Technology & English Studies

Hey all,

For the next time we meet (August 17th or something?! lol), I would like you to goto the CCCC conference website and peruse the conference schedule. (I recommend downloading the entire schedule as a PDF and paging through as you’ll get a much more rich experience and be able to understand the breadth of the conference that way, rather than using the searchable schedule, which is pretty annoying and limiting.) Choose (and bring to class next time we meet) 5 or so sessions that you would want to attend. We’ll talk about some of them (and maybe I’ll have actually gone to some and can tell you more about them!).

Also, here are a few URLs of previous student projects from a similar class:

• one where she enacts the idea of “closure” in hypertext. Click on the closure.wmv.
• any of these, except the Wesch piece

These are all kinda literary or research-paper-y in video form. Remind me to give you some grading heuristics I use on these and to discuss one the next time we meet. I’m trying to track down a few others that are less literary.
And do the readings. That is all.

Hey all,

A little late – apologies. Skip the two extra chapters in New Media Poetics, if needed, so that you have time to read the four RAW chapters I’ve uploaded onto the Readings page. The rest of the RAW chapters are also there (I’m waiting on permission for two more that aren’t linked yet).

Can’t wait to finally see y’all again on Thursday. I have much to report from last week’ visit to NCSA. I won’t have your papers done by then, but will try to get them back to you before CCCC.

If we haven’t reviewed your conference proposal yet (and I want to hear all about those of you who presented at the English Studies conference last week!), then bring your proposals to class on Thursday. We’ll do review of conferences and proposals first, then discuss the readings second.

to this conference: http://www.pixilerations.org/

PIXILERATIONS [V.5]: Fragments & (W)Holes
A festival of digital media and interactive performance
[part of the FirstWorksProv festival]

October 2 – 12, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island

CALL FOR WORKS! PIXILERATIONS [V.5] invites artists, musicians and film/video makers to submit work that investigates connections or disparities between fragments and (w)holes.

THE SUBMISSION PERIOD FOR WORK IS APRIL 1- MAY 1, 2008.

Pixilerations is a New Media festival in Providence, Rhode Island that investigates the state of
New Media arts through installations, concert performance and film/video screenings. The
festival is part of the larger FirstWorksProv festival (www.firstworksprov.org), Providence’s
multidimensional fall performing arts festival. Pixilerations is produced by FirstWorks in
collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University and MIT.

PIXILERATIONS [V.5] THEME: FRAGMENTS & (W)HOLES

Consciously and unconsciously our world view has been altered by the quantum mechanical
view of the world; a world composed of discrete waves and particles. This minute level of
physical investigation, developed first by Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck, is one of the
means by which we have broken the world down in order to make sense of the whole from
its parts.  This dissection has been explored through the tools of psychoanalysis pioneered by
Freud, Pavlov’s behavioral studies and the recent efforts of cognitive science to understand
human psychology and the latest conjuring of artificial intelligence. Artists have reflected
this fragmented world with its mind/body split since the 1900′s with the early collages of
Picasso and the psychological works of the Surrealists.  The digital realm is developing its
own paradigm for separating and putting the world together.  How has the fragmentary view
created deeper holes, how has it allowed us to see the whole with sharper eyes and minds?
How do artists shape their world, with fragments of life or with (w)holistic views?

Hi all. I promised you a copy of my article that might serve as an example (writ large) for your first analysis assignment. It is available here:

http://www.ceball.com/2006/11/01/refereed-article-convergence/

Note that this is the uncorrected proof and that the equal sign in the title and running headers should be a NOT-equal sign (you know, the one with the slash through it? what’s the word for that?)

Obviously, mine is article length and has two heuristics applied to an example whereas yours will only have one heuristic. Yours also shouldn’t be article length (25 pages double-spaced), but it should be a contained unit in which you write for an audience who has not read the text you are analyzing. I said 5-7 pages ds, but if may be 10 if need be. They really shouldn’t be more than 10 pages ds unless you are attemtping to expand the assignment into an article. (And if you do, keep in mind that I will grade it as an expanded, article-reaching assignment, not just as a course paper. So that’s the change, or benefit, you get for making me read more Please make sure you have a title. I hate papers without titles. Titles signal the argument for the reader, yes?

I’ve posted a forum for questions on this assignment in the moodle.

cb

Hi all,

For several reasons (some of which are good), I am cancelling our class tomorrow night.

When we get back from break,
– your first set of analyses are due
– I want to start that class by spending about an hour with the ‘map’, to fill in what we haven’t yet
– and I will post by tomorrow noon what your readings from New Media Poetics will be.
Tomorrow morning, I will also make two Moodle forums, one for you to discuss the rest of Manovich (everyone should at least do a 40-word overview, like we did for Landow), and another for you to ask questions about the analysis assignment, if you have any.

I will be offline Friday through Tuesday afternoon and will be out of cell phone range (yes, unbelievably, there are still places in the US that don’t get cell reception! But if I don’t get to respond to your questions before I go, I definitely will upon my return.

Cheryl.

Call Deadline: 05-Apr-2008

Meeting Description:

This interdisciplinary conference will shed light on how virtual communities are ‘read’ and ‘written’, i.e. constructed textually through linguistic and semiotic en- and decoding, by producers and receivers of video and massively multiplayer online games as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life.

First Call for Papers

International Conference: ‘Creating Second Lives: Reading and Writing Virtual Communities’

Games and virtual environments are playing an increasingly powerful role in Western entertainment and narrative culture. Of particular importance are the constant re- and de-construction of the embodied playing self and the post-industrialist, customisable fluidity of personal and social identity.

The conference’s major intention is to bring together researchers from a wide range of different areas, who share an interest in semiotics, stylistics, codification, new media design, 3D programming and media/cultural studies but do not always speak the same ‘language’. The conference will facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue and understanding by providing room and material for discussions between scholars, scientists and professionals from the gaming industry. By doing so, it will help experts identify and debate current and future developments particularly in relation to the textual construction of subjectivities, communities and ideologies. Date: 24-25 October 2008. Venue: Bangor University.

Abstracts of 250-300 words are invited on any topic relating to the following themes and questions:
- How do we ‘read’ and ‘write’ virtual communities, i.e. how are identities, communities and ideologies constructed textually and discursively in video games and other digital environments?
- How are user identities ‘coded into’ virtual communities?
- To what extent and to what effect can we apply contemporary stylistic and semiotic theory and analysis to virtual, interactive communities?
- How do avatars impersonate networks, communities and societies?
- What are the roles of body and mind in virtual communities? Do they separate or amalgamate?
- To what extent do we need to revisit the notions of ‘virtual’, ‘actual’ and ‘real’ in relation to entextualised social and communal worlds and realities?
- How does and will 3D graphic design contribute – now and in the foreseeable future – to the construction of social identity?
- What programming tools and methodologies are/may be used to create virtual communities and inter-’personal’ relationships?

Keynote speakers will include Prof Espen Aarseth, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Gamestudies.org and author of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, and Fred Hasson, founding CEO of TIGA, the UK Games Development Trade Association.

Hey all,

Here’s a link to the program I mentioned in class on Thursday. It’s open-source, free, and you can do all sorts of wonderful stuff in it. There are tutorials on the site. Let me know if you have questions, as I’ll be playing around with it too!

Cheryl.

I don’t know which check-box made it work, but I think the discussion forums are working now. At least, I can see the posts from last week that y’all made, and the new forum Kyle started (I’m glad that works!) Make sure to post your Landow descriptions so that we can share them and reflect on them. If you want to post your conference proposal, there’s a forum for that too, which will make distribution easier.

Also, note that I have updated the reading/calendar through the end of the semester. Everything is still malleable/tentative, so make sure to check it weekly as I will add in other readings and possibly move some of the smaller items around.

Note, too, that I have removed the book review assignment (the benefit of that is that we get to go through Manovich a little quicker and that you have a second analysis assignment due instead of the book review). I’ve also moved the due dates back a little for the first analysis assignment, which we’ll talk about in class tonight. If you’ve already chosen/read a book, don’t fret. I’m sure you can use it for your analysis or final presentation. And you can consider yourself smarter than the rest of us

Yesterday was a weird day for me — offline most of the day, stuck with my cell phone turned off in Founders Day events and then in class, out of touch. I was so exhilarated after Kurzweil’s talk, and then by class discussion related to his talk, that I completely missed the point when someone in class pointed out that there had been shootings on campus at NIU. I apologize if my behavior seemed inappropriate given the circumstances; because I had had two conversations this week about the possibility of more school shootings (which is weird enough in itself), it didn’t occur to me — just like it didn’t occur to me when only one plane (not yet two) had hit the World Trade Center towers — that the situation was serious. One of my personality faults is not being able to ‘switch gears’ very quickly. I think that’s what happened last night–it just takes a while for news like that to sink in for me. But, now that I’ve had some time to reflect, it hits me sorely. Having my best friend drive by the Pentagon the morning it was hit; having been a student at Virginia Tech and being able to picture the building in which those shootings took place; having walked by Cole Hall on the NIU campus where good colleagues work–these are all locations I can imagine myself in. As my friend Beth told me this morning, we can all imagine connections, and I think that helps us cope.

cb

Folks,

several of you have reported different problems with trying to access the moodle discussion list. Problem is I can’t figure out what the problem is. And since I have to participate in Founders Day events today (sigh), I don’t have time to troubleshoot it before class. My apologies. If you get this message, bring copies of your conference presentation or otherwise put it online somewhere where we can get at it to read and respond to during class. And just hold onto your Landow responses until I get the dang thing fixed.

cb