Summary: Banks
Banks, Adam J. (2006). Taking black technology use seriously: African American discursive traditions in the digital underground (pp. 68-85). In Race, rhetoric, and technology: searching for higher ground. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
In this article, Banks discusses how the African American oral tradition is reflected in the use of online technologies such as Black Planet, and the way in which “undergrounds” like Black Planet to assert the unique culture and resist a tradition of writing being thought of as “the domain of White culture”. Banks cites examples from Black Planet of user names, user messages, etc., to show that the Black oral tradition is reflected and perpetuated within the online writing space. Banks focuses on two main qualities of the oral tradition which can be seen in online spaces such as Black Planet: tonal semantics and sermonic tone. Banks’ discussion illustrates how African American language is finding a space in which to exert its own authority, and also the way in which cyberspace can provide a place for discourse that defines and encourages African American culture and the African American oral tradition, rather than forcing it to be the “other” in a White-dominated forum.
–C.Crawford
Blackmon Summary
Blackmon, Samantha (2007). (Cyber)conspiracy theories?: African-American students in the computerized writing environment. In Pam Takayoshi and Pat Sullivan (eds) Labor, writing technologies, and the shaping of composition in the academy (pp. 153-164). Cresskill: Hampton Press.
In this paper, Samantha Blackmon examines African-American students’ interaction with the computerized classroom in a First Year Composition course. The foundation for this paper is the idea that, while students are encouraged to disregard their racial identity in favor of joining the monochromatic online world, what she terms “cyber human” (154), due to other factors they are not on equal “cyber” footing.
The factors that Blackmon brings forth include (in the order they appear):
1) The fact that African-American students have less access to computers and the Internet in the home.
2) From the evidence of her students, they don’t identify with their racial depiction online.
3) The prevalence of hate speech online.
4) The impression that they can do nothing to correct this depiction because they feel the people in power wouldn’t allow it and the fact that they don’t have the web design skills of students with greater access.
5) Historical access to technology and the distrust in technology it has developed.
To support the last idea of historical access, Blackmon offers examples of why African Americans would distrust technology. The paper ends with an emphasis on the cultural factors that may be at work in computerized classrooms. Blackmon states, “I argue that we can no longer ignore the very real cultural issues that are still at play in our [computerized] classrooms because they are equally important to those still at play in our traditional classroom.”
-M. Markham
kz summary of Reynolds’ Learning to Dwell
Reynolds begins this chapter in a larger work by establishing that just as we dwell in physical spaces and interact with our environment (where gender, race, class and abilities all intertwine to form our identities) we also “dwell” in language. “Writers dwell in ideas to make them their own before moving on” Reynolds says. Dwelling can sometimes wall us off from others who don’t share the same space– a “geography of exclusion.” Heidegger defines building as dwelling; it’s a fundamental human experience that from the start is habitual. But dwelling is also metaphorical. She gives as an example Adrenne Rich’s realization that her identifying characteristics–white, Jewish, Lesbian (and as she once spoke about at a Stanford lecture I attended, having Rheumatoid Arthritis)–helped her to resist speaking for others. As Feminist theory elucidates, starting with the body can help resist “patriarchal epistemologies that insist on objectivity or subscribe to a Cartesian mind-body split.” Bodies leave a trace on places, and can foster an inquiry into why some feel excluded or are excluded by social factors. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Reynolds points out that awareness of physicality contributes to the psychological boundary we feel between the “inner self” and the “outer self,” the one we use to interface with the world of others, that pervasive “us and them” mentality that causes so much alienation and conflict. Reynolds draws an interesting parallel between women’s experience in public spaces, where their personal space is often intruded upon by stares, whistles, comments and even physical assault, and the fact that males perform better on spatial tasks (e.g., greater accuracy in drawing maps of their home area). This may not be due to greater experience, as is often presumed, but rather in “how men occupy space and how this affects women walking.” Plato feared that writing would cause people’s capacity for memory to diminish, yet, as Reynold’s discussion of dwelling shows, our ways of being in the world are based on our memory of the places we inhabit. Even with our electronic environments and print, memory won’t diminish because we can’t navigate through space–physical or metaphorical-without it. At some universities, first-year students are required to take a course to familiarize themselves with the campus– the purpose of this has more to do with creating a psychological openness to all the knowledge university has to offer.
All this comes back to how we inhabit a text, we first look around to see what is familiar, what is inviting, what seems excluding: “Like sense of place, encounters with texts are about feeling– structures of feeling or felt senses that are deeply emotional, visceral, embodied. Just as some walkers experience fear of certain neighborhoods, some readers are going to experience aversion to certain prose styles, citations, or “big” vocabulary words…Those who can’t find ways to dwell develop other moves–they just move on.” Often the discourses of composition studies are written in response to various postmodern or critical theories and are very dense– exclusionary. Some argue that complex ideas can only be properly conveyed in this way, and those who argue for clarity are positioning for a class war of sorts. Reynolds believes composition teachers, especially those who are oriented to working for social change, should pay attention to students’ sense of place since their spatial habits “‘lock in’ their identities, masking the politics of space and clouding the importance that place has in literacy, learning, or communication.” Reynolds feels that studying writing as spatial practices can help us to understand writing, particularly what “readers and writers bring with them to intellectual work of writing, to navigating, arranging, remembering, and composing,” and reminds us that writing can only be understood in a cultural context. “Words on a page,” Reynolds says, “the visual image, the map, the built object–all reflect a series of moves made for habitual, intentional, or accidental reasons. Keeping track of some of these moves might give glimpses into the social production of space, embodied in the moves a writer makes and the products of a writer’s work.” ~kate z
Vieregge Summary
Kinross, Robin. (1989). The rhetoric of neutrality. In Victor Margolin (ed.), Design discourse: History, theory, criticism (pp. 131-143). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robin Kinross, in her article entitled, “The Rhetoric of Neutrality,” asserts that everything is rhetorical, or – if not everything – at least typeface is. To make her argument she finds a seeming contradiction in the words of Gui Bonsiepe, who first argues that there is nothing that is not rhetorical and then almost as an afterthought asserts that typeface is an “extreme” example of something that is arhetorical: “As examples of information innocent of all taint of rhetoric, we might take the train timetable or a table of logarithms. Granted this is an extreme case, but because it is an extreme case, it is very far from representing an ideal model” (132). His point earlier is that while ideas may be without rhetoric once they are embedded within a form of communication they adopt an audience, a writer, and a particular type of medium; they are embedded within the rhetorical triangle.
Kinross doesn’t allow this contradiction to go unchallenged and asserts that the former claim – that all communication is rhetorical – is the sensible one. First, she points out how the document is more complicated than it first appears: the use of color adds appeals to our emotions because it like “music” reaches us at a fundamental level. To do this, she contextualizes the evolution of typeface usage in 20th Century Germany. While pointing out that typeface is often the least important aspect of a writer’s rhetorical skill, Kinross nevertheless asserts that a document’s meaning can be affected by something as simple as typeface. She shows how the use of typeface both affected and was a result of modernist ideology. For instance, directly after WWI, the she writes that the emphasis on typeface changed: “For the new traditionalists, typography needed to be modern -to use mechanized processes and to cater to the needs of the modern world -but needed to avoid ‘modernism’” (136). At first efficiency was what was most important: “This example serves as a reminder of the faith of modernism: the belief in simple forms, in reduction of elements, apparently no. for reasons of style but for the most compelling reason of need the need to save labor, time, and money, and to improve communication” (139). However, later in the mid-twenties and up until the 1960s, typeface began to change again. Ultimately, her argument is that typeface is a culturally determined stylistic choice that affects the reader’s perceptions of a document. She concludes with a coda that points out that “nothing is free or rhetoric,” and therefore, we must constantly interrogate what implications there are with the style of what we say, not simply the argument itself (143).
On Text and Typography
Bryant, Kendra Nicole
U21172145
23 March 2008
(Happy Easter!)
On Ellen Lupton’s “Text. In Thinking with Type:
A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors and Students”
(Note: The easiest way for me to summarize this article is to simply pull phrases as bulleted points, thus making this article more comprehensible, especially since I feel much of the content was repetitive, and the visuals at the end of the article actually added to the comprehension of the piece.)
Typography -the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters)are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.
Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic artists, art directors, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.
(Source: Wikipedia.com)
• Text is an ongoing sequence of words.
• Text is treated as a coherent substance distributed across the space of a document.
• One of designs most humane functions is to help readers avoid reading.
• Text is complete with typography.
• Design is an act of spacing.
• Typography is the visual manifestation of language.
• With the invention of typography, spacing and punctuation coalesced from gap and gesture to physical artifact.
• According to Walter Ong, printing converted the word into a visual object precisely located in space.
• Typography made text into a thing, a material object with known dimensions and fixed locations.
• Whereas talking flows in a single direction, writing occupies space, as well as time.
• Typography is marked by the increasing sophisticated use of space.
• Reading is a performance of the written word.
• How texts are used becomes more important than what they mean.
• Typography is an interface to the alphabet.
• Typography allowed text to become a fixed and stable form.
Summary: Sorapure
Sorapure, Madeleine. “Text, Image, Code, Comment: Writing in Flash.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 412-429. (Go MLA style! Rah!)
Sorapure frames her discussion of the ways users write with Flash in the wider context of the question of what in fact constitutes “writing” these days. She focuses on ways that Flash composers actually use text in different ways (which I found kind of limiting at times). She divides these writing tasks into four groups:
- Text:
- Text itself in Flash can be static (typed by the composer and appears unchangeably in the product) or dynamic (changeable by circumstances in the file–say, in response to user input or pulling from a database)
- Dynamic text “reenergizes the possibilities of hypertext that have become somewhat stagnant on static HTML” (415; I think she needs some qualifiers and complexities here)
- Image:
- Somewhat surprisingly, she focuses not on images per se but on Flash’s ability to reframe and reshape text itself to make it readable as image, not as text. (Does that make sense?)
- Images have different logic than text, one that’s “spatial” instead of “temporal and sequential” (421)
- Code:
- Flash code (ActionScript) specifically designed to be easily adopted by newcomers
- Political dimensions to code: giving students power to shape text without going through a company (which she admits is problematic re: Flash)
- Writing code also “can cause students to reflect on the nature of writing itself” (423): it’s “entirely performative” (424), not written for an audience
- Comment:
- Coders insert comments to help others use the code for their own purposes.
- Creates a kind of social community as people share and interact through code (and at times in real life too, at conferences, etc.)
-Kyle
Sullivan Summary
So why is “safe” a key word when designing websites? Shouldn’t one have the freedom to do as they wish when making their own website? Patricia Sullivan looks at the processes of a “safe” website. Many items go into a website like visual, written, and other forms of rhetoric. As long as they stay in the safe zone, everything is alright. Many writing professionals and teachers enjoy this safe zone. This is a bubble where the rules aren’t broken and creativity is at a minimum. Many of these professionals like to build a website like a book. Keep the fonts simple, limit the use of colors, and no red on white just to name a few. Sullivan looks at all of the information for people to stay “safe” when building their website. A lot of the sources will agree on what needs to be done and how to build it. However, some do not go into detail on the design process. The sources do agree on limiting colors like the Coke example. She examines the problems with designs and keeping them in these predetermined guidelines. Some problems include the use of display. There are so many options for displaying a page and its information. One can place navigation tools anywhere on the page but they might not show up on different operating systems. One must consider hat their page will not work on older technology. This goes the same for pixels and colors. Older systems might not pick them up and display the page wrong. Another item Sullivan looks at is is how a website appears. When one is in the “safe” zone, it will usually appear like a professional site, while one that went outside the box might appear as amateurish. There are many factors which one must consider when building a website. While designing with creativity sounds like a great idea, one must keep it in the safe zone so they won’t appear as a novice in the field. Sullivan really never defines the “safe” zone but notes that people must stay within its guidelines while at the same time be different to stand out.
Listening In Summary
Citation:
Voida, Amy, Grinter, Rebecca E., Ducheneaut, Nicolas, Edwards, W. Keith, and Newman, Mark W. (2005). Listening in: Practices surrounding iTunes music sharing. Proceedings from CHI, April 2–7, Portland, Oregon, USA.
Summary:
This article by Voida et al is an interesting and surprisingly absorbing examination of the social, technological and rhetorical implications of sharing music using the iTunes application.
At the beginning of the article, Voida et al frame their discussion by stating that the majority of discussions on music sharing have focused on the legal and ethical effects, while ignoring the day-to-day, social effects of music sharing.
After pointing out the defining feature of iTunes, the ability to share your music with others on your same subnetwork, Voida points out the differences between this and two previous forms of music sharing—mix tapes and peer-to-peer file sharing. The fact that the sharing is user-focused and restricted to a subset of the population places iTunes directly between the two previous examples.
The rest of the article focuses on the design of the application and how this design is used or not used by the members of these subnets. Voida et al found that the discussions of what and how to share music were tied very directly to how users would be perceived by the rest of the group. Coworkers could choose to use (or not use) iTunes to learn more about each other, educate each other and interact socially. It’s interesting that iTunes was used for undersigned purposes like seeing who was in the office or of someone computer had crashed.
The article gave a very personal face to music sharing and how if effected interpersonal communication. If this had been written just a year later, I wonder how the sharing of podcasts, which reflect a wider range of personal information, would effect iTunes sharing activity.
-M. Markham
Summary On Sound Matters
Summary on Sound matters: Notes toward the analysis and design of Sound in the Multimodal Webtexts
We cannot get away from sound (335-336). It easily incorporated with PowerPoint presentations with soundtracks, Flash works with multiple sound events, and webtext with embedded video and audio. Rhetoric and composition scholars “have discussed the visual a great deal, but [they] haven’t as of yet turned [their] attention to sound” (336). The author shares his experience of how he, a composition teacher, wrestled with the issues of sound in writing. While he was trying to address sound, he noticed that students “intuitively had a sense of how to use sound”(337). However, they lacked a cohesive framework for doing so. In this article, Mckee presents a four part framework for addressing sound
1) the element of vocal delivery Things to consider when dealing with Vocal delivery
· Tension: how tight or strained
· Roughess: how raspy and throaty
Breathiness: how airy or intimate
· Loudness: how booming or soft
· Pitch: how high or low
· Vibrato: how trembling it sounds
When working with voice the strive is for clarity and seamlessness, yet we should not forget postmodern and disruptive approaches.
2) The element of music Things to consider: Sensuous plan
· The medium
· The quality of sound produced
· The dynamics or the intensity of the soundExpressive plane: the feelings the sounds evokes
· A busy can suggest unease or nervousness
· A slow passage in a minor key can suggest gloom Sheerly musical
· A movement of the piece
· The pitch
· The structure of the pieces Music is used in conjunction with other elements of sound as well, especially dialogue.
3) The element of Sound effects
· Provide information about a sence
· Serve as cue reference
· Helps in mood creation
· Act as an emotional stimulus
Sound is used good when it works subconsciously heightening, tension, manipulating mood, and drawing you in the “world”.
4) The element of silence Silence does not consist of the absence of sounds. Silence can work in conjunction with other elements of sound to illustrate the many to create mood and atmosphere.
5) Returning to considerations for an integrated approach Sound is not a fixed, isolated mode, nor should it be considered in isolation. We should consider how sound events might occur and discover how sound events make webtext better. Sound play crucial roles in such important areas as setting the mood, building atmosphere, carrying the narrative, directing attention, and developing themes in multimodal works. It is an arena that should be explored more with respect to webtext compositions.
Rickert & Salvo summary
Rickert, Thomas, and Salvo, Michael. (2006). “The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture.” Computers and Composition, 23(3): 296-316.
In this article, Rickert and Salvo address the concept of “musical worlding,” a term which they define as “the aesthetic realm that a visual-musical work invites us to both enter and immerse ourselves in, and it is the constellation of production pathways an inputs – people, communities, technologies, and networks – that are simultaneously evoked with each aesthetic world” (313). Citing examples such as Wagner, The Beatles, Yes, Brian Eno, and The Flaming Lips, Rickert and Salvo analyze the integration of various types of media to create a musical experience which extends far beyond the auditory. These musicians of the past are echoed in the concept of the more recent Garageband software, which is a direct illustration of Rickert and Salvo’s “prosumer culture” in which the consumer is also inherently a part of the production/composition process (313). This authors argue that this movement toward multimedia integration and “musical worlding” will continue to develop as technology provides new (and improved) resources to enable composers and consumers to interact in more complex ways.
–Crystal Crawford
