but then, Modernist poetry really can't capture the spirit and the tone of Bombadil, or the Hobbits for that matter.

We used these snippets to discuss what literature is (Literature vs. literature), what their notions, expectations, and experiences with literature and literature classes are, and the like. It not only served to introduce them to some of the concepts and issues we're to cover this term, but it gave me a chance to assess where they're coming from, how they've studied literature in the past, and a bit about what they know.

*The much more commonly known 1963 version of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil," published in such works as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book and The Tolkien Reader, has been rewritten to better conform to the Bombadil that makes his way into The Lord of the Rings -- I believe my dissertation director, Tom Shippey, discusses this revision and how the poem helped Tolkien develop the early part of The Lord of the Rings in his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, though it could be in his The Road to Middle Earth. You can also read a bit about the versions of Bombadil at Bromwell School's "The True Story of Tom Bombadil."

Bombadil | pedagogy | Tom Shippey | teaching | Tolkien

Two Primers: Blogging and RSS Feeds

Ready to Start Blogging
How to set up and run your nonprofit's own digital soapbox
By: Marnie Webb, Director of TechCommons, at CompuMentorSource: ConsultantCommons.org

RSS Feeds - a Website Owner's Friend in Disguise
By Bill Hartzer - August 19, 2005

both via The Depraved Librarian

blogs | blogging | rss

Teaching Writing, "We are the Web," and "Media World"

I just wanted to point to Jeff Rice's excellent riff on Kevin Kelly "We are the Web" article in Wired. As Jeff notes, we do live in a media world and many, if not most of us, have, to some extant or another, consciously or not, absorbed the logic of the Web, of digital culture.

Why resist it? Why treat the digital as something outside the academic/professional realm? Is the digital that different from what we're used to? Does embracing our nature as "media beings," as "being/becoming the Net," dehumanize us in some ways? Is being/being in the network that foreign? Is it the openness, the lack of closure and fixed space and order, that we find disturbing?

Or to think of it another way, haven't we always been media beings? I talked with my Introduction to Literature students today about media, about what constitutes media, and I, of course, historicized. Media, I suggested, is not just movies and TV and magazines and radio and the Web. Our textbooks are media. In his day, Dickens was media and he was consumed veraciously. My lecturing, I pointed out to them, was a multimedia event. I used oral, visual, and kinetic communication.

On the practical level, we were discussing our first readings from The English Studies Book and I wanted to get across the idea of English Studies as the study of language, literature, and culture. But I'm also preparing them for the idea that we, as a species, are Homo Narrans: that one of the most basic things about us is our use of narrative to structure and organize the world. We are, and always have been, media beings. To our core.

We also talked a bit today about intertextuality and context, two words which came up in the reading and that I latched on to, not only to get the ideas themselves across, but to help illustrate the "language" aspect of English studies. We talked prefixes and suffixes for a minute or two. As I read and thought about Jeff's post, these two words begged for me to talk about them. In one section of his book, Pope constructs the following equations:

language: a series of words with meaning: rhetoric
literature: word play: intertextuality
culture: the representation of the human world: discourse

Meaning, as I pointed out to my students, is always social, always requires a set of relationships. To define something is to define what it is not. In other words, to understand something is to put in into its context. And once we've done that, we're well on our way to thinking about intertextulaity. Meaning is relational. Meaning both emerges out of and is at the same time a part of a network. Just as we have always been media beings, we have always been part of the network.

This is not to say that we have always been digital or that consciously know how to be digital. As Jeff notes, we're in the process of becoming, of being, digital, and we're still trying to figure it out. Becoming/embracing the digital requires a remediation of our media/mediated selves and a remediation of how we exist in and use the network, but neither is foreign to us.

digital consciousness | digital literacy | Jeff Rice | teaching | teaching composition | teaching writing

Technologies of Memory in the Arts CFP

As much as I want to, I'm not going to be able to attend this conference so I thought I'd share the CFP in the hopes that someone else will go and enjoy it. Note: I'm not connected to the conference and I can't answer any questions about it.

TECHNOLOGIES OF MEMORY IN THE ARTS

The conference 'Technologies of Memory in the Arts' focuses on art as a cultural and technological practice to process and construct the past in the present. Central questions to this conference are: How do art and artistic practices function as technologies of memory? How are cultural artefacts implicated in complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesia?

As a shared artistic and social practice, cultural memory links the present to the past. In doing so, cultural memory has strong ethical and political aspects. The arts are continuously engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, characterised by repetition, rearrangement, revision, and rejection. In artistic representations new memories are thus constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by narrative strategies, visual and aural styles, intertextuality and intermediality, representations of time and space, and rituals of remembrance. These complex processes of representation are what we understand by the term 'technologies of memory'.

The contemporary fascination with history and memory is accompanied by developments in media technology that have simultaneously a petrifying and a virtualising effect. Both individual and cultural memory are increasingly mediated by modern technologies, which means that memories are not only recorded and recollected by media, but are also shaped and
produced by them. The digital media, in particular, allow for new ways of storing, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memories, as well as cultural artefacts.

The conference theme Technologies of memory in the arts specifically addresses the material construction of cultural memory. Some panels will explore procedures of memory in both traditional and new media. Other panels will investigate the role of digitalisation of art and culture in relation to memory. Generally, the focus of this conference will be on the materiality of representation and on the relation between the medium and the construction of cultural memory.

Key note speakers:
- Marita Sturken (University of Southern California)
- Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)

Panels and papers on the conference theme are invited before 1 November
2005.
Suggested topics:
- Mediated memories
- Narrative strategies
- Intertextuality / intermediality
- Music as memory work
- Urban space and spatial dimensions
- Tourism and heritage
- Musical subcultures as memory space
- Representations of memory in the arts
- Amnesia and anamnesia
- Icons of the recent past
- Rituals of remembrance
- Rituals, music and the shape of memory
- Nostalgia and pastiche
- Retro styles as forms of cultural memory
- Rewritings of the classics
- Digitalisation of archives
- Music/sound recordings and the technology of memory

The department of Comparative Arts and Cultural Studies of the Radboud University Nijmegen participates in the EU-sponsored research network ACUME, a network of over thirty European countries researching cultural
memory from an interdisciplinary perspective. Conference committee: Sophie Levie, Edwin van Meerkerk, Liedeke Plate,
Mathijs Sanders and Anneke Smelik

More information and submission: http://www.ru.nl/comparativearts/research/technologies_of
Contact information: Edwin van Meerkerk, e.v.meerkerk@let.ru.nl, tel. +3124 3615543

cultural memory | memory | memory and technology | social memory