Machina Memorialis

About the Old Machina

2006-09-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

While I've moved all my posts to the new Machina Memorialis site, I've decided to keep the old site up as an archive to keep links, both mine and others, from going dead. And in case you missed the first announcement or didn't get around to it, new Machina Memorialis posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina/. Please update links and readers accordingly. Thank you!

Machina Memorialis Has Moved

2006-07-02T14:44:00.000-05:00

D'oh! I should have mentioned this a few days ago: While I have returned to blogging, I've moved to a new blog using WordPress. New posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina.

Ong Orality-Literacy Contrasts Bibliographies

2006-06-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've compiled both a long and short bibliography of Ong's publications on oral-written-print-electronic contrasts. In addition to the two versions, there's an introduction which offers some important qualifications. As the introduction explains, while extensive, the long bibliography is not comprehensive, and while highly selective, the short bibliography is not intended to be taken as a "best of" or "must read" list. My bibliographies are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

And speaking of Ong bibliographies, I heard a few days ago that Thomas Walsh's definitive Walter J. Ong Bibliography (put together using Ong's own files) is in the process of being put online. The bibliography, which contains has something like 430 entries (each entry includes full reprinting history for a total of some 1,200 items), has been marked up in XML for flexible searching. I'm not sure when it will go public, but I'll let you all know.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

Orality and Literacy | Walter J. Ong | Walter Ong

Ong Bibliographies

2006-06-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

Back in February, I posted a complaint about an bibliography of the orality-literacy wars I found on Palimpsest. My complaint wasn't that the bibliography had been posted--I had a vague memory of someone asking if they could use it and, more importantly, it was attributed to me, but rather I was concerned that it was misidentified as an orality-literacy bibliography. I should have mentioned here earlier that the bibliography was properly labeled before I got around to asking that it be changed. This is way too late in coming, but I wanted to acknowledge this, if, for no other reason, I like the idea behind Palimpsest and want to support it.

I've had many requests for an orality-literacy bibliography over the past few years, and I got a number of them a few weeks ago while at C&W, so I'm putting one together. Rather than attempt a definitive orality-literacy bibliography, I'm focusing on Ong's work and it'll list readings which help contextualize and extend Orality and Literacy. It'll have three parts: a long version (about 40 items), a short version (about 16 items), and three suggested retrospectives. I'll pass it on to Palimpsest once it's done.

C&W and KY

2006-06-05T19:55:00.000-05:00

I'm back from Computers and Writing. Well, I've been back for a week, but less than 100 minutes after my plane landed in St. Louis, Tracey and I were on the road to Kentucky for a Virtue and Vice themed vacation (we visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries and the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill).

The distilleries were cool. While Jim Beam doesn't do a tour of the distillery proper, they do have a cool set up. Maker's Mark's grounds are beautiful, and while they don't offer samples of their bourbon, they do let you taste it as it ferments (fermentation takes place over four days and they let you sample each day).

The Shaker Village is well worth visiting. Plan to spend at least a day and maybe more if you want to go on a number of area hikes, a river boat cruise, or participate in one of their workshops (they'd just done a dry stone construction rock wall workshop a few weeks before we visited). While we didn't stay overnight (there's something like 80 rooms and I've been told by a friend the accommodations are good), we did eat in the restaurant and the food is excellent.

I uploaded some of pictures from the trip to Flickr. The oddest thing we saw was an traveling Angus Beef exhibit, which consisted of a cargo truck (which had most of the exhibit, I'm assuming), and a pickup pulling a cow statue:

I'll post more on C&W in the next few days.

MLA Field Bibliography Fellowship

2006-06-05T19:36:00.000-05:00

Back in Feb., I mentioned that I'd applied for one of the 2006-2009 MLA Field Bibliography Fellowships. MLA hasn't updated the website yet, but beginning July 1, I'll be one of the Field Bibliography Fellows! I don't yet know what journals I'll be covering, but my application listed the following interests: the history and theory of rhetoric; composition studies; medieval literature (particularly Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse); medievalism; orality-literacy studies and the media ecology of oral, chirographic, print, and digital cultures; digital English studies; science fiction; and fantasy. As I noted in my application letter, my interests are quite diverse. While the journals I'll eventually cover will depend upon what isn't already being indexed by a field bibliographer and what I have access to, I'd like to cover a mix of areas. I am planning on checking to see whether or not Kairos is being covered by a field bibliographer, and if it's open, I'm going to request it.

C&W 2006 @Get Info Blurb

2006-05-22T16:42:00.000-05:00

While I don't have a fancy video or anything like that for @Get Info at Computers and Writing, I do have a little blurb. I intended to make a video last week, which would have been me saying something like what I've got below with various places in the archive as backdrop, but plans changed. My hope is that the subject itself will be enough of a draw...

@Get Info Blurb for “Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy”

In February of 1990, Ong wrote a letter to Harvard University Press regarding his most recent book project, entitled Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization.

Wait, I’m sure many of you are thinking, Ong wrote a book on digitization? Kind of. He wrote 40,000 of a projected 50,000 words, some of which did make it into print in such publications as “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I’.” And he wrote a number of other things on the topic that didn’t make it into print, such as the presentation “Secondary Oralism and Secondary Visualism,” and my favorite, the unpublished but brilliant article “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.”

And that’s what my presentation’s going to be about: the stuff that makes up Ong’s “digital turn.” While I’ve talked about what’s in the Ong Manuscript Collection before, this is my first presentation about what I’ve learned while working in the archive.

Session G.3, which is Saturday right after lunch.

computer and writing | C&W2006

C&W 2006 Handout (Select Bibliography)

2006-05-22T16:27:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd post my bibliography handout, which goes with my Computers and Writing 2006 presentation "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy." There should be streaming video archives of a number of the presentations at http://richrice.com/cw/website. On it are a number of unpublished material found in the archives.

Select Bibliography for "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy"

“Kleine, Michael and Frederic Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Forum 7.2 (1996): 65-86.

Ong, Walter J. “A.M.D.G.: Dedication or Directive?” Review for Religious 11 (1952): 257-263. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 1-8.

---. “The Church and Cosmic History.” American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 1-15.

---. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 4-21. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 527-49.

---. “Ecology and Some of Its Future.” Explorations in Media Ecology 1.1 (2002): 5-11.

---. "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time." Thought 34 (1959-60): 547-68. Rpt in revised form in Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives. Ed. by Walter J. Ong. New York: Macmillan, 1960. 125-48. Rpt. in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 61-82; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 2: Supplementary Studies, 1946-1989. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 85-103.

---. Forward to The Barefoot Expert: The Interface of Computerized Knowledge Systems and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. By Doris M. Schoenhoff. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. ix-xii.

---. Forward to Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. By Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. xiii-xiv.

---. “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I.’” Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 183-203.

---. “Information and/or Communication: Interactions.” Communication Research Trends 16.3 (1996): 3-16. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 217-38. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 505-25.

---. “Knowledge in Time.” Introduction to Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium. Ed. Walter J. Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 3-38. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 1. Selected Essays and Studies, 1952-1991. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 127-53.

---. "The Knowledge Explosion and the Sciences of Man." American Benedictine Review 15.1 (1964): 1-13. Rpt as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 41-51. Rpt. as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 55-68.

---. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Oralism to Online Thinking.” Explorations in Media Ecology 2.1 (2003): 43-4.

---. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

---. “Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

---. “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. "Secular Knowledge, Revealed Religion, and History." Religious Education 52.5 (1957): 341-49. Rpt as "Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion" in American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 74-95.

---. “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Voice, Text, Fundamentalism, Hermeneutic, and God’s Word: The Personal Grounding of Truth.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.

Swearingen, C. Jan. “On Photographic ‘Literacy’: An Interview with Walter J. Ong.” Exposure 23.4 (1985): 19-27.

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

computer and writing | C&W2006 | digital culture | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Eurovision Upset: "Monsters" Of Rock Win

2006-05-21T08:35:00.000-05:00

Eurovision? What?

Most of you, I'm guessing, don't follow the annual Eurovision Song Contest, Europe's battle of the bands. I don't either except for the little bit of coverage it gets on the BBC World News, but this year was different. While Eurovision is usually dominated by Europop so bad even Europeans make fun of it, this year's contest was swept away by the Finnish "monster metal" band Lordi and their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah." Even for me, a casual observer of Scandinavian metal, Lordi's invention of monster metal just makes sense. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done by a metal band before, Scandinavian or otherwise. It's a logical move blending the stage presence of KISS, Alice Cooper, and the like with the metal band monster mascot like Iron Maiden's Eddie.

And the song's not bad either as far as metal tributes to rock go. And it's much better than the usual Eurovision fare. Youtube.com, of course, already has a number of videos of the Eurovision performance:

BBC stories on Lordi's win:

Finnish monsters rock Eurovision

How horror rock conquered Europe

Finns shocked by Eurovision band

Link Roundup

2006-05-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

The Scotsman has a short piece based on an interview with the Vatican's astronomer. The story has a very Ongian take on the intersection of science and religion: "Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer." Via Neil Gaiman.

Cow abductions. Watch the video on the front page. Via Lisa at The Truth Hurts.

Michael Drout's How Tradition Works: A Meme-based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century is now out. It's a must read book for me, but I'm not sure if it's going to be a read-for-dissertation book. It would have been a must-read for the old dissertation, and while it's something I should read now, the cut off point for new books has probably been passed.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education has published the report "Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences."

The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative is funding the NEW TIES project, which seeks to create a "computer society" of software agents capable of developing their own culture and language. Via CogNews.

I forgot to add:

University of Toronto Press has published Marcel O'Gorman's E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities, a book which I want to check out.

Matthew Driscoll of the Arnamagnæan Institute has an article in the new issue of Digital Medievalist that describes the new manuscript description module in TEI P5: "P5-MS: A General Purpose Tagset for Manuscript Description."

Ong at MLA 2006

2006-05-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

MLA has accepted my panel "Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy at 25," which I hope will be the first of a series of 25th anniversary celebrations for the book. MLA's on board, C&W 2007 will likely be a go, so now it's up to CCCC. Steve may be right: 2007 just might be the year of Ong.

The MLA panel's three papers and presenters are:

"Orality, Literacy, and Ong's Asymmetrical Opposition" by Jerry Harp of Lewis and Clark College

"Orality and Literacy as a Methodological Apparatus for Examining Women's Rhetorics" by Melissa Fiesta of California State University, Long Beach

"Ong, Derrida, and the New Media Theory" by David Martyn of Macalester College

We'll be posting abstracts later this summer.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

MLA | MLA2006 | Orality and Literacy | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Miscellanea

2006-05-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

I meant to post this much earlier, but the time between returning from a celebratory dinner and discovering the theft of the Neon was about 8 hours. Any way, on May 2, Gina Merys defended her dissertation, "Teaching Freedom: The De-Colonized Classroom, Empowerment, and First Year Writing," and she was hooded yesterday. Dr. Merys joins Creighton University as an assistant professor later this summer.

I finished grading over the weekend and submitted grades on Sunday. For the most part, the final papers were good, and a number of them taught me something about the texts we read, which is always a great thing. All in all, a good class. I'll be posting a wrap up in the not too distant future.

We bought a new PT Cruiser on Tuesday because, as I mentioned yesterday, our Neon was stolen and totaled. While it means having a car payment, and, therefore, me having to pick up freelance work this summer to cover it, we wanted a new car rather than an used one. My mother-in-law loves brokering car deals, so we let her at it. She got us a better price than we were hoping for and other than the color, the car has everything we wanted. While we wanted black, we got magnesium, which was our second choice.

I need to need to reread Heaven's War. With the movie hype going around, I couldn't help but note some echoes of the Da Vinci Code, which isn't to say that Heaven's War has anything to do with the Da Vinci Code but rather that both stories draw from the Grail/Knights Templar/Merovingian mythologies covered in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I've not read either book, but I know good amount about both, so I was able to pick up Heaven's War's use of Holy Blood, Holy Grail well before I read the notes in the back of the book. I've been told by a number of people that I should read the Da Vinci Code at some point and I probably will. Even if it wasn't enjoyable, and I've been told by enough people that it is, it's medievalism and it's bringing students into medieval studies courses, and that's a good enough reason to put it on a "to read" list. Heaven's War itself focuses much more on Charles Williams than on Tolkien or Lewis, which I found disappointing, but I expected as much. The title, after all, is a nod to Williams' own grail story, The War in Heaven.

The backyard lawn, which we replanted last October is doing quite well. Too well, I think. It needs to be mowed more than once a week and it's so thick it jams up the lawn mower. With this new found lawn success, we're probably going to rent a roto-tiller again and tear up the front yard, which not only suffers from the hard-packed Missouri clay but a steep slope and too much shade. We're also thinking about turning the front yard slope into terraced flowerbeds. We've also got canna coming in and the hostas have grown in. We've filled our screened-in porch with flowers and other plants (including two basil plants), and we've also got a number of moonflower seedlings ready to transplant. I need to build a trellis to put up alongside the porch so we can enjoy the moonflowers when we sit out there in the evenings. I'm also supposed to build a number of bamboo border fences in the Yotsume style. The bamboo has even been ordered.

"No sign of theft"

2006-05-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

Just over two weeks ago, our 1995 Neon was stolen, taken for a joyride, and, as is almost always the case in St. Louis, intentionally crashed before abandoned. The aftermath, for the most part, was one long nightmare. Before we could see our car, we had to once again talk to the police, who tried to get us to admit to crashing our car and fleeing the scene. That was a two hour nightmare in which the detective told us a number of lies, including that she had sent someone down to the impound lot to check our car and that there were no signs of theft. (When we finally got to see the car, we found the steering column exposed, the ignition lock busted up, and ignition lock fragments all over the floor of the car.) At some point, I called my dad, who is an attorney, a retired FBI agent, and a retired judge, and he told me how to push back. He also told me it would piss the detective off, but that she'd give us the paperwork to get our car. She got pissed off, but she did let us go shortly after. She wouldn't, however, ever give us a theft report number. I had to call back to ask for one and she told me there wasn't one. I then asked if she'd had someone look at the car because, contrary to what she'd told us earlier, there were clear signs of theft. She said someone would look into it, and called the next day to tell us that the car had been stolen. She then told my wife that the accident report would also serve as our theft report. When we picked it up five days later, it didn't. We've finally gotten it all resolved, but it took the intervention of the Crime Victims' Advocacy Association.

And here, for your enjoyment, are a few more pictures of the non-existent signs of theft: The ignition, in b&w:

A pulled back view. Note the small item on the floor mat above the black rectangle of rubber -- that's the biggest piece of the ignition lock. Apparently it's too small for a St. Louis Police officer to notice. But then, they assumed I've driven the car for the past three years with the steering column and ignition lock in the state you see above.

"Heaven's War": The Inklings Vs. Crowley

2006-05-08T20:02:00.000-05:00

I don't remember where I learned about Heaven's War by Micah Harris and Michael Gaydos, but it was sometime in the last 6 months. I ordered it last week as a post-semester diversion. It's short, so it won't be that much of a distraction, and finishing up a semester of teaching science fiction (it's finals week), I can't rationalize reading something like the Quicksilver, the first novel in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which has been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I could, probably, rationalize Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus or Tales of a Scottish Grandfather Vol. 1: From Bannockburn to Flodden: Wallace, Bruce and the Heroes of Medieval Scotland by Walter Scott (justified, even, as Scott engaging in the production of social memory). But, really, I just can't pass up this comic, which is described as such:

1938: As the world moves toward global war, a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind's fate. The infamous Aleister Crowley plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will.

Only "The Inklings"--20th century fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams--oppose his scheme. Their altercation with Crowley will take them to the very threshold of Heaven--and one of the Inklings outside time itself!

Lewis and Tolkien have long been favorite authors of mine, and I've enjoyed their scholarship as much as their fiction. And not only did I TA and then teach my own Tolkien course before the movies made it fashionable to do so, I team taught a class on the Inklings with T.A. Shippey a few years ago. Like I said, I can't pass this up.

It came much earlier than I expected, so now I've got to put it away until I've submitted grades.

And need I mention that I've got Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley" going through my head?

Aleister Crowley | Charles Williams | comics | C.S. Lewis | graphic novel | Inklings | J.R.R. Tolkien

Resources on Electronic Scholarly Publishing

2006-05-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

Via the Humanist Discussion Group:

Version 62 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,680 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The Open Access Webliography (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information: The page-specific "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" (listing all indexed items) deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 2,300 indexed titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated.

digital scholarship | electronic publishing | Open Access

CFP: The Digital Archive

2006-05-04T21:14:00.000-05:00

via the Humanist Discussion Group:

Image (&) Narrative (www.imageandnarrative.be), a peer reviewed, online journal published by the University of Leuven (Belgium), is inviting submissions for a special issue on:

The Digital Archive

In human societies memory is organized in two basic forms: material forms (tablets, paintings, books, etc.) on the one hand and immaterial forms (oral history, dances, songs, etc.) on the other hand. These forms represent two organizing principles that function in different ways. While material forms of memory are fixed, immaterial ways of remembering are fluid. Tablets, paintings, texts, & are affirmative and stable, while conversations, oral traditions, ... have a more ambiguous or dialogic' character. Especially in western societies, the first organizing principle has gained more authority. Material memory' has laid the foundation of modern bureaucracy and of every industrial or post-industrial company. Contracts and laws are the most evident examples of material memory' which guarantee the relative stability necessary for every modern organization. In this context, the classical archive often functions as a library of proof' on which societies can always rely when appointments are discussed, rules are violated or facts are disputed. In other words, the classical archive as a reservoir of material memory is one of the crucial foundations that have made modern society & modern.

The introduction of digital databases transforms the way Western societies use their archives. The most visible result of digitization is of course the fact that the classical archive, once digitized, becomes a more fluid one. Although it may not become as instable as conversations, oral history or urban legends, the possibility of permanent transformation is real. As soon as new data enter a networked archive, the database can reorganize itself just as oral legends transform over time when the storyteller or the audience changes. At least we can say that the digital archive is a strange hybrid between material and immaterial memory machines. But in the digital era classical' archives do not disappear. Just as the paperless' office has proven a fiction (utopian or dystopian, following the sources), the world of archives is not one-dimensional. Classical and digital archives coexist, not always pacifically, their respective logics, areas and scopes interact, and their users have to switch permanently from one type of archive to another.

Deadline for submissions: 1st of November 2006
Please contact:
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
rudi.laermans@soc.kuleuven.be
pascal.gielen@soc.kuleuven.be

archive | cfp | digital archive | digital scholarship | memory

Writing Tickets

2006-05-02T07:34:00.000-05:00

When I read Laurence Musgrove's IHE piece "The Real Reasons Students Can’t Write" last week, my reaction to it was, not surprisingly, similar to the reactions of Steve Krause and Mike Garcia. As I read it, Ed White's recent invoking of Peter Elbow on WPA-L came to mind. White reminded us of Elbow's argument that we shouldn't use revision as punishment, that we shouldn't revise our "bad" writing, but, rather, that we should use revision to make our good writing better.

As much as I agree with that notion, however, we're not always left with the option of revising our best work, or even good work. Sometimes, we're stuck with the crap we've got. And that's the problem Musgrove is trying to solve. As states in the piece, most student errors are the result of not caring about the writing or not noticing the error in that particular instance rather than not knowing how to write.

Musgrove's answer to making students care--the writing ticket--can't be a good solution. While punishment can be a strong motivation to reduce error, the reliance upon a system of negative feedback, of punishment, is going to teach students, especially students who need the most writing instruction, to write as little as possible and to avoid writing whenever possible.

If the problem here is with error, maybe a better solution would be to increase training in editing distinct and separate from writing and revision. Yes, editing is part of the writing process, but editing is also a distinct craft and most professional writers have editors who edit their work because it's understood that even the best writers make and fail to catch errors. Not everyone is cut out to be a good editor--I'm pretty sure I'm not--but we can all learn how to systematically scan a piece for error. Done well, this separates revision from editing, revision from the elimination of error, and it directly addresses editing as a rhetorical act along the lines of Joseph Williams' "The Phenomenology of Error."

composition | composition studies | Laurence Musgrove | teaching writing

Book Meme

2006-05-01T10:25:00.000-05:00

I'm resisting the urge to say that I don't do memes but I'm doing this one because, well, we all say that. I came across this one at blogos

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open it to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Copy it onto your blog/journal along with these instructions

The book is David Farrell Krell's Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge which is on my desk between the keyboard and my iMac. Here's the fifth full sentence:

They allow only particular peridos of stimulus to pass.

Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth

2006-05-01T06:55:00.000-05:00

Back in October, I made a brief reference to Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey, a collection which I'm co-editing with Andrew Wawn and Graham Johnson. While we knew Brepols Publishers was going to pick it up for over a year, we now have a contract. It will be published as part of Brepols' Making the Middle Ages series, and the collection is about the “the Grimmian Revolution," what Shippey calls the development and the results of comparative philology in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the initial contact letter that we sent to potential contributors and in our initial discussions with Brepols, we offered the following possible topics:

-the effects of literary and linguistic discovery on European national self-definitions
-the way in which comparative philology was extended, successfully or not, to comparative mythology
-the creation of folkloristics as a study, including the collecting of folktale and folk-ballad
-the history of the recovery of the old Northern literatures and languages
-the reception of those literatures and languages in general, and the way they have altered modern literary sensibility.

The collection will have 16 essays divided into three topics (nationalism, philology, and mythology) by scholars from 7 countries. It covers such topics the rise of Finnish vernacular literature, Beowulf, Tolkien as philologist and mythologist, Old Norse poetry and myth, the Mabinogi, Macpherson's Ossian and Scottish nationalism, Frisian and Danish "Grimmian" figures, and Anglo-Irish-Icelandic connections. It's on track to be published in October 2007.

What I don't think is going to be made explicit in the collection is how all of this, the whole of Grimmian Revolution, is social memory. Sometime after we finish editing the whole thing -- probably after the collection itself is out -- I plan on writing an essay on the Grimmian Revolution as projects in social memory.

There's something a bit exhilarating and a bit intimidating about signing a book contract.

Cognitive Science News Roundup

2006-04-29T11:16:00.000-05:00

Four interesting pieces from the world of cognitive science caught my attention this week, two of which deal with the always controversial intersection of cognition and genetics and evolution. I found the first three at CogNews and heard the last on NPR's Science Friday.

Evidence of genetic influence over cognitive abilities:

A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study’s primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups. [Read more.]

Weak electrical currents can improve brain function:

A growing body of evidence suggests that passing a small electric current through your head can have a profound effect on the way your brain works. Called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the technique has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills and to improve learning and memory in healthy people - making fully-functioning brains work even better. It is also showing promise as a therapy to cure migraine and speed recovery after a stroke, and may extract more from the withering brains of people with dementia. Some researchers think the technique will eventually yield a commercial device that healthy people could use to boost their brain function at the flick of a switch. [Read more.]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finds supports smart mob theory when it comes to complex problem solving:

Groups of three, four, or five perform better on complex problem solving than the best of an equivalent number of individuals, says a new study appearing in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). This finding may transfer to scientific research teams and classroom problem solving and offer new ways for students to study and improve academic performance, according to the study authors. [Read more.

Science Friday's interview with Before the Dawn: Recovering The Lost History of Our Ancestors author, Nicholas Wade. New York Times' science reporter Nicholas Wade and NPR's Ira Flatow discuss Wade's new book Before the Dawn, which explains discoveries in recent human evolution. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of the intersections between cognitive development and evolution.

I know that racism, both current and past, is always a concern when we wade into the intersections of evolution/genetics and cognition, but it's interesting and important work nonetheless. It's part of the story of human development.

And, finally, the implications of improving brain function via applying weak electrical currents are fascinating.

New Blog: The Forgotten Canon

2006-04-28T00:21:00.000-05:00

While you might think one could get lonely working at the intersection of medieval memory studies and techrhet, it's never been a lonely place because Kathie Gossett's always been there with me. And now she's blogging too.

digital rhetoric | digital scholarship | medieval rhetoric | memory

Tag Literacy

2006-04-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

Via tengrrl, an article on tag literacy I want to look at soon.

Update: Link fixed.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Futurist Folk Opera

2006-04-27T18:13:00.000-05:00

About two weeks ago, as we were discussing R.U.R. in class, a student asked me if it had ever been performed. I wish I'd known this then. R.U.R., the play by Karel Čapek that gave us the word robot, has been made into an opera and is being performed this week and the next.

This world premiere will blend Rock, Tango, Jazz and Punk music with contemporary dance to re-imagine Karel Čapek's original 1921 classic, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek's play that started it all, introducing the word ROBOT into the world's lexicon and into our fantasies, is reexamined for the 21st Century.

This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC).

Via Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Dennis also has a great R.U.R. resource page

Another Day, Another Proposal (Two, Really)

2006-04-26T14:07:00.000-05:00

Having organized or co-organized three prior "Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom" sessions for the Midwest Modern Language Association convention, I've finally decided to step aside and submit a proposal for the session. M/MLA posts 250 word abstracts, so I've spent part of the morning revising mine to this:

“Memory as Composition: Monastic Rhetoric, Cognitive Science, and Imageword”

In The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, Mary Carruthers argues that the focus of medieval monastic rhetoric was on the creation of compositions for meditation rather than on persuading others. Meditation, Carruthers notes, is “a craft of thinking” used for “making things” (4). This work, both the process and the product, involved cognitive images – imagewords, to borrow Kristie Fleckenstein’s term, used in a recursive process of creating and representing meaning. These imagewords, a mixture of the memoria rerum (memory for things) and memoria verborum (memory for words) best known to contemporary rhetoricians and compositionists as part and parcel of the Ciceronian art of memory, work as metaphor, and it is by understanding them as a metaphor that we can understand how the imageword, how the art of memory itself, works. Current thought in cognitive science argues that metaphor functions through the processes of structure mapping and conceptual integration (also known as conceptual blending or mental binding), and it is through the theory of conceptual integration that we can understand how both classical and medieval ars memoria and contemporary image theory work on the cognitive level. In bringing together the theories and practices of monastic rhetoric, cognitive science, and imagery in composition studies, I will suggest a theoretical and practical framework for developing a contemporary art of memory, one that sees memory as a composition craft.

It might sound a bit familiar to some of you, as it's closely connected to my earlier musing on my cognitive (re)turn and it is, more or less, the third chapter of my dissertation, though I'm not going to talk about MOO-based writing, which I do discuss in the dissertation.

Up next is an abstract for the CCCC 2007 memory roundtable which Kathie Gossett is organizing. I'm going to talk about the role social memory plays in rhetoric and composition. Or, really, as I'll have somewhere around 6-8 minutes, I'll be talking about one of the roles social memory does play. I think, though I'm not sure yet, that I'll discuss my adaptation of Pierre Nora's notion of les lieux des memorie (site or realm of memory) and their function as a form of social commonplaces and how we can use them. While I didn't use the Nora's terminology in my cognitive (re)turn posts, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy functions as an Anglo-Saxon site of memory throughout Beowulf, and in that post I suggested a few ways in which the Beowulf-poet uses this social commonplace mnemonically. In my CCCC presentation, as well as in my chapter on social memory in rhetoric and composition, I'm going to use Jon Stewart's September 20, 2001 monologue, the first new Daily Show after September 11. What most interests me is the last half of the monologue, which reads:

One of my first memories was of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five and if you wonder if this feeling will pass. . . (choked up). . . When I was five and he was shot, this is what I remember about it. I was in school in Trenton and they turned the lights off and we got to sit under our desks. . . and that was really cool. And they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there were riots, but we didn’t know that. We just thought, "My God! We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese!" And that’s what I remember about it. And that was a tremendous test of this country's fabric and this country has had many tests before that and after that.

The reason I don’t despair is that. . . this attack happened. It's not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery, is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King's dream.

Whatever barriers we put up are gone. Even if it's just momentary. We are judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character. (pause) You know, all this talk about "These guys are criminal masterminds. They got together and their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill. . ." It's all a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding. . . that’s extraordinary. And that's why we have already won. . . they can't. . . it's light. It's democracy. They can't shut that down.

They live in chaos. And chaos, it can't sustain itself--it never could. It's too easy and it's too unsatisfying. The view. . . from my apartment. . . (choking up) was the World Trade Center. . .

Now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of. . . of American ingenuity and strength. . . and labor and imagination and commerce and it's gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. . . the view from the south of Manhattan is the Statue of Liberty. . .

You can’t beat that. . .

Note how he uses Martin Luther King, Jr., the World Trade Center, and the Statue of Liberty as commonplaces. Each functions as a social commonplace with a host of meanings. While the whole range of meanings won't all hold for specific individuals, each holds mnemonic value within American society while at the same time serving as symbols of America itself. Rather than just name each of the three sites of memory, Stewart tells us what value we should ascribe to MLK and to the World Trade Center, and in doing so he both calls upon our own store of knowledge and creates for us a cognitive image, an imageword to use Fleckenstein's term, that both makes meaning for us and serves to anchor that meaning in our minds. The Statue of Liberty is used in the same way too, but I think its also interesting that he doesn't believe there's a need to explicate, to define, the statues mnemonic value. While we can all read the meaning of Statue of Liberty against the grain, its symbolic value is deeply rooted in the American psyche, in American social memory.

I could also, and in the dissertation I might, talk about how other elements such as sitting under one's desk at school, firefighters and policemen, democracy, chaos, and even light, function mnemonically in the monologue, but the big three are more than enough.

The Daily Show | medieval rhetoric | memory | rhetoric | social memory

Crime Problem? Hire Gurkhas

2006-04-18T21:36:00.000-05:00

I've long had a fascination with the Gurkhas,, a people from Nepal, ever since I first learned about them in high school. The Gurkhas are famous for the soldiers they produce -- in fact, the British East India Company was so impressed with them, after finally defeating them, Britian hired them as soldiers and Gurkhas have been part of the British army ever since. There are still four Gurkhas regiments in the British Army -- no other former or current members of the Commonwealth outside the UK have this distinction, and the Gurkhas have won more Victoria Crosses than any other troop in the British Army.

I first learned of the Gurkhas because of the khukuri, their traditional knife used for everything from choping wood to skinning animals to combat. There are stories of Gurkhas and their khukuris are legion. The first stories I remember hearing were of Gurkhas running through German trenches in WWI lopping heads off as they went.

Every once in a while, especially since Hong Kong was returned to China (until then, the Gurkhas were based in Hong Kong), you hear of former Gurkhas hiring out their services. The Gurkhas International Group provides services around the world and Claudia Schiffer reportedly hired Gurkhas bodyguards last year. And now, a news report this week states that an IKEA store in Nottingham has hired ex-Gurkhas soldiers to protect their parking lot. I love this quote:

"It's true that there has been no crime in the car park at all since the Gurkhas came in," David Attle, the store's risk controller, told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency amid the busy bank holiday rush.

"Prior to their appointment we had quite a high incident rate and it's a pleasure to say that since we have had the Gurkhas doing the patrols we haven't had a single incident so far."

Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity

2006-04-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity

From the Preface:

Computer science has drawn from and contributed to many disciplines and practices since it emerged as a field in the middle of the 20th century. Those interactions, in turn, have contributed to the evolution of information technology: New forms of computing and communications, and new applications, continue to develop from the creative interaction of computer science and other fields. Focused initially on interactions between computer science and other forms of science and engineering, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) began in the mid-1990s to examine opportunities at the intersection of computing and the humanities and the arts. In 1997, it organized a workshop that illuminated the potential, as well as the practical challenges, of mining those opportunities1 and that led, eventually, to the project described in this report. Ensuing discussions between CSTB staff and people interested in the intersection of computing and the humanities or the arts, notably Joan Shigekawa of the Rockefeller Foundation, a participant in the 1997 workshop, culminated in a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study information technology and creativity (see Box P.1 for the statement of task).

This report should be read with two conditions in mind: First, it is, by design, a record of the project, filled with descriptions, observations, conclusions, and recommendations intended to motivate and sustain interest and activity in the rich intersection of information technology (IT) and the arts and design. Second, in this book form it cannot possibly convey the exciting possibilities at that intersection. Instead, it presents examples and pointers to sites on the World Wide Web and in the physical world where that intersection can be observed and experienced. We urge the reader to treat this report as a primer and guidebook and to seek out instances of IT and creative practices—ITCP—directly. [The Report]

What I'm Thinking About Today: Conceptual Integration Networks

2006-04-14T10:53:00.000-05:00

From the introduction to an expanded web version of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's "Conceptual Integration Networks," Cognitive Science 22.2 (1998): 133-187.

Much of the excitement about recent work on language, thought, and action stems from the discovery that the same structural cognitive principles are operating in areas that were once viewed as sharply distinct and technically incommensurable. Under the old view, there were word meanings, syntactic structures, sentence meanings (typically truth-conditional), discourse and pragmatic principles, and then, at a higher level, figures of speech like metaphor and metonymy, scripts and scenarios, rhetoric, forms of inductive and deductive reasoning, argumentation, narrative structure, etc. A recurrent finding in recent work has been that key notions, principles, and instruments of analysis cut across all these divisions and in fact operate in non-linguistic situations as well. Here are some of them:

Frames structure our conceptual and social life. As shown in the work of Fillmore, Langacker, Goldberg, and others, they are also, in their most generic, and schematic forms, a basis for grammatical constructions. Words are themselves viewed as constructions, and lexical meaning is an intricate web of connected frames. Furthermore, although cognitive framing is reflected and guided by language, it is not inherently linguistic. People manipulate many more frames than they have words and constructions for.

Analogical mapping, traditionally studied in connection with reasoning, shows up at all levels of grammar and meaning construction, such as the interpretation of counterfactuals and hypotheticals, category formation , and of course metaphor, whether creative or conventional.

Reference points, focus, viewpoints, and dominions are key notions not only at higher levels of narrative structure, but also at the seemingly micro-level of ordinary grammar, as shown convincingly by Langacker 1993, Zribi-Hertz 1989, Van Hoek 1997, Cutrer 1994, among others.

Connected mental spaces account for reference and inference phenomena across wide stretches of discourse, but also for sentence-internal multiple readings and tense/mood distributions. Mappings at all levels operate between such spaces, and like frames they are not specifically linguistic. (Fauconnier 1997, Dinsmore 1991, Cutrer 1994, Fauconnier and Sweetser, 1996).

Connectors and conceptual connections also operate at all levels, linking mental spaces and other domains for coreference, for metonymy (Nunberg 1978), and for analogy and metaphor (Turner 1991, Sweetser 1990).

There are other notions that apply uniformly at seemingly different levels, such as figure/ground organization (Talmy 1978), profiling, or pragmatic scales.Running through this research is the central cognitive scientific idea of projection between structures. Projection connects frames to specific situations, to related frames, and to conventional scenes. Projection connects related linguistic constructions. It connects one viewpoint to another and sets up new viewpoints partly on the basis of old. It connects counterfactual conceptions to non-counterfactual conceptions on which they are based. Projection is the backbone of analogy, categorization, and grammar.

In the present study, we show that projection typically involves conceptual integration. There is extensive previous research on varieties of projection, but not on conceptual integration. Empirical evidence suggests that an adequate characterization of mental projection requires a theory of conceptual integration. We propose the basis for such a theory and argue that conceptual integration—like framing or categorization—is a basic cognitive operation that operates uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. It also operates along a number of interacting gradients. Conceptual integration plays a significant role in many areas of cognition. It has uniform, systematic properties of structure and dynamics. [Read more.]

My Cognitive (Re)Turn II

2006-04-08T12:50:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to thrash out some idea here that seem to be just beyond my ability to explain them, so any thoughts or suggestions would be quite welcome. While I start off by talking about Beowulf, I'm really talking about rhetorical memory rather than the poem. I should also note that I'm probably quoting too heavily. I do that with early drafts, and especially with zero drafts, as I try to internalize the information.

In yesterday's post, "My Cognitive (Re)Turn," I discussed how proverbs in Beowulf play a mnemonic role: by reading the generic meaning within the context of the narrative, the poet can tell parts of the story without narrating them. In Beowulf , this form of mnemonic shorthand isn't just limited to proverbs. In fact, the poem is full of such apposition. People, events, and ideas are projected into the poem and we are meant to interpret the narrative of the poem through these people, events, and ideas. While the connection between the proverbs and the narrative is often clear, many of the people and events referred to in the poem seem superfluous, and are commonly referred to as digressions even while their mnemonic function is recognized (though their function is not specifically described as mnemonic). Each of these elements, say, for instance, the Finnsburg episode or Modþryð, function as concepts pregnant with meaning (what I'm calling their mnemonic value), which are, in effect, stories projected into other stories, which he defines as parables (see the first four chapters of Mark Turner's The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language for a detailed discussion of these ideas).

The cognitive work that allows us to read the story of Beowulf through the lens of these concepts takes place in what Turner calls "blended space," which is where conceptual blending occurs. He writes: “A blended space has input spaces. There is partial projection from the input spaces to the blend. […] Crucially, blended spaces can develop emergent structure of their own and can project structure back to there input spaces. Input spaces can be not only providers of projections to the blend, but also receivers of projections back from the developed blend” (60), and then continues, "One of the great cognitive advantages of a blended space is its freedom to deal in all the vivid specifics--ploughing, straw, barns, planning, talking, deceiving--of both its input spaces. Although the blended space will conform to its own logic, it is free of various constraints of possibility that restrict the input spaces. By means of these specifics from both input spaces, the blended space can powerfully activate both spaces and keep them easily activate while we do cognitive work over them to construct meaning. Upon that circus of lively information, the mind can dwell and work to develop a projection" (61).

While there’s much I want to do with this understanding of conceptual blending (for instance, I’m going to argue in my dissertation that this is the modern explanation of the inner workings of medieval memory theory's machina memorialis, the engine of thought), what I want to point out here is that this is not a unidirectional system. By working through the conceptual blending of ideas, not only do the input systems (such as the proverb and the story of Beow I discussed yesterday, or the story of Modþryð which we are to read in apposition to the stories of Hroðgar and Beowulf) provide the meanings we are to blend, our potential understandings of their individual meanings are changed – expanded – by that blending. Why do I see this as important? Because, as I titled a short position paper/rant in a history of rhetoric course: “Memory Lane is a Two-way Street.”

The conceptual blending we’re asked to do while reading Beowulf only works if we’re aware of the meanings of the concepts we’re supposed to blend. For instance, if we don’t know who Modþryð is and what historical role she played in Danish history (she was a queen who turned brutal, possibly because of pride), we can’t read her in apposition to Hroðgar and Beowulf. Likewise, if we don’t recognize a proverb as a proverb, or if we have no idea what the proverb means, then we’ll miss the opportunity to decode the meaning, the story, the proverb mnemonically represents. What I want to suggest is that as mnemonic shorthands, these concepts are cultural commonplaces that are invoked by rhetors/authors/storytellers.

Because our traditional histories of rhetoric define rhetorical memory as memorization for purposes of recalling oral speeches, our traditional stories of the commonplaces describe them as one-way systems that work internally: the commonplaces are containers where we store common topics which we can use to develop a composition. Commonplaces, I want to suggest, have a second, external, function. By invoking a shared commonplace, a specific person, event, or concept that is pregnant with meaning, a rhetor invokes those meanings as well, and, in fact, relies upon that commonplace to work as a mnemonic shorthand for those meanings. So, for instance, the Old English maxims invoked in the opening section of Beowulf are able to do their cognitive work when the audience is aware of the maxims or, at least, the social practices to which the maxims refer. They only work when the audience is aware of the connotations they’re supposed to invoke.

Knowing how to invoke commonplaces allows rhetors to invoke the ideas, emotions, and other conceptual freight associated with that commonplace. While I’ve been using literature as my example so far, this is not limited to literature. In fact, like Mark Turner, I believe that literature is not a special case of language in use, but instead, only seems special because it tends to foreground the cognitive function of language that is largely transparent in everyday practice and, therefore, unconscious. Whether we realize it or not, the description of how proverbs work in Beowulf is also the description of how general, everyday thought works. Again, for a full account, you’ll want to read Turner, but let me offer this short quote to help illustrate this point. Turner writes: “Abstract reasoning appears to be possible in large part because we project image-schematic structure from spatial concepts onto abstract concepts. We say, for example, ‘Shame forced him to confess,’ even though no physical forces are involved. Forms of social and psychological causation are understood by projection from bodily causation that involves physical forces. This is parable” (18). What Turner means here is that we have no difficulty processing the idea that shame can force someone to do something even though shame is an abstract concept, which cannot have animate agency. As he explains, it is "the projection of a basic abstract story of movement by an actor under his own power onto a different story of action, whether or not it involves movement" (39): in short, as a parable, we process the sentence "Shame forced him to confess" the same way we process the mnemonic shorthands in Beowulf discussed above. Likewise, words like terrorism and patriot function as parables and serve as mnemonic shorthand for President George Bush in the same way that proverbs and Modþryð do for the Beowulf poet.

I need to better develop and expand upon what I’ve got here, but it’s a start at defining the concepts from cognitive science that I'm using to lay the groundwork for discussing cognitive images, the architectural mnemonic (places and images mnemonic), and contemporary work on mental, verbal, and graphic imagery (chapter 2), and, of course, the whole notion of the bi-directional work of memory leads to the social, and therefore helps set up my chapters on rhetoric and social memory (chapter 4), and literature as social memory (chapter 5).

I realize my use of commonplace here may be problematic because commonplaces are most often discussed as categories, as places (containers) for topics rather than as specific concepts themselves. I still need to do more reading on the commonplaces and commonplace thinking, but much of what I’ve read notes that the whole concept is somewhat vague and never fully defined in any systematic or authoritative way. Unless someone’s got a better suggestion or wants to point me towards something I should read or reread, I want to use it, if for no other reason than to stress the fact that by neglecting memory, we've constructed an understanding of rhetoric that is too narrow.

My Cognitive (Re)Turn

2006-04-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

Donna's recent post "Virtual forgetting" reminded me that I wanted to a least touch upon habit memory and body memory and writing. Nothing profound in touching upon this as its a commonplace that habit and regularity (time, place, materials) are conducive for writing, but placing this within the context of habit memory and body memory is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of rhetorical memory. (If it's not readily apparent, I define rhetorical memory about as broadly as one can get. Essentially, if it's memory or memory related and it applies, it's rhetorical memory as far as I'm concerned.) As I was walking to meet some people for lunch yesterday, my mind jumped from habit memory to prototypes and scripts and schemas and how they can be engaged by writers. (All my reading here has, to date, been limited to cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics; a search of CompPile shows, as I suspected, composition studies flirted with the ideas in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, but they never took like they have in literary studies.)

The more distance I get from my old dissertation, the more I begin to realize everything that was going wrong. At some point, after having done some extensive poking around in cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, I wrote a snippet, drawing heavily from Mark Turner's The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language as an example of the cognitive turn I wanted to take with my dissertation on memory in Old English literature. It's nothing exciting and was just meant to serve as an example of the value I was finding in this work and to show why I wanted to include this perspective. I wrote:

While proverbs have their origins in oral tradition and often represent what we’d today call folk wisdom, they also function as mnemonic devices and operate by invoking cultural values, practices, and beliefs. As John Miles Foley explains, for a “competent audience,” proverbs and proverbial speech “activate networks of immanent meaning to which they are linked by performance fiat and traditional practice” (Singer, 42). In specific reference to Beowulf, Foley argues that proverbs serve to situate the narrative within the context of the culture: “This common gambit embeds the specifics of a particular situation in the overarching traditional network that informs all individual moments. It builds a bridge between the particular and the generic, the momentary and the traditional” (How to Read 106).

We can see a proverb providing a bridge between the specific (the narrative) and the generic (the meaning of the proverb) within the first proverbial statement in Beowulf:

Swa sceal (geong g)uma gode gewyrcean, fromum feohgiftum on fæder (bea)rme, þæt hine on ylde eft gewunigen wilgesi†as, þonne wig cume, leode gelæsten; (20-24a) (Thus should a young man bring about good with pious gifts from his father’s possessions, so that later in life loyal comrades will stand beside him when war comes, the people will support him;)

This proverbial statement, a variation of “Cyning sceal mid ceape cwene gebicgan, / bunum ond beagum; bu sceolon ærest / geofum god wesan” ‘A king has to procure a queen with a payment, with goblets and with rings. Both must be pre-eminently liberal with gifts’ (“Maxims I,” 81-83b) and “Geongne æþeling sceolan gode gesiðas / byldan to beaduwe and to beahgife” ‘Noble companions must urge on the prince / While young to battle and to treasure-giving’ (“Maxims II,” 14-15), expresses the Anglo-Saxon sentiment that good kings should buy and reward loyalty with treasure and that this treasure giving should begin early to ensure support when the throne is assumed. In Beowulf, just before this proverbial statement is made, we have been introduced to Scyld’s son Beow, who is “breme” ‘renown’ (18a) and who has had his “blæd wide sprang” ‘glory wide spread’ (18b). After Scyld’s death, Beow is described as a beloved king who long ruled his people (53-55a). The mnemonic value of the proverb resides within its bridging function that connects the particular (the narrative) to the generic (the proverb). Its mnemonic value, that good kings give treasure to buy and reward loyalty, is brought into play when it is juxtaposed with Beow’s fame and success. Because Beow is renowned while Scyld is alive, and because he becomes a beloved king once Scyld is dead, we are meant to assume that Beow acts in accordance with the proverb and with Anglo-Saxon cultural standards.

What this proverbial statement does is tell the story of Beow’s treasure-giving in mnemonic shorthand. Proverbs function this way, Mark Turner explains, because they are a form of parable and, as such, represent “a condensed, implicit story to be interpreted through projection” (5-6). In other words, by placing a proverb into a story, both the proverb and the story provide context for each other and help us interpret both. He explains:

Parable begins with narrative imagining—the understanding of a complex of objects, events, and actors as organized by our knowledge of story. It then combines story with projection. This classic combination produces one of our keenest mental processes for constructing meaning. The evolution of the genre of parable is thus neither accidental nor exclusively literary: it follows inevitably from the nature of our conceptual systems. (5)

On their own, outside of stories, proverbs exist in what Turner calls a “generic space.” The proverbial statements of “Maxims I” and “Maxims II” exist wholly within this generic space and have a generic interpretation, which are, respectively, “Both must be pre-eminently liberal with gifts” and “Noble companions must urge on the prince / While young to battle and to treasure-giving." It is this generic interpretation, the cultural values and folk wisdom the proverb represents, that a proverb or proverbial statement is a mnemonic for. When projected into a story, a proverb is given a context and its mnemonic value activates its “networks of immanent meaning."

I was told to leave the cognitive out. I'm sure the fear was that I was going to far a field and that I was delving too far beyond the expertise of anyone within the department. But now, as I reflect on it, it was just one more sign of how different our visions were for my dissertation. At the time I tried to tell myself I'd slip some of it in and deal with it in full post-dissertation, and I could have done that if this was the only problem I was having.

But now the cognitive's back. I'm insisting on it because I can't think about memory without thinking about the cognitive. This time around, it slipped in with visual thinking and conceptual metaphor (well, both were going to be slipped in the old dissertation too). Right now I'm currently rewriting the paper that is to be my first chapter. As it exists, it is a survey of medieval memory theory that draws connections to contemporary attempts to work with rhetorical memory. The thrust of that paper is that the contemporary approaches are scattered, partial, and seemingly unconnected until we place them within the context of medieval memory theory, theory which most of these scholars are unaware of. The title of that paper, which I gave as a keynote for the Texas Tech grad student conference in 2003, is titled "Remembering that which We Forgot: Reviving Medieval Memoria for the Contemporary Classroom." As I've been working with this rewrite, I've been concerned with how I was going to tie it in with social memory and integrate literature in more fully. And yesterday it hit me, and now I'm rewriting it so that rather than explore composition studies' contemporary attempts to engage rhetorical memory, it'll introduce the important issues from medieval memory theory and contemporary cognitive science that I'll be drawing upon in the rest of the dissertation. I'll still point to composition studies attempts to engage memory, many of which are quite good, I should note. I want to title it something like "Memory Medieval and Modern: Towards a Contemporary Understanding of Rhetorical Memory" but that title echoes Ong's "Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today's Computers," a review essay of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's Before Writing.

Two from CogNews: Storing New Information, and Artificial Intelligence

2006-04-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

Via CogNews:

"Conscious and unconscious memory linked in storing new information"

The way the brain stores new, conscious information such as a first kiss or a childhood home is strongly linked to the way the human brain stores unconscious information, researchers at Yale report this month in an article featured on the cover of "Neuron". This finding by Marvin Chun, professor in the Department of Psychology, and his team contrasts with the belief that all explicit (conscious) memory, and implicit (unconscious) memory, has distinct neural bases. The belief that the two types of memory are distinct has been illustrated by examples, including amnesiac patients with damage to the hippocampus and associated brain structures who have severely impaired explicit memory but intact implicit memory. [Read more.]

"Virtual Sea Slugs and Beyond"

ZDNet recently ran a three part series covering the past, present and future of Artificial Intelligence. It serves as a good primer for other disciplines in cognitive science, covering Asimov and Alice through Neural Networks and Dancing Hondas. And for the rest of you there are little morsels of entertainment such as virtual sea slugs. [Read more.]

CCCC (Yes, it's Late in Coming)

2006-04-03T19:57:00.000-05:00

Okay, so it might be a bit late to finally get around to talking about CCCC, but I'm finally getting around to it now that the MLA Ong session proposal is in and now that I'm caught up on grading and reading.

This was my sixth CCCC, and the first one I've been to where someone didn't make some comment about me being a literary scholar. There's been one other year when someone didn't say something to that effect to my face, but that year, as crazy as it sounds, someone felt the need to make sure others were aware that I was a barbarian on the wrong side of the Rhet/Comp gate and Barry Maid came to my defense, or so a couple of people told me. (I must admit to getting way too much pleasure out of knowing that some people find me so much of a threat that they feel the need to denounce me when I'm not around.) So maybe I was being denounced again this year, but if I was, I didn't hear about it.

There were eight of us from SLU at the conference, with six of us in the program. Not bad considering there have been years when I've been the only representative from SLU.

As Donna's already mentioned, I flew to Chicago first class, although, unlike her, I had to pay for it. The upgrade was so inexpensive, however, that I hit the yes button on the self check-in machine without really thinking about it. 45 minutes isn't really long enough to enjoy it. Not like the time I got upgraded for free on a flight back from Iceland.

I didn't get to as many sessions as I wanted to, but I got to more than last year when I had three gigs with Bedford/St. Martin's (I demoed Comment twice and played Comment expert at a Bedford sponsored tapas and drinks gathering), a 7Cs meeting, a session playing digital troubleshooter, and a session watching the Computer Connection. My favorite presentation was by Bradley Dilger who gave a great introduction to web accessibility. My favorite session would have to be "From Panel to Gallery: Twelve Digital Writings, One Installation" (see Marcia Hansen's summary). Gina Merys and I should post our presentation on developing a local digital culture, but we should touch base about that first and neither of us have had the time.

My favorite part of CCCC is getting to see people. I ran into Doug Eyman and some others before I even checked into the hotel, so I checked in, dropped my stuff off in my room, and went back down to the lounge to chat with them. I had some great meals with friends: diner with Tari Fanderclai, Tim Roach, and T.R. Johnson (Tari, Tim, and T.R. went to Louisville together), breakfast with Joyce Walker and Harriet Wald, breakfast with Karen Lunsford, lunch with Kathie Gossett and Carrie Lamanna, and a leasurely coffee with Gina. Though we get together reguarly, it's usually to work, or it's with a group of friends. We rarely just hang out and talk. (In fact, about the only time we do just hangout is when we're at a conference.) I also had a few dinners and a couple of lunches with various SLU people. I'm realizing that trying to list everyone I saw is unrealistic and so is listing all the people I didn't see or didn't spend nearly enough time with. I'll just note that I regret missing Brendan Riley and Lisa Gerrard.

While memory's still being denied (multiple reports of people saying memory has no role anymore), there's a growing number of people who are paying attention to it and there was talk of collections on memory. Two different groups were out headhunting, though they may have decided to join forces. Kathie and I also talked about doing our own thing, which we've been talking about doing for years now (it's always been a post-dissertation project for us, so nothing concrete yet). The truth is, there's more than enough to memory to go around. At least I've got more than enough ideas to write a few single authored books, a number of articles, and co-authored book with Kathie. I'm most excited by doing a project with Kathie as we so strongly overlap (we're both solidly rooted in medieval) but have different approaches and, I think, understandings. I might be wrong, but I think we'd even define the scope of rhetorical memory differently (Note to Kathie: maybe we should spend some time at C&W talking about our approaches and how we both define it?). Even though I have this sense we differ in some very real ways, I also sense that Kathie understands what I see in memory, and especially medieval memory, better than anyone else I've ever talked with. And I also think our differences, or what I perceive as differences, would be productive ones. But as I said (in case other memory people are reading), I've got enough ideas to go around.

I limited myself and only picked up three books this year: Johndan's Datacloud, Dickie Selfe's Sustainable Computer Environments, and the Routledge book Introducing Metaphor, which both summarizes a number of texts I've found useful (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; Metaphors We Live By; More than Cool Reason; and Cognitive Poetics, but also a number of texts I haven't yet read or come across. If you muck around with memory long enough, you'll drift into the cognitive, and cognitive studies is vastly different than it was in the 70s and early 80s when composition studies last really paid attention to it. In fact, composition studies stopped paying attention to the cognitive right about the same time cognitive studies had a revolution. I think I could write a whole book on rhetorical memory based in large part on the works of George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson. One of my many problems with my old disseration, I think, is that Shippey wanted me to stay away from the cognitive. I probably should have pushed this issue long ago, but I didn't.

WordHoard: Software for Corpus Linguistic Analysis

2006-04-03T09:30:00.000-05:00

From Academic Technologies and the Library at Northwestern University is the new corpus linguistics analysis software WordHoard. While currently limited to the Early Greek epics (in the original and in translation), Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser's Faerie Queene, WordHoard texts are tagged by by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria.

From What is WordHoard?:

The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a 'digital page' or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.

It is a basic assumption of WordHoard that new kinds of historical, literary, or broadly cultural analysis will be supported through the forms of data access that are made possible when literary texts are treated in the manner of linguistic corpora. Deeply tagged corpora of course support more finely grained inquiries at a verbal or stylistic level. But more importantly, access to the words of a text at such microscopic levels also lets you look in new ways at the imaginative worlds created by those words.

In its current release WordHoard contains the entire canon of Early Greek epic in the original and in translation, as well as all of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. The section on Provenance, Copyrights, and Licenses provides detailed information about the texts.

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King

2006-03-29T09:36:00.000-06:00

A student has pointed me to the Sci-Fi channel's Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, based on the Nibelung legends, primarily, it seems, off the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, which is the most famous and the one used by Wagner. I'm partial to the Völsunga saga and the earlier poems that make up the The Niflung Cycle of the Poetic Edda.

See also Ring of the Nibelungs.

Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Database

2006-03-28T21:49:00.000-06:00

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) was funded for five years (2000-4) by the AHRB (now the AHRC). The on-line publication is built round a relational database comprising a structured register of persons that includes, in principle, every recorded individual who lived in, or was closely connected with, Anglo-Saxon England from 597 to 1042.

anglo-saxon | Old English

Memes in Cognitive Science: An Amazon Listmania List

2006-03-28T18:13:00.000-06:00

While checking out Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive
Psychology, which Jim Kalmbach recommended to me, I came across this Amazon.com listmania list Memes in Cognitive Science. While studying cognitive science can earn one snarky comments from some in composition studies, cognitive studies today is vastly different than it was in the 1970s and we shouldn't, we can't, ignore it, and we'll never understand the canon of memory without it.

Link Roundup

2006-03-28T18:05:00.000-06:00

When I first read Mark Bauerlein's attack on last week's CCCC, I thought it was a joke. It reads som much like the standard bash-the-MLA fare that comes up year after year that I found it hard to take seriously. It seems, however, that Bauerlein is the type who would write those bash-the-MLA pieces. Anyway, Donna's response is by far the best I've seen.

Educational Weblogs offers a link to Evoca, a free audio-hosting social software site. You can upload audio via phone, PC mic, or Skype.

Educational Weblog cites Mashable* as the source for the Evoca link. I mention Mashable* here as I've not seen it before and it looks like a good source for new Web 2.0 resources.

And ArchaeoBlog points to a story about a recently discovered 2,500-year-old sarcophagus painted with scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey.

CFP: 25 Years of Reading and Misreading Orality and Literacy (April 15 2006; CCCC 2007)

2006-03-20T11:36:00.000-06:00

2007 CCCC Convention: Call for Proposals

25 Years of Reading and Misreading Orality and Literacy

This session is intended to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by exploring the ways the text has been read and misread by those working in the fields of composition studies, rhetoric, literacy studies, orality-literacy studies, and communication studies. Suggested topics include but not limited to considerations of its reception and its influence, reflections on reading and rereading the text over time, its connection to Ong's other works and the related work of others, as well as extensions, critiques, contextualization of its ideas.

Please send inquiries and 1-page abstracts by April 15, 2006 to John Paul Walter (walterj [at] slu [dot] edu).

If you or someone you know may be interested in participating, I'm more than happy to discuss suggested topics and exchange ideas as the proposals are being drafted.

I've set the submission deadline early enough (April 15) so that if I can't include someone's paper, they'll have more than enough time to work up and submit another proposal to the conference if they wish.

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

cfp | Orality and Literacy | Walter J. Ong

Electronic Textual Editing Pre-print Version

2006-03-19T17:58:00.000-06:00

While at MLA, I saw an advert -- a poster, really -- for the forthcoming collection Electronic Textual Editing, to be published in April by the MLA and edited by John Unsworth, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and Lou Burnard. Pre-print versions of the entire collection is available from the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/ETE/.

Via The Stoa Consortium

digital scholarship | Electronic Text | Humanities Computing | Textual Editing

It's CCCC + Computers!

2006-03-19T08:04:00.000-06:00

The 5th C SIG

Friday, March 24, 6:30 - 7:30 PM
Salon 5, 3rd Floor, Palmer House

Sponsored by the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication.

7Cs | CCCC | computers and writing

Junicode 0.6.7 Now at Sourceforge

2006-03-17T18:34:00.000-06:00

Peter Baker has moved Junicode to Sourceforge.org. According to an email he sent to the Digital Medievalist list, recent additions to Junicode 0.6.7 "include characters in all styles for the transliteration of medieval Arabic and characters and OpenType features to support African languages."

Junicode (short for Junius-Unicode) is a Unicode font for medievalists. The current version is a beta; the selection of characters and the arrangement of the Private Use Area are subject to change. Your comments, suggestions and bug reports will be a great help to me as I complete the project.

Junicode currently contains 1768 characters in the regular style (the italic, bold and bold italic styles are less complete). It implements these Unicode ranges completely:

* Basic Latin
* Latin 1 Supplement
* Latin Extended A
* Latin Extended B
* IPA Extensions
* Spacing Modifier Letters
* Combining Diacritical Marks
* Runic
* Phonetic Extensions
* Latin Extended Additional
* Number Forms
* Enclosed Alphanumerics
[Read more.]

fonts | Junicode | medieval fonts

Orality and Literacy at 25 Update

2006-03-16T23:35:00.000-06:00

I got 11 proposals for my planned session for MLA 2006. I'm pleased with all of them, and deciding which three to accept is proving quite a task. This is the sixth or seventh conference panel I've put together using an open call for papers, and while I've had more papers to choose from once or twice, I've never had so many papers I want to accept. We still have to see if MLA will accept the panel, but even if they don't, just seeing what people are doing has been worth it.

But with the great response I've had, I am going to try to organize "25 Years of Reading and Misreading Orality and Literacy" for CCCC 2007 and "Orality and Literacy in the Digital Age" for Computers and Writing 2007. I'll put the CCCC CFP out soon (over the weekend, I hope), and the CW 2007 CFP after the formal Computers and Writing 2007 conference CFP comes out.

I'll post more information about all the sessions as I have it.

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

Orality and Literacy | Walter Ong | Walter J. Ong

U.S. Memory Champion Relates Competitive Secrets (NPR)

2006-03-16T09:07:00.000-06:00

Talk of the Nation, March 14, 2006 · Freelance writer Joshua Foer talks about his first place win at the U.S. Memory Championship in New York this past weekend. Foer says centuries-old memory techniques are the key to beating the competition. [Listen]

I have some comments on this piece, but will need to come back to it after I listen a few more times.

Freyja: Oct. 4, 1994 - March 13, 2006

2006-03-14T23:08:00.000-06:00

Freyja never got along well with the kittens Monteigh and Minnie, siblings we got in 2000. She put up with them, sometimes, but, eventually, she stopped coming upstairs at night to sleep. She would meet us in the morning, usually on the stairs, and would follow us into the kitchen. One of her favorite spots was the garden window above the kitchen sink, and we'd feed her breakfast there before we'd make breakfast for ourselves. This morning, there was no one to great me as I went downstairs, and the window was all too empty.

We brought her home from the vet last Friday with all the gear to treat feline chronic renal failure. She responded to the initial treatment, so we had hopes that she would remain with us for some time to come. We weren't that lucky.

She was my first cat.

"Brain activity that tells how well your memory will work in advance"

2006-03-08T08:38:00.000-06:00

Via CogNews:

Scientists can now predict memory of an event before it even happens. A team at UCL (University College London) can now tell how well memory will serve us before we have seen what we will remember. Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature "Neuroscience," indicate that the brain can actually get into the *right frame of mind* to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.

Dr Leun Otten from UCL Psychology and the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the research project, said: "It sounds a bit like clairvoyance in the sense that we're able to predict whether someone will remember a word before they even see it. That's really new - scientists knew that brain activity changes as you store things into memory but now we have found brain activity that tells how well your memory will work in advance." [Read more.]

Link Roundup: Sound, a Bibliographic Tool, and ME Texts

2006-03-05T10:17:00.000-06:00

Sound
The Rhetoric and Composition Sound Archives is an organization dedicated to "collection, production, and preservation of audio, visual, and print interviews that document the history of rhetoric and composition studies." The archives are hosted by Texas Christian University. (Via WPA-L)

Created by one of the founders of Blogger is Odeo, an audio sharing site. (Via WPA-L)

Citation/Bibliography Resource
Recommended on the Digital Medievalist list is Wikindx, a free, cross-platform, open source bibliographic tool (stores quotations, paraphrases and notes as well as citations), that can run on personal computers or on a web server. (Via dm-l)

Middle English Texts
University of Michigan's Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse has expanded from 62 to 146 texts. (Via ChaucerNet)

On Foot Composition

2006-02-27T20:20:00.000-06:00

Realizing that the deadline is looming, I recorded my piece for Jenny Edbauer's CCCC podcast "On Foot Composition." My piece is a bit rough. I thought I'd downloaded some audio editing software at some point, but either I never did or I trashed it at some point. I recorded the piece using my iPod and a Griffin iTalk voice recorder, and I recorded it, appropriately enough, while pacing up and down the hallway between my bedroom and my study.

MLA Field Bibliographer

2006-02-26T16:14:00.000-06:00

I've just sent in my application to become a MLA field bibliographer and an application for one of the 2006-2009 MLA Field Bibliography Fellowships. I've been thinking about applying to become a field bibliographer for two or three years now, so I attended both the "Indexing for the MLA International Bibliography" and the "Indexing Scholarly Web Sites in the MLA International Bibliography" sessions at the MLA convention this past December. If I get one of the fellowships, I'll be committing myself to attending MLA through 2008, but, as I've said here before, I like the conference. While I've heard a number of MLA horror stories, I've been three times (and presented twice), and its general reputation just doesn't seem justified.

If you're interested, you can apply to be a field bibliographer at any time, but Fellowship applications are due March 1.

Two from CogNews: Brain Evolution, Speech Sound Processing, and the Whorf Hypothesis Revisited

2006-02-26T09:39:00.000-06:00

Here's three interesting pieces from CogNews:

"Brain processing of speech sounds is different in some dialects of the same language": This theory offers an answer human brain evolution version of the chicken and egg question. What's interesting, at least for me, is that my wife's been reading about omega-3 fatty acids and its role in brain functions (everything from mental health to memory to learning disorders to Alzheimer's treatments) and general physical health. Our brains are mostly made up of omega-3 fatty acids, and, in short, we don't get nearly as much omega-3 fatty acids in our diets as we used to, and Americans have one of the lowest levels of omega-3 rich diets in the world. This study, or at least this report of the study, plays up the importance of iodine, but this diet would have been omega-3 rich as well.
"Brain processing of speech sounds is different in some dialects of the same language: This is a report on a study of the differences in brain processing between vowel-merged and unmerged dialect speakers. It's building from the idea The topic of vowel merging is of real interest to me because I'm from a vowel-merged dialect (Western US) and I can not hear or pronounce the two low back vowels used in "paw" and "pot." Instead, I hear and say a medial vowel. A couple of years ago a graduate student who had immigrated from India joined the department and I found myself unable to pronounce her name. It became something of a game for us, but it finally dawned on me why I couldn't get it right--her name has one of those two vowels I don't recognize. I tried to explain the problem, but she wasn't buying it until our History of the English Language specialist walked by and I asked that he tell her I couldn't pronounce her name. He asked her to pronounce it, and then laughed and said, "Oh, no, John can't pronounce that."

Odd Use of My Suggested Bibliography

2006-02-20T17:57:00.000-06:00

From time to time, one hears about some blogger lifting text from someone else's blog, and while this isn't exactly the same, and while the content is attributed to me, I'm a bit perplexed at this wiki page on Orality and Literacy. That's definitely a bibliography I suggested, but it's a very short list of suggested readings I either gave someone who asked about orality-literacy wars of the 1980s or I created when writing about the orality-literacy wars. It's not anything like what I would recommend as a bibliography for studying orality and literacy.

I don't mind a suggested bibliography showing up on someone else's site, especially when it's attributed to me, but the repurposing of this bibliography serves no one very well. It makes me look quirky in ways that I'm not, and it's not a useful bibliography for those wanting to learn more about orality and literacy.

Update (5 June 2006): I should have mentioned earlier that the bibliography intro has been changed to indicate reflect what it is, and I've finally compiled a much better bibliography for those wishing to study Ong's orality-literacy contrasts which I'm going to forward on to George Williams for Palimpsest.

Quote for the Day

2006-02-20T14:13:00.000-06:00

Assuming, of course, one is allowed to quote their own writing in such contexts:

"OMG, etc. is an abbreviation!"

From a rant to WPA-L that argues "IM slang" is not a sign of the apocalypse, and that we all need a bit of historical awareness when talking about it.

CFP: Theory and Practice in the Comp Classroom (M/MLA 2006, 11/9/06-11/12/06)

2006-02-17T10:19:00.000-06:00

Gina M. Merys and I are reviving the "Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom" session for M/MLA which we organized in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom

Abstracts exploring the intersection, or lack thereof, between rhetoric and composition theory and classroom practice are invited for 20-minute papers to be presented in a proposed session for the 2006 M/MLA Conference to be held in Chicago on November 9-12.

For further information on the conference, please see the M/MLA Web site.

Please submit one-page abstracts via email by April 15, 2006 to:

Gina M. Merys, mahaffey [at] slu [dot] edu

or

John Walter, walterj [at] slu [dot] edu

cfp | composition studies | Rhetoric | teaching composition | teaching writing

Ong on Time and Knowledge

2006-02-15T18:19:00.000-06:00

Some day I'd like to edit a collection of Ong's essays titled A Preface and Postscript to Orality and Literacy. This, from the Introduction to In the Human Grain, would make a good candidate:

Man's knowledge and understanding came into being within time, though they situate man in a way outside time's bounds. In the realm of knowledge today, time is paying high dividends. In many fields of learning we now gain more ground in a decade than earlier man could gain in millennia. This is because knowledge is even more than cumulative: it is self-accelerating, and we live in an age when its acceleration has reached the point where it must be calculated in orders of magnitude entirely new in relationship to the life of the individual human being. There is no way to 'sum up' knowledge in a computer age.

As man moves through time his growth in knowledge ac- [page break] celebrates, his relationship to time itself undergoes a change. He notices time more and more. He studies it and himself in it, becoming more and more explicitly knowledge about his past. The further we get from the beginning of things, the more we know about the beginning. As knowledge of the past grows, focus on the present becomes more intent, for the present acquires a face of its own insofar as it can be both connected with and differentiated from a past circumstantially known. The knowledge explosion thus breeds the existentialist sensitivity to the present moment, felt as the front of past time, which marks our age.

Moreover, as time unfolds, the mind of man not only accumulates knowledge at an accelerating rate, but it also acquires new dimensions and new relations to the sensory world. The human sensorium reorganizes itself as the spoken word is reconstructed outside its native habitat of sound, relegated to space by the alphabet and then, this time with the aid of the alphabet, introjected into a new world of sound, the electronic world which dominates, though it does not monopolize, our modes of expression and consequently our thought processes today. The shifts in the media of communication entail corresponding shifts in psychological structures, creating new strains in the psyche while relieving old ones.

Though he was born into time and lives in its stream, man does not readily believe that time is good. Attempted repudiation of time is a theme of the second section of this book [which includes "Evolution and Cyclicism in our Time," "Nationalism and Darwinism," and "Evolution, Myth, and Poetic Vision"]. Man fears time, for it lies totally outside his control. Despite anything he can do, it moves inexorably on, never reversing itself, never allowing him really to recapture a moment of his past, even when this past grows in charm and poignancy as it recedes into the distance. Science may control genetics and even the weather, but it cannot harness time. Not the least promise shows here. Worst of all, time engulfs all our decisions. A decision once made cannot really be retracted. So-called retraction or retraction means not a withdrawal of the first decision, which has already vanished down the steady moving stream of time, but rather a second decision which we must add to the first. Instead of 'replacing' a decision, we now have two on the record. Time is beyond all persuasion. It hears no pleas. This inexorability of time tempts man into illusion: he likes to think that time is cy- [page break] clic, that it will return either to give him another chance or to show that he never had a chance at all—what happens because it had happened before, so that he has no responsibility. But this pretense is unreal, and it reveals itself more and more as unreal since the discovery of evolution, which is the discovery of the unrepeatability of all being" (ix-xi).

In the Human Grain | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong

Serenity and Jesse James

2006-02-15T11:00:00.000-06:00

It might just be because I'm in Missouri, but I watched Serenity the other day (I've never seen the TV show Firefly) and I couldn't but help make connections between Captain Malcom Reynolds and the romanticized whitewash of Jesse James.

First, there's the slightly hokey "frontierish" accent, the "Volunteer Force" war service (Jesse was a Missouri bushwacker and part of the Confederate guerrilla unit known as Quantrill's Raiders), the ruthless-yet-honorable/noble soldier (the Robin Hood mythos of romanticized Jesse) still fighting the war he lost any way he can (i.e., life of crime against the government that defeated him). There's the vaguely "horsy" look to the Serenity itself, emphasized by various undershots of the ship at dramatic moments of flight that invoked "rearing" for me (yes, I know a horse can't rear in motion, but I couldn't help seeing it invoked). And, finally, there's the "going to ground" scene where they hide Serenity in an underground shaft. The James gang regularly went to ground in a number of MO's more than 5,600 caves. In fact, Jesse's Jesse's signiture has been authentically documented in a number of them.

Firefly | Jesse James | Science Fiction | Serenity | SF

Vitanza Quote Found While Marking Time in the Archive

2006-02-13T14:58:00.000-06:00

from Vitanza, Victor J. "'Notes' Towards historiographies of Rhetorics; or the Rhetorics of the Histories of Rhetorics: Traditional, Revisionary, and Sub/Versive." Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 8.1-2 (1987): 63-125.

An 'emerging field' will be short-lived especially...if it continues to think, read, speak, and write propaganda,...if it insists on living An Illusion, ... if it insists on an homological discourse (which is sterile) over an heterolo-/gical one (which fosters 'difference').

Just a little quote to turn to when the "we're an emerging field" and "what is our common ground" threads pop up on WPA-L.

I'm a headline for the "Angelina Jolie News"?

2006-02-12T22:59:00.000-06:00

My "Googling Angelina Jolie Naked" entry has been picked up by a number of Angelina Jolie feeds including the "Angelina Jolie News." And when one such feed picks you up, apparently, they all start doing so. I realize it's all due to crawlers, but that makes it all the more amusing that a post which I wrote to make fun of people looking for naked pictures of Jolie is bring in greater and greater numbers of people looking for naked pictures of her.

As I followed a couple of referring links back to these Jolie sites and was thinking it couldn't get any more weird/creepy/pathetic, I saw a link to my post in an Angelina Jolie site Google ad. Presumably, someone is paying money to send Angelina fans to my blog.

All I want to know is what I need to do to get my cut.

Notes for "The Orality-Literacy Wars," RNF @ CCCC 2006

2006-02-12T14:05:00.000-06:00

While I don't think I was at first, I've been a little uncomfortable with Ong's essay "Orality and Literacy in Our Times" ever since I learned of the orality-literacy wars, and I think I've been uncomfortable with it because I was misreading it, as a good number of people do (a quick skimming over sections of it seem to support what I'm writing here). Many people, I think, read the essay as a defense of Thomas J. Farrell's application of Ong's thought to basic writers, especially to African American students, and it's not. Rather than a defense of Farrell, it is, I want to suggest, a correction. Or, maybe better, it is Ong's statement on the subject delimiting exactly to what extent he believes Farrell's ideas useful and, at the same time, suggesting a better line of inquiry into the subject.

This would not be the only time Ong had done something like this. In reference the controversy started by Farrell's essay "IQ and Standard English" (CCC 34 (1983): 470-484), a friend wrote to Ong about the abuse being heaped upon him in relation to the essay, he responded that "Writing and the Evolution of Consciousness" would set the record straight as far as his position on the issue was concerned. [I need to double check it is this to see if I've got the right essay -- and if you're reading this aside, don't assume this is the correct essay.] I was strongly struck by the fact that while the essay did indeed "set the record straight" (I reread it upon reading this letter), there was no indication that it was a response for anyone looking one. Ong wasn't into direct confrontation beyond the occasional short correction when he was being directly attacked--see, for instance, his response to Beth Daniel's "Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy" (PRE/TEXT 8.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1987): 155), a fact which is supported by comments people have made to me about him and comments I've read in letters. He was in his 70s by then and he notes that he believed his efforts were better geared towards new issues rather than directly fighting against what he believed to be misreadings/misuses of his work.

There maybe something along these lines in relation to "Orality and Literacy in Our Times" and I'll look, but until we have a finding guide with keyword searching (something that's going to take a long time after the finding guide itself is done -- it's going to take me the better part of three years (at least) to get the basic work done so that people can start worrying about issues like going through the material and tagging for keywords), I'll be hit or miss. I might stumble upon it, or Ong may have put it in the "Orality and Literacy in Our Times" file, but it's just as likely that if something like it exists it is a minor comment in a letter that's filed under some other topic such as someone's correspondence file or in a response to a request to give a lecture or in some other publication file.

But what I do know is that while "Orality and Literacy in Our Times" is oft times read as a defense of Farrell, Farrell himself is frustrated buy the essay. I don't remember if he uses these exact words, but it was clear from his comments during the April 2005 Ong conference here at Saint Louis University, Farrell doesn't believe Ong went far enough in that essay and he's quite disappointed that Ong never actually ran with Farrell's ideas. (All of this is on video, during, I think, the discussion to the Friday, April 8, 2005 "Current Research" panel held from 10:00 - 11:30 AM).

To my mind, the orality-literacy wars are as much about misreading and misunderstanding as anything else, which is why I'm approaching this topic not as a partisan continuing the fight but as a case study in academic error. I get a lot of mileage out of both Daniel and Farrell, and while there's plenty of others to deal with, they've become (and fairly so, I think) my operative symbols (mnemonic cognitive images) of the "war."

More notes for this talk. [Note to self: see also the WPA-L archives for June or July 2005.]

literacy | orality-literacy | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong

The Talking Book, 2.0: "Flash Memory Distribution of Digital Talking Books"

2006-02-12T13:36:00.000-06:00

[The above title is, of course, a allusion to Ong's essay "The Talked Book," which is different than a talking book, but there you go. While I'm titling this post "The Talking Book 2.0," that's probably a term better used for books on CD-ROM. And now that I think about it, there's also .mp3, .wav, etc. audio books, and now those self-playing digital audio books from Playaway. But as this is the second generation talking book for accessibility issues, I'll leave it as "The Talking Book, 2.0."]

The Library of Congress' National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has a series of white papers on digital talking books, the most recent of which is "Flash Memory Distribution of Digital Talking Books." In addition to explaining what they'll be doing, the paper explains why they've decided to go with flash memory as opposed to other digital storage options. From the introduction:

In 2008 the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) will begin to replace its existing cassette-based talking book system with a new system based on digital talking books (DTBs). These books, recorded and played back using digital audio technology, will provide the same top-quality narration NLS patrons have come to expect.

Along with digital audio must come a new medium to replace the analog cassette. This new medium must be as easy to use, as durable, and as simple to duplicate as the cassette. Ideally it would also hold far more audio, be reusable, and still be of reasonable cost. For these reasons NLS has chosen the USB (Universal Serial Bus) Flash Drive for the circulation of DTBs

This choice was made after considering alternative digital media carriers such as CD-ROM and the miniature hard drive. [Read more.]

Via TechRhet.

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

accessibility | digital books | talking books

Googling Angelina Jolie Naked

2006-02-12T12:47:00.000-06:00

While it shouldn't come as any surprise, my earlier "Random Collection of Links and Comments" post, which contains both "Angelina Jolie" and "naked," drew a lot of traffic even though I wasn't referring to her being naked at all .

The comment was about a mistaken news report that Anthony Hopkins had to perform naked while doing the filming for his role as Hrothgar in the upcoming Zemeckis/Avery/Gaiman Beowulf movie, and I linked to a picture of Jolie, who plays Grendel's mother, dressed in the kind of performance capture suit Hopkins would have been wearing as he was filmed. While I don't expect much in the way of thoughtful engagement from an entertainment reporter, automatically equating "no costume" to "performing naked" without even as much as a follow up question to verify the assumption ought to get someone fired.)

So, all you people who've ended up here while googling for naked pictures of Angelina Jolie, do yourself a favor and use Google's image search.

Bibliography Formatting Software: An Evaluation Template

2006-02-11T10:42:00.000-06:00

The Bibliography Formatting Software: An Evaluation Template is now in its 12th edition.

via the Digital Medievalist mailing list

bibliography software

Via CogNews: Words help deterimine what we see

2006-02-11T10:39:00.000-06:00

The language we speak affects half of what we see, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.

Scholars have long debated whether our native language affects how we perceive reality � and whether speakers of different languages might therefore see the world differently. The idea that language affects perception is controversial, and results have conflicted. A paper published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports the idea � but with a twist.

The paper suggests that language affects perception in the right half of the visual field, but much less, if at all, in the left half. The paper, "Whorf Hypothesis is Supported in the Right Visual Field but not in the Left," by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry � is the first to propose that language may shape just half of our visual world.[Read more.]

Random Collection of Links and Comments

2006-02-08T13:42:00.000-06:00

No, I haven't forgotten to finish off the riff on "Language Games." I'll be getting back to that sometime soon, and it connects well with my new dissertation focus. Briefly looking back at what I've written so far, I was being much too meek at the end. The whole noetic shift that took place with the advent of literacy in ancient Greece is commonplace in orality-literacy studies and media ecology (see, for instance, Havelock). As I said, I'll get back to that soon.

I'm getting into the shift of the dissertation topic. I took back a bunch of library books on things like style in Old English poetry, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, and the Old English Orosius (the Old English translation of Paulus Orosius' Historia adversum paganos -- as with much Old English prose translation here, of course, means both additions to and omissions of the Latin text. The travel accounts of both Ohthere and Wulfstan, standard pieces in Old English readers, are examples of such additions to Orosius' Historia), and I picked up a number of books on the commonplaces and commonplace books to jump back into Memory and the Art of Database, which is now a dissertation chapter rather than a post-dissertation project. Library books I've kept include such titles as Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry, The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia, and Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Literature, and Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity. I've also shifted some books to or from dissertation shelves or to my desk. Books moved to dissertation spaces include Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing and Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Fun, fun, fun.

While I've thought about oral-formulaic practice as a pre-digital database technology/practice, the idea hit me in a different way today. Until today, it's been something I've just filed away to think about at some other time. Today, however, I started thinking about the implications as a compositional technology and as a way of knowing and representing ideas. No, I'm not thinking about trying to revive oral-formulaic practices. Rather, I'm trying to think about the practice not as a literary scholar or a media ecologist but as a compositionist and to think of it in relation to a whole host of pre- and post-digital database technologies and practices and how those insights can help theorize new practices and perspectives.

Bradley has an excellent post on how he used del.icio.us to manage the readings for one of his courses last semester.

Ain't It Cool News has, according to Neil Gaiman, one of the best, most accurate reports of the upcoming Zemeckis/Avery/Gaiman Beowulf set to come out in 2007 (a few spoilers in the report, supposedly, though I don't think anything was spoiled by reading it). Much of the media reports about the movie are less than accurate. My favorite so far is the report that Anthony Hopkins did his performance naked because, when asked about his costume, he told then he didn't have one. He wasn't wearing a costume, of course, because the movie is being done with performance capture technology (according to various sources, Zemeckis has solved the eye issue that plagued The Polar Express). Rather than being naked, Hopkins was dressed up in a suit much like the one we see Angelina Jolie wearing. (Jolie plays Grendel's mother.)

Also Gaiman related, if you missed Mirrormask, which had a very limited release, it's now out on DVD. Rent it. Buy it. You'll be glad you did. You can see two reviews at http://movies.about.com/od/mirrormask/gr/mirrormsk012606.htm and http://www.the-trades.com/article.php?id=4016.

And finally, if you didn't know (maybe I'm the only one who didn't?), Cheryl Ball has been blogging for a while.

Boxes and Circles on the Board

2006-02-07T17:50:00.000-06:00

As my science fiction class and I were working our way through Samuel R. Delaney's "Science Fiction and 'Literature'--or, the Conscience of the King," I found myself needing to explicate what Delaney means when he talks about the difference in interpretive space around a "mundane" text like Pride and Prejudice and the interpretive space around science fiction, and what he means by the discourses of such texts. I jumped to the board and drew two small boxes, one to represent Pride and Prejudice and one to represent the first Star Wars movie, and then drew circles around each of those boxes, each circle meant to represent at the same time both the discourses each text partakes in and the realms of possible interpretation of each text. The spheres around Pride and Prejudice, I explained, govern how we read the sentence "Then her world exploded" if it appeared in the novel. We would read it metaphorically. But in a science fiction text, I explained, the interpretive space is much larger. It's not unlikely that "Then her world exploded" may mean just that, and, in fact, it does if we were to talk about Princess Leia in Star Wars. In fact, in her case, it's likely the sentence would carry both connotations.

As I drew those boxes and circles, I had to smile. While Jenny often explains the whole world with a box and a couple of arrows, I try to explain it with a couple of circles and a couple of boxes.

Delaney's final point, for those of you who might be curious, is that we ought to read "literature" as science fiction, a sentiment I've unconsciously shared for who knows how long. He ends:

It is possible that, on the level of values reading literature as if it were science fiction may be the only hope for literature--if, while we're doing it, we don't commit the same sort of historical ruptures that we in science fiction have already suffered at the hands of both editors and uniformed academics. And we must read--and write--science fiction as if it were really science fiction, and not just some philistine hack job purveying the same unitary values as literature but in their most debased form.

Or, to back up a bit to the beginning of his conclusion, he explicitly states his point, and I've just realized he's describing how I read: "I'm talking about the encounter between discourses, between responses, between ways of reading texts, ways of using the interpretive space around them."

Words to Live by

2006-02-05T13:28:00.000-06:00

"Remember -- Think Once, Think Twice, Think 'Don't Get A Tattoo From a Guy At The Door With A Homemade Tattoo gun'."

Neil Gaiman, commenting on a news story about a door-to-door tattoo saleman.

Mid-Dissertation Crisis

2006-02-04T10:40:00.000-06:00

It may not come as much of a surprise that I've been through a couple of what could be called mid dissertation crises, this time helped by thinking about how I really want to define myself as far as the job market is concerned, about what I want to be as a scholar. While I've recently presented on medieval topics at MLA (well, one was Old Norse medievalism (see Barbarian Chic below), I haven't been to the International Congress on Medieval Studies in years. I have, however, been attending CCCC and C&W regularly. I love the idea of my dissertation topic, but I'm not sure I can do it. Well, I can, and I'm not abandoning the idea, but it's not what I think about when I'm not trying to slog through it. Given free reign, my mind, my attention, drifts towards Ongian topics and to my end goal for the dissertation: working towards a revised understanding of memory for contemporary English studies. While I was going to focus on memory practices in Old English literature, my goal has always been to better understand, revive, and adapt memory for today.

So, yesterday, I finally admitted to myself that I'm not doing what I should be doing. That trying to finishing the dissertation this summer will likely come at too great a psychological and emotional cost, and that I'm not doing what will naturally (meaning clear to most people) lead to the kind of job I want. For now, "Social Memory and Old English Literature" is no more. I'm now working on something provisionally called "Reviving Memoria: English Studies and the Canon of Memory."

This isn't as bad or as crazy as it sounds. While we still figuring out what it means in terms of committee and if we'll need to get the Graduate School involved (since my committee has both medievalists and rhetoric/compositionists my hope is if there needs to be a change it just means a change in who's chairing), content-wise there's no significant difference, or if there is, it's in my favor. The fact that I've got more than enough material to replace what I can't keep from my old project, and the fact this material is more coherent and more polished is itself a sign that I've been trying to do the wrong dissertation for a long time.

I need to write up a much better description, but here's my "on the back of a napkin" sketch of the new project:

Basic argument: memory still matters; we now know that classical and medieval theories and practices of memory were much more complex and sophisticated than we once believed (both formal rhetoric and oral traditions); and that rather than trying to reinvent the wheel we can draw from them and adapt them to use as a starting point for a contemporary canon of memory. Five body chapters will include a chapter surveying medieval understanding and practices of memory and compares them to contemporary approaches to memory (a paper I presented at TTU forms the basis for this chapter); a chapter on cognitive images and making/representing knowledge and memorial composition (the machina memorialis meets Kristie Fleckenstein and Patricia Dunn; a chapter on the technologies of memory from catalog poems to social tagging (often referred to in this blog as memory and the art of database); a chapter on literature as social memory (my Beowulf as traumatic social memory chapter repurposed); and social memory and rhetoric (the one chapter that I don't have anything written for, though I've been thinking about it for a while now).

The new project is clearly much more rhet-comp in focus and draws from classical to contemporary rhetorical theory and composition studies, with a good dose of medieval theory and practice. It now covers not just the oral-literate transitional culture of Anglo-Saxon England but memory practices from oral through digital culture. And it more explicitly bridges the rhet-comp-literature divide: Not only do I discuss literature as social memory, I'll be talking about the conscious use of cognitive images by medieval poets like Chaucer and Dante and connect that practice back to the use of imagery in oral tradition and forward to verbal, graphic, and mental imagery in composition and literature pedagogy. It's sweeping in scope, but that's what I do best. Each chapter will focus on a different aspect of memoria to show how it all fits together better than most of us realize.

A Riff on Jeff's "Language Games," Part I

2006-01-29T12:41:00.000-06:00

In response to Jeff's post "Language Games" is a brief discussion by Donna, Jeff, and Scot about the nature of argument in new media and agonistic discourse. The discussion and the post itself got me to thinking, but I haven't felt entirely comfortable about commenting on it until now.

Any way, it'll come as no surprise to those who know me that I enjoy a good debate, probably too much for my own good. But a good debate is one in which all parties should be able to walk away in the end happy and having learned something, even if the debate itself gets heated and even aggressive while its running.

The media dynamics of a blog, and especially the comment function, are some of the worst I've encountered for sustained, productive debate. But that really shouldn't be a surprise, least of all to me. Agonistic discourse in the form of productive debate is always problematic outside of face-to-face communication (and when too ritualized, such as with current US Presidential Debates, it's not that productive face-to-face, though one could argue they're not engaged in face-to-face oral communication). And while I'm not sure I really think this yet, my gut thinking, based on years of use, is that asynchronous written communication environments are much more problematic for this kind of this kind of discourse than even pre-electronic and digital ones. In effect, the sense of immediacy that digital technologies afford give us a sense of face-to-face immediacy but lack all the affordances of face-to-face communication. As with all written communication our audience is a fiction, even when we know that audience well. Since we can't just "sit down and talk," we have to let far too many misassumptions and fictional (re)constructions of ourselves and our positions slide by without comment as we try to focus on the larger issue(s), but those misassumptions and fictional (re)constructions keep us from coming to an understanding about the larger issue(s).

Our regular failure to fully take this into consideration is apparent when you google secondary orality. It's commonplace to discuss written online communication (both synchronous and asynchronous) in terms of secondary orality when, in fact, there's nothing oral about it. It's written. Sure, it has some of the characteristics of oral discourse, but that's mostly surface level features rather than the deeper level media dynamics. (I'm still trying to work out a language for all this as well as develop a more complex understanding of what I mean when I talk about surface level features and deeper level media dynamics, and while I've developed my thinking a bit more on the subject, I have two posts on the subject dating back to Oct. 2004 -- oh, wow, I see there's a really good comment to the second one I have somehow overlooked until now and ought to formulate a response to.)

And this brings me back to Donna and Jeff's discussion of argument and its role as a "god term" in composition (great term, Donna) and the desire to drag argument with us as we turn towards new media. The origins of rhetorical argument, as we all know, harkens back to ritualized face-to-face oral discourse practices of Antiquity, and that these practices, in one form or another, were a regular feature of education into the 20th Century (Ong, among others, treats this in detail in Fighting for Life). We've made do in written mediums, but written discourse isn't the best medium for debate (though various writing technologies have differing affordances and constraints).

And from here I step on to more shaky ground.

While I suggesting--exploring, really--the idea that writing isn't well suited for debate, I think it's safe to say that it was literacy that allowed us to systematize various discourse practices into Rhetoric in much the same way it was literacy that allowed the systematization of memory practices that became rhetoric's ars memoria (on ars memoria as a consequence of literacy, see Carruthers' The Book of Memory and Small's Wax Tablets of the Mind. In other words, although we've dragged argument into written discourse, it's really best suited for face-to-face oral discourse.

Again, I'm just tossing out some ideas to think about, and while I'm "buying" it at the moment, that's because I'm in an Elbowian believing mode.

More on this in a few days.

Victorians and Vikings? Huh?

2006-01-28T11:58:00.000-06:00

In an attempt to liven things up a bit, I've decided to try a new genre of blog post. While deep down I just really want to write posts like Dr. Fabulous, Dr. Fabulous has already cornered that market and I'd be nothing more than a cheap knockoff. So, instead, I might be morphing my way into an avuncular tweed and Doc. Martin wearing scholar much too influenced by the style of the epistolary novel. Or maybe not. We'll see.

Any way dear readers, I'm sure some of you who have read my earlier post "Barbarian Chic" must surely have asked yourself something along the lines of "The Victorians infatuation with Vikings? How come I've never heard of this?" The reason, dear reader, is politics. The Victorians loved the Vikings. School children were given Vikingish books as grammar school and Sunday school prizes. Iceland, with its saga sites, was a tourist destination. People flocked to public lectures, and study groups were formed to learn Old Norse-Icelandic in order to read the works in their original. People debated the nature of Odin, who he was and what he represented (some believed Odin to be a "mighty Scythian leader who had once challenged the tyranny of Rome and who could now act as a role model for upwardly moble Victorian young achievers." Viking themed songs were sung in Victorian parlors and the subject of a cantata by Edward Elgar. (All this, and more, can be found in Andrew Wawn's The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain.)

The love and interest in the Vikings didn't begin with the Victorians (Wordsworth and Coleridge were fans of the Poetic Edda, Walter Scott's The Pirate was a best-seller and was adapted for the stage, and Thomas Gray published a number of translations of Old Norse poems (well, really, he translated into English a number of Latin translations of Old Norse poems, my two favorite of which are "The Decent of Odin" and "The Fatal Sisters"). Britian's interest in Iceland and the Old North dates back much further, really beginning in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Before continuing, I should back up just a bit. The first problem with what I've written so far, both here and earlier, is the term "Viking." While its etymology is of some debate, and while it's common for those of us in the English speaking world to refer to the Vikings and the Viking Age (roughly 800-1100 CE) to mean Scandinavians and all their colonies and trading outposts during the Viking Age (from Newfoundland to modern day Russia, and even to Baghdad and Constantinople, where they not only to traded, but formed the Varangian Guard, which itself eventually became the Imperial Guard of the Byzantine Emperors. It may also be interesting to note that after the Norman Invasion of 1066, a number--some sources claim up to 5,000--Anglo-Saxons went to Constantinople to sign up with the Varangians. You can read this in the Wikipedia article I link to above, but I, of course, already knew this).

While we refer to all this Scandinavian peoples as Vikings, the word viking itself is best thought of as a gerund noun. In other words viking is something you do rather than something you are. Well, when you were going a-viking you could be said to be a viking, but you get my meaning. While there were what we might call professional vikings, most did it on a part-time basis. Going viking was a way to make a name for yourself, set up a nest egg, and see new places and meet new people. Really. A group might set off with trade goods, do some viking, sell the goods, hang out in the court of a noble or king, get some more trade goods, do some more raiding, do some more buying and selling, and then return home. A typical man going viking might sometimes go for a summer and sometimes might sometimes go for years. But enough on that.

The second thing we need to know is that for reasons too complex to go into here but which I often simplify down to Franco-Prussian nationalism, we refer to what was, and is, really Scandinavian culture as "Germanic." English? A Germanic language. The Anglo-Saxons? A Germanic peoples. The settled homeland of the Indo-Europeans that we refer to as the Germanic peoples? Sweden and Denmark. As I said, Franco-Prussian nationalism with its roots in the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne. It was not just the Victorians who loved the vikings, but Victoria's cousins, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II, as well as Victoria's son-in-law, Frederick III who briefly reigned between the Wilhelms, were vikingophiles as well. In fact, Haggard's Eric Brighteyes was dedicated to Victoria's daughter, the Empress Frederick less than a year after Frederick's death.

So, back to your question, dear readers. In short, World War I happened. The love the British had for the Prussians suffered a blow at that point. And to the extent that the Great North had become affiliated with the Germans, the Great North suffered. I don't think it's coincidence that it wasn't until the late 20th Century that scholars started returning to Friðþjofs saga hins frækna, a Victorian favorite closely connected not just to Victoria herself but the Kaisers. And if the Hunnish* connections weren't enough there is, of course, Hitler's "use" of Teutonic mythology. Now, again, this is all a simplification and there were other factors involved, including the study and influence of Greco-Roman culture which, of course, remained strong throughout this period. But it's worth noting that part of the Victorian Old North movement was a debate over the England's connections to the North vs. the South, i.e., the Germanic rather than Greco-Roman culture. This debate itself stopped after WWI.

*Yes, I wrote Hunnish and I did so for a reason. I might be wrong, but I don't think Hun was used as a slur for Germans prior to World War I. But, either way, Attila and the Huns play a prominent role in Germanic culture. The Germanic Heroic Age (300-500 CE), which corresponds to the migrations of the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, etc., may itself have been sparked by Attila's incursions into Western Europe, and he a character or is refered to in a number of Germanic texts, most notably the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, and the Old Norse-Icelandic Völsunga saga and Poetic Edda. In fact, the Edda has two poems bearing his name: the "Atlakvida" ("The Lay of Atli"), which is believed to be one of the oldest poems in the collection, and the "Atlamal" ("The Greenlandic Lay of Atli"). It's worth noting here that while the Old Norse-Icelandic texts present Attila/Atli as a cruel and greedy bastard who kills his brothers-in-law Gunnar and Hogni because he wants the treasure of the Niflungs (the Rhinegold Sigurd won when he slew the dragon Fafnir, the Attila of the German Nibelungenlied, which tells the same story more or less, is a noble figure. It's also worth noting that the name Attila is probably Gothic and probably means "little father," and that a number of Goths served under him. In other words, the use of Hun as a German racial slur is, I think, directly related to this very topic.

But, you might ask, would Robert E. Howard have known any of this? The short answer is yes. I say this having read through a number of Howard biographies, bio-bibliographies, collected letters, accounts, and the like. If you want to know more, I'll gladly give you citations. Or, you can wait. While a full-fledged study of the Victorian Viking medievalism and sword and sorcery fantasy is far down on my list of scholarly projects, behind social memory and Old English literature, medieval and contemporary rhetorical memory, and various Ong/orality-literacy/media ecology issues, it is on my list.

Toronto School of Communication

2006-01-28T10:34:00.000-06:00

I came across an online essay describing the "Toronto School" of Communication, hosted, appropriately enough, by the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and written by Senior McLuhan Fellow Twyla Gibson. The Toronto School is, essentially, media ecology. Among other things, the piece discusses the importance of such figures as Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Milman Parry, John Eisenberg, and Rhys Carpenter. It's worth checking out.

Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive

media ecology | orality and literacy

Barbarian Chic

2006-01-26T19:47:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd provide a link to short Washington Post review of Del Rey/Ballantine's The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan. These are Robert E. Howard's Conan stories without the rewrites, pastiches, and finsihed fragments that got published with Howard's completed stories during the 1960s and 70s.

I devoured the Conan stories in 8th grade, both the good and the bad (yes, there's good Conan stories, almost always written by Howard himself), and then returned to them in 2004 when I realized I couldn't talk about the late 20th Century sword and sorcery fantasy's indebtedness to Victorian Britain’s infatuation with the Vikings without talking about Conan (this was for a MLA panel on the 19th and 20th Century reception of Old Norse literature and I began with the idea that the self-conscious medievalism of Pratchett's The Last Hero and Holt's Who's Afraid of Beowulf? was linked to Victorian medievalism. I knew it in that gut-level way of knowing things and my diss. director agreed, so I ran with it. Among other things, I learned that while medievalists and medievalismists regard H. Rider Haggard's Eric Brighteyes as the best modern novel written in the medieval Icelandic saga style, it's considered by fantasy scholars to be one of if not the first sword and sorcery novel.

But then there's Conan. Howard grew up reading Victorian adventure stories and Haggard was one of his favorite authors (we might also recall that in King Solomon's Mines, Sir Henry Curtis an Englishman of Danelaw ancestry, is described as a Viking warror during the climatic battle). While Howard's usually connected with the Celts by the handful of scholars who study him, I kept finding Viking references in his letters and other writings. And, well, there's "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," one of the earliest Conan stories, in which Conan tells his Aesir friend that he feels much more akin to the Aesir and Vanir (Howard's Hyborian Age proto-Scandinavians) than he does to his own Cimmerians peoples (Howard's Hyborian Age proto-Celts). Turns out, Howard plays with the Vikings nearly as much as the Celts, though most scholar's haven't picked up on that because Howard's friends wrote about Howard as a Celtophile.

Any way, Michael Dirda's review is short and good. I'm not saying Howard's a literary great, but at his best, he's damn good. At his worst, well, the man made a living, during the Depression, as a pulp fiction writer, churning out everything from boxing stories to erotica. And yes, he was a racist and a sexist. But his writing's not fluff. He was engaged in a long running debate with H.P. Lovecraft over the issue of civilization vs. barbarism, with Lovecraft seeing civilization as our salvation and Howard seeing it as our weakness. Their letters make fascinating reading. And these philosophical debates made their way into Howard's writing, as Dirda explains:

Yet without making grandiose claims for them, Howard's Conan chronicles are also a bit more than that. They are, as Patrice Louinet demonstrates in his forewords and afterwords to these three volumes, studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard's grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless. As a character insists in "Beyond the Black River," the most deeply felt and complex Conan story, "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."

Regardless of what one thinks of Howard, his writing, and his philosophy, only Tolkien has had as much influence on 20th Century fantasy. In fact, while Tolkien didn't create "high" or "epic" fantasy and while Howard didn't create sword and sorcery, the two subgenres were reshaped by them to such an extent they are the two fathers of modern fantasy literature.

Via Neil Gaiman

Conan | fantasy | sword and sorcery

First Class, Defining SF, and a Book on Books

2006-01-17T14:08:00.000-06:00

First day of my Science Fiction course. About a third of the students said they were regular science fiction readers, which is /much/ larger percentage than my previous SF course, which was about 1/10. It'll be interesting to see how this difference plays out in the classroom.

We started off by talking about what science fiction is. Three students offered suggestions: that it's set in the future and usually in space; that it's usually about science and/or technology; and that it's a work of fiction that offers something new and tries to provide a rational, scientific explanation. Fairly standard definitions, all good in their own way and all problematic as well. And that's the point. The science fiction community (authors, critics, scholars, fans) don't agree. SF Scholar and critic James Gunn has an acendote, which I should have shared in class, about inviting SF Damon Knight, influential SF book reviewer and critic, to his class to define SF. Knight argued that there is no significant difference between SF and fantasy, and Gunn insisted that there is a fundamental difference. I then offered five definitions to get us started (that link also includes Heinlein's rules for a “Simon-pure science fiction story,” which we didn't discuss today.

We then looked at my Reading SF Handout, and discussed the protocols of reading SF. in short, that SF requires different reading protocols than other literary genres (see, for instance, Tom Shippey's "Hard Reading: The Challenges of Science Fiction" in the Blackwell A Companion to Science Fiction, edited by David Seed). I then introduced Darko Suvin's concepts of the novum and cognitive estrangement and gave them one last definition of SF: "SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment." What else would you expect from theorist working in the tradition of Russian Formalism? We did unpack the idea, though I expect we'll need to return to it. But, again, that's my goal for the course, to unpack these definitions while also adding (and unpacking) additional ones.

I brought along the first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex just in case, but the above took most of our time and a brief run down of the course and course site took care of the rest, so we'll watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex "Section 9" Thursday as well as discuss their first reading.

And pleased to say that the beautiful and inexpensive Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 arrived today. I'd ordered it while at MLA. How could I pass up a book with chapters like "Dimensional Thinking"? From the U of Chicago Press Web site:

[Add to cart] or
Print an order form.
[jacket image]

Cormack, Bradin and Carla Mazzio Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. Designed by Joan Sommers. Distributed for the Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago. 144 p., 75 halftones. 9 x 11 2005

Paper $15.00sp 0-943056-34-9 Spring 2005
What might it mean to use books rather than read them?

This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use.

The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.

book history | print culture | science fiction | teaching

Is Your Book Title Bestseller Material?

2006-01-15T12:17:00.000-06:00

According to Lulu Titlescorer, The Q-U Conspiracy and Other Oddities of the English Language has a 10.2% chance of being a bestselling title. Hmmm...so does Social Memory and Old English Literature. Maybe I should just write Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive, which has a 35.9% chance....

Beowulf and Grendel Trailer

2006-01-14T17:03:00.000-06:00

The trailer to the Beowulf & Grendel, due out later this year.

Years ago, this movie was going to be true to the poem, but they couldn't raise the money, even with the backing of the Canadian and Icelandic governments. So the movie has morphed into "Predator meets Braveheart," or so it was described by the director a few years ago. I'm not a stickler for movies being slavishly faithful to the text (few texts can be remediated without changes anyways), and especially so when they're honest enough to indicate they're not trying to be the text on screen. The movie's controversial within the Anglo-Saxon community. For one thing, we watch Grendel watching Hrothgar kill Grendel's father, which positions Grendel's attacks on Heorot within the larger context of natural, secular blood feud (as opposed to the monstrous race of Cain and their war with God feud).

Also added to the movie is character Selma (fine, we toss in a female character to help Beowulf and function as a potential love interest, but couldn't we at least give her a Scandinavian name, or, since she's a witch, a Laplandish name if she's to be one of those foreign, imported witches? Also of note is the "Necrophile," still listed on the movie Web site's cast of characters but not on IMDB. I'd wondered about that when I first saw it (actually, I first read it as necromancer and a friend pointed it out to me that it was necrophile), and was told by a former consultant to the movie that the necrophile
is a twist on the whole rape and pillage motif. (Maybe the idea is that rape isn't so bad if its done to a corpse, or the idea is that the rapist is so depraved that he rapes corpses? The former consultant wasn't sure either, and had questioned the need for a corpse.)

But don't let those changes and additions get in the way. If the movie's good, the movie's good. It is, after all, Beowulf & Grendel rather than Beowulf. The movie was filmed in Iceland, and from what I've seen, they make the most of the Icelandic landscape. And it's produced by my favorite Icelandic director, Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. (I know, you're thinking, "What? John's got a favorite Icelandic director?" I do.) Producing not the same as directing, but still.

Beowulf & Grendel

M.A. in Medieval Icelandic Studies

2006-01-13T18:52:00.000-06:00

From Úlfar Bragason, director of the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar (Sigurdur Nordal Institute):

A new program, the M.A. in Medieval Icelandic Studies, started in the Autumn of 2005 at the University of Iceland. The program is run in cooperation with the Manuscript Institute (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Reykjavík) and the Sigurdur Nordal Institute (Stofnun Sigurðar Nordals). The course is aimed at providing postgraduate students with the necessary tools to study Old/Medieval Icelandic Texts in the original and in their manuscript context, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary study. Classes will be taught in English.

Deadline for application is 15 April 2006.

More info: www.hug.hi.is [English version]

This is great news. One of the best academic experiences of my life was the Sigurdur Nordal Institute's two-week Medieval Icelandic Studies Programme I took in the summer of 1999.

Medieval Iceland | Medieval Icelandic | medieval studies | Old Icelandic | Old Norse | University of Iceland | Viking Age Iceland

Revising the Science Fiction Course

2006-01-13T08:50:00.000-06:00

A few days before school starts and I find myself seriously overhauling the plans for my Science Fiction course. I'm in the middle of redoing the reading schedule and a number of the assignments.

I've given up on pulling together a bunch of short stories--still worth doing sometime, but not now. Instead, I've decided to use Visions of Wonder: The Science Fiction Research Association Reading Anthology. No anthology is perfect, and this one has its flaws (heavy focus on the first half of the 1990s), but it's got a good mix. The only anthology I've seen that has a comparable inclusion of women is the Le Guin edited Norton Book of Science Fiction, which I refuse to use for ideological reasons (Le Guin's, not mine. Because she dislikes cyberpunk and its ethos, she leaves it out of her anthology. Like it or not, leaving cyberpunk out of science fiction anthology that focuses on SF from 1960s to 2000 is akin to an editor of a Romantic literature anthology leaving out Byron because he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." It's too bad, really, because Le Guin's anthology is really good otherwise). In addition to a good mix of stories, Visions of Wonder has a number of accessible essays on SF interspersed throughout (it appears, though I can't say for sure until I've read the whole thing, that the essays and stories are grouped together. The layout of the table of contents suggests this and my reading in a few sections seems to support it). I'm still figuring out what stories we're going to read from the anthology (last week I'd set up a schedule where we read nearly all 700 pages, but I'm cutting back). Including the anthology, the final book list is as follows:

Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. Aspect, 1997. ISBN: 0446603775.

Capek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Penguin Books, 2004. ISBN: 0141182083.

Hartwell, David G., and Milton T. Wolf, eds. Visions of Wonder: The Science Fiction Research Association Reading Anthology. Tor Books, 1996. ISBN: 0312852878.

Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. Ace, 1987. ISBN: 0441783589.

Masamune Shirow. Ghost In The Shell Volume 1 2nd Edition. Dark Horse, 2004. ISBN: 1593072287.

Miller, Walter J., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz. Spectra, 1997. ISBN: 0553379267.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm using Schtuff.com as a course site, which is a free Wiki service that includes blogging, tagging, commenting, and custom permissions (ranging from "must be logged in to view page" to "anybody can view, comment, and edit page"). I'm going with Schtuff.com rather than setting up my own Wiki or CMS like Drupal for a few reasons. First, the Wiki and multiple blogs (group and individual blogs both) in one space means fewer interfaces for the students to deal with. More importantly, however, I'm always conscious of the fact that my use of technology serves as an example to others in the department of what can be done. While SLU has Wiki and blog software available to use, it took me 3 months of repeated asking to get anyone to set up a group blog for my fall class and I never did get a Wiki. And after six months of asking for a blog and Wiki for the English Graduate Organization, I've given up on using in-house materials (and no, they won't let a graduate student set up something on their servers). So, while I could set up something on my own site (actually, I do have Media Wiki installed), the chances of anyone else in the department running out and installing their own Wiki or blog or Drupal on their own personal site is unlikely (assuming they have a personal site--few maintain a SLU based site on their own). The chance of someone seeing how I'm using Schtuff.com and deciding to try it out, especially since we're also going to start using it for the English Graduate Organization, is much more likely.

My plan has been, and continues to be, to make extensive use of the Wiki and blog as a student created database of content that we can then draw upon for other projects. I'd come up with a number of ideas before December, only wrote some of them down, and forgot most of what I didn't write down until I followed Jeff's link to his Theories of the Digital course. In particular, his comment about the function of the Weblog as reading journal reminded me of my earlier plans. Jeff writes: "Weblog notes are not critiques of the readings. They are notes. Notes serve as databases you draw upon for future work and for making connections. Notes are not evaluative."

In addition to using the Wiki and blog to create a glossary, for a short story project (more on this sometime this term), for reading journals and a group blog, and for "letter exchanges" (while written to meet the needs of ReadWriteThink's K-12 focus, and therefore quite different from how it plays out in my courses, my "Exploring Literature Through Letter Writing Groups is an example of how these exchanges work), I wanted to push the database idea a bit further by having students post class discussion notes and to make carnival posts. Each class, two or three students will be required to post notes to the class site, which anyone can then come in and flesh out, and every two weeks, 3-4 students will be required to write a carnival post drawing the past two weeks blog posts (both individual and group). The take-home essay and midterm, as well as the short story project and the letter exchanges, will ask students to draw upon the already created content (thereby acting as a database). So, since I'm already revising the plan, I've decided to rethink some of the other assignments and how it will all come together.

I'll finish adding content to the site this weekend, and students should start adding to it by this time next week. I'm going to encourage, but not require, that their reading journals and short story projects be made public to those not logged in, but I want to leave that up to them. Right now the glossary, which they'll be creating most of the content for, is set to be public. I'm going to fill in a few entries for terms I want to start the course with (such as cognitive estrangement), but until they get to work on it, it's mostly going to be a list of terms.

SF | science fiction | teaching | teaching-carnival

CW 2006 Proposal: Ong's Digital Turn

2006-01-12T15:44:00.000-06:00

Computers and Writing 2006 (as opposed to Computers and Writing Online 2006) proposals are due Jan. 15. Call for Papers | Submission Form. For what it's worth, here's my proposal:

“Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy”

Although the merits and particulars of Walter Ong’s study of orality-literacy contrasts are the subject of some debate, the influence of Ong’s work on many who study computers and writing and digital culture is not. While Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word remains his most influential and widely known work, Ong continued to work with orality-literacy contrasts for another 15 years, much of it focusing on the role of digitization. Ong’s digital turn can be found in such publications as “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I’” (1995), “Information and/or Communication Interactions” (1996), and “Digitization, Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers” (1998), but it can not be fully understood without considering such unpublished works as the short talk “Secondary Oralism and Secondary Visualism,” the article “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory,” and the unfinished 40,000-word manuscript Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization.

This presentation will summarize and contextualize Ong’s digital turn and identify a number of its implications for technorhetoricians and others seeking to apply Ongian thought to digital culture, including such issues such as the debate over Ong’s thought, the use and misuse of secondary orality, visualism, the relationship of digital technologies to analog electronic technologies, and the role of digitization in Western Culture. The purpose of this presentation is not to argue that Ong’s digital turn was groundbreaking or that its implications will revolutionize the study of digital culture. Rather, the goal of this presentation is to bring to light Ong's own reworking of orality-literacy contrasts after the publication of Orality and Literacy so that we may better understand his thought as we continue to use it as a point of departure for our own work.

Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archives.

cfp | computers and writing | C&W2006 | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong

Computers & Writing Online 2006 Registration Begins

2006-01-12T10:06:00.000-06:00

Via Kairosnews:

Just a quick note to say that registration for Computers & Writing Online 2006 is live and ready to go. Visit http://english.ttu.edu/cw/CWO2006/ to register.

From the conference home page, you will also find a list of all the presentations accepted for the conference. We have an excellent line up of presentations, and I hope you are making travel plans to attend now:

E-Forum asynchronous presentations Feb. 6-28
Tuesday Night Café Reunion Feb 7
Symposium—-real-time presentations, poster sessions, and keynote conversation Feb. 18 10-3 PM CST.

We also have in the works some special GRN (Graduate Research Network) events, and we are working on a recreation of the infamous Technorhetorician's Bar & Grill complete with Lou the bartender.

A complete conference-going guide will be sent to all those who have registered for the conference by Feb. 1st. In the meantime, feel free to explore the conference website and contact me if you have any questions.

The conference is free, so why not register and participate as you can?

computers and writing | computers and writing online

4 Things Meme

2006-01-12T08:51:00.000-06:00

Because Clancy's doing it.

Note: I've decided to change some of my answers. Deal with it.

Four Jobs You’ve Had In Your Life:

1. Paper route
2. Cashier at the Hot Springs Lodge and Pool (one of many positions I held there in high school and college)
3. Sales associate for Godiva Chocolatier
4. Student employee in the Media Library of University of Colorado, Boulder

Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over:

1. Grosse Pointe Blank
2. Blade Runner
3. Seven Samurai
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Four Places You’ve Lived:

1. Agoura Hills, CA
2. Glenwood Springs, CO
3. Boulder, CO
4. Hillsboro, OR

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch:

1. The Simpsons
2. The Daily Show (How could I have forgotten this?) ~~Time Team~~
3. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
4. South Park

Four Places You’ve Been On Vacation:

1. Orcas Island
2. Reykjavik
3. Victoria, British Columbia
4. London

Four Blogs You Visit Daily:

1. Neil Gaiman
2. Yellow Dog
3. Depraved Librarian
4. The Truth Hurts

Four Of Your Favorite Foods:

1. Green chili
2. Lamb stew
3. Italian Supreme pizza from Round Table
4. Bread pudding

Four Places You’d Rather Be:

1. Central Western Colorado (i.e., in the mountains)
2. Orcas Island
3. Portland, OR
4. ?

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without:

1. Box Set, Led Zeppelin (or if that's cheating, Led Zeppelin II
2. Nihil, KMFDM
3. Siamese Dream, Smashing Pumpkins
4. Cowboy Bebop CD-Box Orignial Soundtrack (Actually, I could live with the box set which includes clips from the show; what I'd really want is my iTunes Cowboy Bebop playlist.) or Symphony No. 9: From the New World, Dvorak

Four Vehicles I’ve Owned:

I've never owned a car until I got married when, legally, my wife's car became our car. When I started college, my parents gave me the choice of a computer or a used car and I went with the computer....

1. An battery-powered car made by a family friend in the early 1970s (imagine a 4x2 foot piece of plywood with four bicycle wheels, one seat, and handle bar steering on a metal frame. I think it could go about 5 mph and could run about an hour before the battery needed to recharge overnight. We got it when I was four and I was too heavy for it by the time I was eight)
2. 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme (an old car that my parents kept around as a second car--my dad had a government supplied car for work).
3. 1995 Dodge Neon (the car my wife had when we got married)
4. 1999 Mustang (not a car we'd have normally bought, but my wife's offloaded it on us for cheap when they went nomadic)

Four People To Be Tagged: Following Clancy's lead: If you haven't done it yet, you're one of the four

Year of Ong Blog

2006-01-06T13:08:00.000-06:00

With a nod to Steve's "Will 2007 be the year of Ong?" post, I have a question for anyone who cares to comment. I've begun putting together a small web site to house the various calls for papers and other information about the Orality and Literacy 25th anniversary plans when I thought it might be more interesting to put the whole thing together as a group blog. Crucial posts, such as the CFPs and session information, could be linked to in a sidebar so they'd always be easy to find, and, of course, there'd be an RSS feed. Ideally, over the next year and especially once the sessions begin, the blog could also become a site of conversation about Orality and Literacy, Ong, and related issues.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?

Orality and Literacy Turning 25 (1982-2007)

2006-01-04T15:48:00.000-06:00

Ong's Orality and Literacy turns 25 next year (1982-2007), and as many regular readers know, I believe the book is both widely misread and misunderstood. See, for instance "Reading and Misreading Orality and Literacy," notes for my CCCC 2006 RNF presentation, interview response, and this rant. To mark the 25th anniversary of the book's publication, I've decided to organize a series of conference panels for MLA 2006, CCCC 2007, C&W 2007, Saint Louis University's Ong conference (assuming the plan to make the Ong conference bi-annual holds together), and maybe MEA 2007. One could argue that the MLA panel ought to be held in Dec. 2007 rather than Dec. 2006, but it seems odd to have a concentration of panels in March (CCCC), April (Ong Conference), May (C&W), and June (MEA) and then wait six months for MLA, so I'm starting with MLA 2006. The spring issue of the MLA Newsletter should have the brief (35 word) CFP, which is as follows:

Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy at 25
Papers relating to Ong's Orality and Literacy. Suggested topics: considerations/reconsiderations, its reception, extensions, critiques, contextualizations. Inquiries and 1-page abstracts by 15 Mar.; John Paul Walter (walterj at slu.edu).

In the next day or two I'll put up a web page where I'll post all the CFPs as they come available, and, eventually, abstracts and the like.

While I haven't decided yet, for CCCC I'm thinking of something along the lines of "25 Years of Reading/Misreading Orality and Literacy, and for C&W something like "Orality and Literacy in the Digital Age."

If you're interested in getting involved, be it proposing a paper, helping organize a panel for one of the above conferences (I don't see why we couldn't propose more than one panel), suggesting panel topics, or even organizing a panel for a conference I don't list above, please leave a comment or email me.

And yes, I am keeping in mind the possibility of some sort of edited collection, either a book or as a special issue of a journal. We should have Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth together well before C&W 2007, so I'll know by then whether I'm up for playing editor again.

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

cfp | Orality and Literacy | Walter J. Ong

Back from MLA

2006-01-01T13:20:00.000-06:00

I'm back from MLA. Unlike a number of people I like the conference. Its timing isn't the best for most people, but as we don't have kids and as my wife isn't allowed time off between Christmas and New Years thanks to the end of the year rush of people who want to use up their insurance benefits for eye exams and glasses, we can't do much of anything the last week of the year. MLA is big and it is diverse, and therefore thin, in its offerings for any one subject, it's a great big smorgasbord for me: rhetoric, medieval literature, composition studies, digital studies, medievalism, textual studies, science fiction and fantasy, Scottish literature, professional issues, philology and linguistics.... Generally, my problem is figuring out which panel I'm going to go to and which time slots I'm going to attend. Three or four sessions a day is my limit, and with MLA offering up to 8 sessions a day (8:30 AM - 10:00 PM), that's a lot to miss.

I'll write more about the conference and type up some of my notes over the next few days. Unfortunately, as I don't have a laptop to carry around and remind me, I'm still not in the habit of taking notes to blog sessions, though I did much better job of taking notes than I have in the past (i.e., I can actually blog about some of the sessions this time around). But, for now:

Sessions I went to:
1: A Preconvention Workshop for Job Seekers: The Job Search In English
8: The Subject of Composition
118: Indexing for the MLA International Bibliograpy
148: Alternative Models for Writing Programs: A Critical Conversation
214: Old English Poetry: Bodies, Aesthetics, and Sexual Difference
291: Cash Bar Arranged by the Division on Old English Language and Literature
418: Indexing Scholarly Web Sites in the MLA International Bibliograpy
541: Old English Literature and Its Celtic and Scandinavian Affinities
600: The State of American Writing: Perspectives Popular and Professional
662: Anglo-Saxon Manuscript Culture and the Visual Imagination

Sessions I really wanted to attend but didn't:
42: Chaucer "after Theory"
58: Innovation through Tradition: Medieval Perspectives on Textual Authority
110: Situated Rhetorics
149: The Poetic Line in the Age of New Media
157: Siðakipti: Spirituality and Change in Old Norse Literature
168: Braw Lads and Bonnie Lasses: Gendering Scotland
173: Revisiting Intention through Rhetoric
222: Troilus and Criseyde
224: Outside in the Archival Machine: Graduate Student Scholarship and the Archive
226: Literary Representations of Historical Medieval Women
232: New Media and Literary Criticism
262: The Language of Soundscape: "Rhythm Science" and Reading Electronic Music
265: Byron, Scotland, and the Scots
269: What Video Games Teach Us about Literature
329: Ancient Rhetorics and Contemporary Pedagogies
351: Electronic Journals 2005
383: The World Wide Web as Metamedium
408: Ranges and Reaches of Early Middle English
443: New Technologies of Literary Investigation: Digital Demonstrations
465: Comparative Spirituality: Old and Middle English Texts and Traditions
470: Electronic Media in Nineteenth-Century American Studies
484: Who Owns Composition?
493: Digital Scholarly Publishing: Beyond the Crisis
496: Literary Theory and the Electronic Text
511: Editing New Media
516: Taking It Digital: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century
519: Scale and Scholarship in the Digital Humanities
534: Language Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
567: Early Modern Science Fiction
599: Writing Program Administration and (Multi)Media
625: New Angles on Graphic Narratives
665: Textual Analysis: What's Data Got to Do with It?
669: Troubling the Tradition: Intersections of Literature and Composition
675: Anthropology, Archaeology, and Medieval Texts
678: Studying How Genres Change
704: The Verbal and Visual: Images within and between Texts

Looking at what I missed by choice (as opposed to because of conflict) is depressing. There really was just too much. I'll write up some summaries of sessions later.

MLA

MLA on Revising Tenure

2005-12-31T17:24:00.000-06:00

According to Inside Higher Ed, the MLA will soon be issuing a plan on revising tenure standards. At issue is the common tenure requirement of a monograph at a time when the number of monographs academic publishers are willing to take on, especially by first-time authors, is shrinking. Among other things, the proposal will argue for broadening the scope of what scholarship considered acceptable for tenure, for better advising practices, and for breaking down the distinctions between print and online work.

Thursday night, a special panel of the MLA offered the first glimpse at its plan to overhaul tenure — and in many ways the plans go well beyond the reforms Greenblatt proposed. As he suggested, the panel wants departments — including those at top research universities — to explicitly change their expectations such that there are “multiple pathways” to demonstrating research excellence, ending the expectation of publishing a monograph. But the panel does not appear likely to stop there.

It plans to propose that departments negotiate “memorandums of understanding” with new hires about what factors will go into their tenure reviews. It wants departments to end a bias that favors print over online publications. It wants to change the rules of how tenure candidates are evaluated, proposing that a limit of six be set on the number of outsider reviewers asked to look at a tenure candidate and that those outside reviewers no longer be asked certain questions that seem likely to doom some candidacies while adding little valuable information to an evaluation.

Domna C. Stanton, the MLA’s current president and a French studies professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, has led the work of the panel, and she remarked several times as members discussed the group’s ideas about how broad and significant they were. In an interview after the presentation, she said that these proposals could lead to revolutionary changes in the way faculty members start and advance in their academic careers.

academia | MLA | tenure

Digital Storytelling at the BBC

2005-12-31T15:25:00.000-06:00

The BBC claims to have the world's largest archive of digital stories at Telling Lives: Your Digital Stories. They define digital stories as:

A digital story is a short film made from a script that tells a personal story illustrated with pictures from your photo album. The films are produced in workshops in which all the skills are taught. Everybody has a story to tell and anyone can learn the techniques. Discover how to write a script and use new technology to turn it into a short piece of television.

The site should provide a number of good examples and models for classroom new media projects.

See also the California based Center for Digital Storytelling, to which I've linked before.

Digital Culture | Digital Literacy | pedagogy | teaching | teaching resources

"Tools Interiorized"

2005-12-25T14:18:00.000-06:00

Konrad Glogowski, winner of the 2005 Edublog "Best Newcomer" Award, has a post on developing community through blogging:

I have spent the last ten days creating a new blogging community for my students. The old one stopped working. I’ve been using Manila for the past two years but there have been too many problems lately. First, the IT team said it was a virus, then the aftermath of the virus, then compatibility issues. Finally, after many disruptions to our classroom blogging, I decided to take action and get new software and a new server.

As you can imagine, it was a lot of work. This whole experience, however, proved to be very enlightening from an educational point of view. [read more]

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

blogging | pedagogy | teaching

Understanding New Media

2005-12-25T13:58:00.000-06:00

Robert K. Logan, author of The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age, The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age, and The Alphabet Effect, is currently working on Understanding New Media: Extensions of Marshall McLuhan:

A new study is being made of the social impacts and history of the “new media” is a project called Understanding New Media: Extensions of Marshall McLuhan. The impact of the “new media” on the media McLuhan studied in Understanding Media: Extension of Man like radio, TV and the movies as well as the impact of “new media” themselves like the Internet, the World Wide Web, Blogs, Cell Phones, I-pods, etc.

drafts of chapters 1 and 7 are available for download as MS Word docs at http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/.

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

Marshall McLuhan | media ecology

Ethnographies of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games

2005-12-24T15:17:00.000-06:00

A collection of student term papers from a course titled "Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games."

via datacloud

Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams

2005-12-24T15:02:00.000-06:00

Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams

[From the hard copy book Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis; Jossey-Bass Publishers: San Francisco, 1993. Linking to this book chapter from other websites is permissible. However, the contents of this chapter may not be copied, printed, or distributed in hard copy form without permission.]

Students learn best when they are actively involved in the process. Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats. Students who work in collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their classes. (Sources: Beckman, 1990; Chickering and Gamson, 1991; Collier, 1980; Cooper and Associates, 1990; Goodsell, Maher, Tinto, and Associates, 1992; Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991; Kohn, 1986; McKeachie, Pintrich, Lin, and Smith, 1986; Slavin, 1980, 1983; Whitman, 1988)

Various names have been given to this form of teaching, and there are some distinctions among these: cooperative learning, collaborative learning, collective learning, learning communities, peer teaching, peer learning, reciprocal learning, team learning, study circles, study groups, and work groups. But all in all, there are three general types of group work: informal learning groups, formal learning groups, and study teams (adapted from Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991).

via cyberdash

collaborative learning | teaching

Digital Humanities at MLA

2005-12-24T13:27:00.000-06:00

The Association for Computers and the Humanities has put together a list of digital humanities sessions for the MLA 2005.

via Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.

digital humanities | humanities computing | mla2005

Fanboys/girls and Scholarship, or the Scholar as Otaku

2005-12-24T11:20:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to point to Michael Drout's post on Fanboys and Scholarship for over a month now, so here it is. As Drout argues, scholarship requires the focus of the otaku (yes, I realize that otaku traditionally refers to an obsessive interest in anime and manga and is considered a negative term by many. (Otaku, fangirl/boy, geek, and nerd are all contentious terms).

On my medievalist side, I've got a fairly stereotypical fanboy background as described by Drout. During the summer between 3rd and 4th grade I came across the The Chronicles of Narnia, and by the time I'd finished The Lord of the Rings in 5th grade, I began devouring fantasy and started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Fantasy led to science fiction and Dungeons and Dragons led to other role-playing games (I more or less gave up gaming upon starting graduate school, though I'd love to still play Ars Magica, a game set in "mythic Europe" and designed by people with degrees in medieval studies). As I mentioned during my 2004 MLA presentation on the Victorian reception of Old Norse literature and its influence on 20th Century heroic (i.e., sword and sorcery) fantasy, some of my aunts and uncles worried where these obsessions with fantasy literature and role-playing games would take me. Academia, naturally. After all, my 11th grade learn-how-to-write-a-research-paper research paper was on the development and use of heavy cavalry during the middle Ages....

Upon starting graduate school, my gaming and most of my fantasy/science fiction reading stopped. Outside of the Tolkien courses I took and then TAed for during my MA studies, I usually read a couple of fantasy/SF novels during the summer and one over winter break. At some point during my Ph.D. studies I fell back into reading both. Quite inevitable, possibly, when one teaches courses such as The Lord of the Rings and its medieval context and science fiction and when one's dissertation director has not only written and edited such books as Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English, The Critical Heritage: Beowulf, and The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous, but The Road to Middle-earth, Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, and both the The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories.

Come to think of it, I can pinpoint this return to SF and fantasy to two events. While we were browsing in some used bookstore in Kansas City for a confernece, Shippey handed me a copy of Stephenson's Snow Crash and told me I needed to read it. And then, sometime later, while sitting in on Shippey's class on The Alliterative Tradition, he made the offhanded comment about Terry Pratchett, and when all he got was blank stares, he said, "Everyone should read Terry Pratchett." A few weeks later, a copy of the first book in Pratchett's Discworld series fell into my hands--literally, a friend lent the book to my wife, who doesn't read much science fiction or fantasy, she brought it on a trip back home to Colorado for Christmas and had finished it in the airport before the flight. Trying to be good, I'd brought a some scholarly book, which I couldn't concentrate on during the flight, so she handed it to me.

Academically, my obsessions are memory (rhetorical memory, literature as social memory, the technologies of memory, and memory and cognition); orality-literacy studies and media ecology (with a particular interest in oral-manuscript transitional culture, digital culture, how it pertains to the history and theory of rhetoric and composition, and literary reconstructions and representations of media cultures such as in A Canticle for Leibowitz, Early in Orcadia, The Tale of Old Mortality, and Ridley Walker; and traditions (the traditions of oral/manuscript/print/digital culture, rhetorical traditions, social memory and practices of memory, the traditions of composition, and medievalism, which, in its broadest sense, also includes speculative fiction (i.e., fantasy and science fiction)).

Of more traditional fanboy fare, I've currently got obsessions with Ghost in the Shell, and the works of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Speaking of which:

-I've just finished recording to DVD the 26th (and final) episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and I think I know which episodes I'm going to use in my science fiction course next term (I want to watch them in order to decide if 1) they make sense when viewed out of the larger narrative, and 2) if they really do represent the issues I want to touch on).

-Thud! The Boardgame, which is essentially the Discworld's version of a fox game (the two best known fox games are the English Foxes and Geese and the Scandinavian Halatafl, both of which I own versions of because while I have no desire to play the medieval á la the Society for Creative Anachronism (role-playing games of the non-live variety are a different thing), I do enjoy playing a medieval game now and then):

THUD– Officially Licensed DISCWORLD boardgame
Mongoose Publishing is proud to announce the release of THUD, an exciting DISCWORLD boardgame based on the battle between dwarfs and trolls, where players take the field in an all-out attempt to defeat their opponent. The fast-moving dwarfs must form up into defensive blocks as quickly as possible, before hurling their crazed axe-wielding comrades at the trolls. The slower, more ponderous, trolls must catch and clobber these whirling axe dervishes before they have a chance to properly organise...

and both Pratchett and Gaiman have released the New Year's resolutions, the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, Hell and Heaven's representatives on earth who team up to stop the apocalypse in Gaiman and Pratchett's comic novel Good Omens. My favorite from Crowley is

Resolution #7: On the orders of Head Office I will encourage the belief in Intelligent Design, because it upsets everyone.

and my favorite from Aziraphale is

Resolution #10: On the orders of Head Office I will encourage the belief in Intelligent Design – despite the fact that the human airway crosses the digestive tract. Who thought that was intelligent?

And since I'm on the subject of being a otaku/geek/nerd: I watched The Brothers Grimm last night, and I'm pretty sure Angelica was carrying a seax (in the OED as sax), a Germanic bladed tool/weapon that, linguistically, dates back to at least the proto-Germanic period and may have its roots in the proto Indo-European period (see Gustav Hübener's "Beowulf and Germanic Exorcism" in Review of English Studies 11 (1935): 163-181 and "Beowulf's 'Seax', the Saxons and the Indian Exorcism" in Review of English Studies 12 (1936): 429-439). A nice touch for a movie playing with two figures who helped invent the fields of comparative philology, comparative mythology, and folklore.

academia | fanboy | fangirl | otaku | scholarship

Duke iPod Experiment Update

2005-12-24T09:05:00.000-06:00

It seems, as I have argued earlier, that obituaries of Duke's iPod experiment were misguided:

The number of Duke University students using iPods in the classroom has quadrupled and the number of courses incorporating the devices has doubled in the second year of an effort to mesh digital technology with academics. [read more]

via Inside Higher Ed

Duke University | iPod

Wiki Pedagogy & Social Software Affordances

2005-12-10T09:53:00.000-06:00

Two teaching resources I want to remember: Wiki Pedagogy, an article, and Social Software Affordances, a syllabus.

Wiki Pedagogy (article)

Abstract
This article endeavours to denote and promote pedagogical experimentations concerning a Free/Open technology called a "Wiki". An intensely simple, accessible and collaborative hypertext tool Wiki software challenges and complexifies traditional notions of - as well as access to - authorship, editing, and publishing. Usurping official authorizing practices in the public domain poses fundamental - if not radical - questions for both academic theory and pedagogical practice.

The particular pedagogical challenge is one of control: wikis work most effectively when students can assert meaningful autonomy over the process. This involves not just adjusting the technical configuration and delivery; it involves challenging the social norms and practices of the course as well (Lamb, 2004). Enacting such horizontal knowledge assemblages in higher education practices could evoke a return towards and an instance upon the making of impossible public goods” (Ciffolilli, 2003).

Social Software Affordances (syllabus)

Course Description
'Social software' has become a convenient label to group a new generation of socio-technical systems (mostly web based) that facilitate human expression, communication, and collaboration. Examples of social software include content management systems such as blogs, knowledge and collaboration management systems such as wikis, relationship management systems such as Friendster and Orkut, distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us and furl, and the use of RSS feeds to distribute information to specific audiences.
Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities. During this course, we will (individually and collectively) address some of the following questions:

* What is 'social' about social software?
* How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?
* What aspects of our humanity stand to gain or suffer as a result of our use of and reliance on social software?
* How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software?
* What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?
* What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?
* Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?
* What general principles can we identify for designing social software? How would we apply those principles in the design of a particular social software application?
* What general principles can we identify for evaluating social software?
How would we use those principles to measure the effectiveness of a particular social software application?

I thought I'd come across these two either at Weblogg-ed or Educational Weblogs, but I'm not finding reference to them any more at either site.

social software | teaching resources | wiki

iPod 101

2005-12-06T11:53:00.000-06:00

Apple's put together an "iPod 101" site as a one-stop spot for iPod information:

If you're a new iPod owner or simply need a refresher course on how to get the most out of your iPod, you've come to the right place. Welcome to iPod 101: Your guide to rockin' out, gettin' down, and boogieing with your iPod, iPod nano, iPod mini, or iPod shuffle.

Whether you're a Mac or Windows user, iPod 101 contains tons of information that'll help you enjoy your iPod to its fullest and guide you on your way to becoming iTunes savvy (we're using iTunes 6 in our course materials). Get ready to walk through the virtual aisles of the iTunes Music Store; learn how to sync your music, contacts, calendars, and more; admire your pretty pictures (and force others to do the same); watch TV shows and video; and find out what to do when things don't go as planned.

via Lifehacker.

iPod

Yule in Iceland

2005-12-06T11:52:00.000-06:00

It's early December, which means the Yule in Iceland Web site is up. Oh, wait, I see it's now up year-round, but the Jólasveinar don't start appearing until Dec. 12. When I was in Iceland, I picked up a multi-language children's book on the Jólasveinarnir, which has the section on each of the lads (the text is in Icelandic, English, German, Norwegian, and, I want to say, Swedish and/or French). Without a doubt, however, my favorite Icelandic Yule tradition is the Jólaköttur.

Welcome to Iceland and the Yule Traditions and Yule Lore found here. On these pages you will find some information about Yule traditions in ancient and modern times.

Jólasveinarnir, The Yuletide Lads, will visit these pages starting on December 12th, as you can see in the list at the left. The Icelandic Jólasveinar leave small gifts for good children, who put their shoes on the windowsill at night. The Jólasveinar will also leave a Cyber-gift for you each day, as they arrive in town from the mountains, where they live for most of the year.

We are using the English word Yule instead of Christmas as we want to emphasize the close connection the English and Icelandic languages had in the past when the tongues were essentially the same.

Christmas | Iceland | yule

Epic 2014

2005-12-05T12:04:00.000-06:00

I first saw the 8 minute flash movie Epic 2014 last year when it information about it was first making the rounds. I'm posting a link to it here mostly to remind myself (this is, after all, my artificial memory system), but if you haven't seen it, take a look.

LookLater: An Anti-social Bookmarking Service

2005-12-01T18:33:00.000-06:00

LookLater: "Instant searchable bookmarks in your own FREE and PRIVATE on-line archive." According to Lifehacker, LookLater is like del.icio.us, but your bookmarks are private.

The English Studies Job Search

2005-11-30T14:00:00.000-06:00

Clancy of CultureCat links to these two perspectives on the English Studies academic job market . The first is "But Can You Teach?," by M. Garrett Bauman and published in The Chronicle, and the second is "Who Would You Hire?, or, Merit in Action," written by "Dean Dad" at Confessions of a Community College Dean.

academia | higher education

Rereading Orality & Literacy

2005-11-29T13:17:00.000-06:00

Rereading Orality & Literacy so as to give my students a theoretical framework for understanding Naomi Mitchinson's Early in Orcadia, I was, once again, struck by the fact that it's much too well known and far too little well read.

I've seen far too many discussions of this book by scholars who haven't read it or haven't read it recently (i.e., discussions of it are based not on the text but on discussions and quotations of the text that are once, twice, even five or six times removed from Ong's own words). I've seen the book attacked for saying things it does not say, and I've seen it attacked for not saying or taking into account things it actually does say or does take into account. For instance, I don't remember where I read this, but I once read an attack on Ong based on the argument that traditional skills-based knowledge is often learned visually, by watching and doing rather than through telling. This, the argument went, blew Ong's psychodyanamics of orality classification system out of water because it demonstrated that visualism was important before writing. While the argument itself demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of what Ong and others do argue, it even demonstrates a complete lack of attention to Orality & Literacy itself. In Ong's discussion of the fifth characteristic of orally based thought and expression, "Close to the human lifeworld," Ong writes

An oral culture has nothing corresponding to how-to-do-it manuals for the trades [...]. Trades were learned by apprenticeship (as they still largely are even in high-technology cultures), which means from observation and practice with only minimal verbalized explanation. (43)

Clearly, the scholar who was attacking Ong in that piece I read had paid absolutely no attention to Orality & Literacyitself, not even to the section of the book to which the author took issue. This is all too common an approach to Ong and his work: accusing him of saying what he does not say or attacking him for not considering something he does, in fact, consider.

But lets take a step back from that particular issue. Things don't get much better when we consider representations of Ong's work. Based on search engine referrals to both my blogs, Notes from the Water J. Ong Archive and Machina Memorialis, I feel comfortable in saying that one of Ong's better known topics is the psychodynamics of orality articulated in chapter 3 of Orality & Literacy. For a good number of people, the psychodynamics of orality are the list of nine characteristics of orally based thought and expression Ong lists in that chapter, which are:

Additive rather than subordinate;

Aggregative rather than analytic;

redundant or 'copious';

Conservative or traditionalist;

Close to the human lifeworld;

Agonistically toned;

Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced;

Homeostatic; and

Situational rather than abstract.

What one needs to remember, what one would remember if they returned to the chapter, or, in some cases, turned to it, is that this section, labeled "Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression," is but one of nine sections in the chapter "Some Psychodynamics of Orality." In other words, these nine characteristics do not, in and of themselves, define the psychodynamics of orality. Although this is the case, far too many representations and accounts of the psychodynamics of orality focus only on these nine characteristics.

And let's take another step back. Or maybe it's a step sideways. Either way, I want to focus on the nine characteristics as a whole. Many scholars, often following Beth Daniel's "Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy," attack Ong and orality-literacy studies by pointing out weaknesses, both real and imagined, with these nine characteristics. This would be fine except for the fact that few acknowledge or pay any attention to how Ong introduces these nine characteristics. He writes:

This inventory of characteristics is not presented as exclusive or conclusive but as suggestive, for much more work and reflection is needed to deepen understanding of orally based thought (and thereby understanding of chirographically based, typographically based, and electronically based thought). (36)

Far too often, these suggestions that need further exploration are treated as hard facts to be embraced or refuted.
Ong, as he himself liked to stress, did not try to theorize. Rather than theorize, he tried to describe what we knew and what the implications of that knowledge was. And this is not just some semantic game that Ong and I are playing. As I've argued before, this distinction is key to understanding Ong's work (see for instance, this post for the gist of this argument).

What I'm getting at here in this post, and it's not a new theme for me, is that Orality & Literacy is one of the more misread and misunderstood books in English studies. And, moreover, far too little is done with it. It's cited a lot by both its supporters and its critics, but it's not used enough as a road map for further exploration. In writing it, Ong presented us with a map that has large tracks of unknown territory, and on this map he did not write "Beyond here be dragons." No. Ong wanted us to explore, to discover, and to learn. He believed knowledge existed in time (follow the link at the end of the paragraph above), and that what we know is always provisional and will always need to be reevaluated and reworked as new knowledge comes in.

I'm always struck by thoughts like these when I pick this book up. While it came at the end of his career, it was always intended to be an introduction to his own work and to the field. Even when it was published in 1982, it was not meant to be an end point but instead a point of departure.

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

Orality and Literacy | psychodynamics of orality | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong

Help Review and/or Contribute to a Free Rhetoric and Composition Textbook

2005-11-29T12:09:00.000-06:00

Matt Barton and his students have been working on a free Rhetoric and Composition wikibook and are now looking for reviewers as well as collaborators. See Matt's post at Kairosnews.org for more information.

composition | rhetoric | teaching composition | teaching writing

Spring Teaching

2005-11-27T16:16:00.000-06:00

My science fiction course is taking shape. I've decided we'll read five novels and a number of short stories, and we'll watch 2-3 movies and some episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

The novels we'll read are Dawn by Octavia Butler, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Telling by Ursula Le Guin, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr., and Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Masamune. In addition to the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episodes, I know we're going to watch Bladerunner, and I think we're going to watch Minority Report (and read the short story upon which it is based). I'm also thinking about showing Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, but I'm also tempted to show War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks!.

The issues of short stories is more vexed, but my current short list includes:

Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars"

Robert Silverberg's "Good News from the Vatican"

Nancy Kress' "Out of All Them Bright Stars"

Candas Jane Dorsey's "(Learning About) Machine Sex"

Isaac Asimov's "Robbie" and/or "Robot Dreams"

William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome"

Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" or "Second Dawn"

Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Cordwainer Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'mell"

Phil K. Dick's "Minority Report"

James Trptree, Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See"

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu"

Who and what that are missing from that list is depressing. Really, I continually debate myself over the wisdom of teaching both science fiction short stories and novels in the same course. As a reader, SF novels were and are much more important to me than SF short stories, but the short story is of vital importance to the history of SF, and one can hardly touch on the complexity of the genre in the span of one semester by just reading novels. The first time I taught a SF class, I went with novels and 4 short stories. Clearly, I'm still sticking with novels, but I'm trying to bring in more stories. I need to browse my SF anthologies and anthologies in the library before I finally decide which stories to include. Please feel free to make suggestions.

The class itself is already full. It usually fills quickly. And I'm glad to see that more than a third of the class is women. Last time I taught it, women made up less than 10%. Though, to be fair, I taught a course that was added late by dividing the already existing and fully enrolled SF course into two courses and the other instructor was a women. Her class was about 40% women.

Finally, I've decided to make use of the free wiki service Schtuff, which has a built in blog. I'm not keen on the blogging software my school's made available, and I can use Schtuff as the course web site, blog, and wiki all from one URL. We'll be using the wiki for a collaborative project working with the short stories. I'll post more about that later.

SF | science fiction | teaching | teaching-carnival

Kessinger Publishing's Rare Reprints

2005-11-26T15:42:00.000-06:00

essinger Publishing utilizes advanced technology to publish and preserve thousands of rare, scarce, and out-of-print books.

We search worldwide for hard-to-find books and publish them in affordable editions. Once we place a title into print, it stays in print.

Located near Glacier National Park in Montana, Kessinger Publishing is dedicated toward publishing and digitally preserving important literature for future generations.

The categories and search function are not what one would hope--I wouldn't expect to find Jacob Grimm's four-volume Teutonic Mythology in philosophy rather than folklore (though it does come up under mythology), and I'm not keen on the fact "Old English" as a search term brings up way more texts like Arabian Days and Vindication of the Principles and Doctrines of the People Called Quakers, but there's a number of treasures at reasonable prices. Consider, for instance, their collection of William Morris's medievalism such as The House Of The Wolfings, The Story Of The Glittering Plain, The Story Of The Heath Slayings Heitharviga Saga, The Well At The World's End, and Wood Beyond The World.

rare books | reprints

XML editors

2005-11-26T12:40:00.000-06:00

Recently, someone on the Digital Medievalist list asked for recommendations for a XML editor that was java based and hid the fact XML was being used--a WYSIWYG editor, I think. Two were suggested: Vex, an open source editor, and XMLmind.

xml editors

"Where a Geneticist Can Teach 'Gilgamesh'"

2005-11-22T16:07:00.000-06:00

I've been wanting to comment on The Chronicle article "Where a Geneticist Can Teach 'Gilgamesh'" for a while now. From the beginning of the article:

One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles.

But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched out on the carpeted floor, his head propped up on a bent arm, and asked a small class of bright-eyed freshmen sitting along the walls to reflect on Gilgamesh, the world's oldest-known epic poem. Gilgamesh, the virile Mesopotamian king who may actually have lived around 2700 BC, is both hero and villain in his failed quest for immortality.

In short, the article discusses the idea of year-long core seminars, focusing on the program at Ursinus College where Robert Dawley teaches. By most accounts, including those of the students themselves, Ursinus' program is successful and most of the faculty, including those outside the humanities, find value in teaching humanities based first year seminars.

Looking back to my post in response to Domenico Grasso's piece "Is It Time to Shut Down Engineering Colleges?," I'd like to push this idea a bit further and suggest we think about having philosophers and literary scholars and historians teaching genetic engineering or cosmology. I'm not suggesting that non scientists teach upper division courses in the sciences but, instead, I'm suggesting, as in my earlier post, that our non scientists need more exposure to issues of science and technology, and, like Grasso, I think we all need to think about science and technology from a humanist perspective. Again, he argues:

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.

So, why should all the core science classes be the traditional introductions to those disciplines? Why not interdisciplinary (transdisciplinary) seminars focusing on the social, cultural, political, historical aspects of science and technology? We are a technological society that has little understanding of science or technology, let alone the social, cultural, political, and historical aspects of science and technology. A well-rounded, liberal, education is not just rooted in the humanities. It is rooted in the sciences (and the social sciences) as well. It involves the making the connections among the disciplines, in considering disciplinary issues through the lens of other disciplines.

via Jerz's Literacy Weblog.

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