Johnson-Eilola and Kohl et. al.

Johnson-Eilola in the text The Database and The Essay; Understanding Composition as Articulation ( a misleading and rather dry title, if you ask me) lay out what, I think, is the very purpose of our course in digital rhetoric: "I'm not arguing that this postmodern shift erases traditional texts or narratives. Instead, I'm trying to make clear that our traditional texts are changing, whether we like this our [or?] not. We must work to understand the transformations and fragmentations taking place so that we can work within them"(207). This change that J-Eilola is attempting to make clear is not a new one, nor one that shocks me as a reader. I'm less interested in the aspect of the essay where he segments and differentiates between kinds of writing, which to me, seemed to function as a weak attempt to strengthen his argument, and more interested in the implications of these shifts.

As a class, we've been able to look at various forms of 'text', and have gravitated around a similar conceptual pondering of "originality" in both creative idea and writing that J-E's Intellectual Property questions. He looks at this further, prodding into WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)  , a new type of organized legislation that would "permit firms to 'own' facts they gather, and to restrict and control the re-dissemination of those facts. The new property right would lie outside (and on top) of the copyright laws, and create an entirely new and untested form of regulation that would radically change the public's current rights to use and disseminate facts and statistics (n. pag.)"(210). As an aspiring author, I see the implications of such law reaching far beyond 'facts and statistics'. One day, if WIPO were to come into effect, anything published online-- like the work on these blogs, or essays published in an online composition, even Facebook walls-- could, essentially, need to be patented. And this process is a business of profit like any other. There is a cost (of 1,330 swiss francs plus the filling fee of up to 2,300 francs- a sum equivalent to almost 4000 U.S dollars), naturally, to patent an IP with WIPO. Though, for now, Intelectual Property seems to be relatively restricted to larger scale, corporate business but that is by now means a guarantee.

While browsing to better understand the work of IP, I read from the Journal of Advanced Pharmaceutical Technology and Research that "IPR (rights) is a strong tool, to protect investments, time, money, effort invested by the inventor/creator of an IP, since it grants the inventor/creator an exclusive right for a certain period of time for use of his invention/creation"(Saha: Introduction). I wonder, what happens at the end of this period of time? Will we end up seeing Owell's 1984 republished under another name? Will all of language need to be locked down to a single 'owner'? Now that this claim game has begun, like everything else wrapped up under our umbrella of modernity, it will not stop. 

You can actually visit Johndon Johnson- Eilola's 'workspace' here where I found this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU to John Oliver discussing some further implications of the HyperWorld we are now undeniably immersed in. This video is so worth the time, and really, a quite witty compliment to his text.

I've sort of ignored Kohl et. al.'s History Now; Media Development and Textual Genesis of Wikipedia and their commentary on collective, or collaborative, writing. The collaborative element of, to borrow Kohl's example, Wikipedia is interesting when thought of in terms of IP. Wikipedia functions as a site with no true ownership since the authorship is anonymous and constantly shifting (though the form and media PPR is attributed to Ward Cunningham) so it offers a unique opposition to the very core of IP. Reading History Now and discovering a bit of the foundations of Wikipedia made me smile. Key elements are 'openness' and essentially, simplicity of use. How often in a day do I "wikipedia" something (yes it's a verb-- much like 'googling') and thank my stars that in the first paragraph I can extract a meaningful understanding of a concept. In essence, what Kohl et. al. seem to be wanting us to understand, is that Wikipedia, and maybe even all collaborative texts, are the ultimate Hypertext. There are some kinks-- like contribution and scientific authority-- but those will work themselves out eventually.

Sometimes it scares me to remember we've only been at this for 14 years. What will happen in another 14? The post-modernity that Eilola talks of really needs to be redefined as we slip and slid through the Hypermodern world.
It's here. It's now.

Infographic

This is Badger! He's a great snuggler, a blanket theif, and an avid hiker. He loves his ball, napping on the front porch and playing with his buddy Tukka. He always greets you with a smile- literally- to show you how much he loves you. He's my best friend, the inspiration for this Infographic and he's a Pit Bull.

Critical Essay- Proposal

For the Critical 'photo' essay assignment, I'm interested in understanding more clearly the history of hypertext. I'm curious to develop how hypertext came to exist. Where did its roots emerge in literary history? And, how do we see those roots shift to create the kind of hypertext we mingle with today?

I've been studying eco-criticism for several years now and have come to better understand the paradigm of modernity that we are operating within, and I'd like to extend the deconstruction to hypertext. Though I don't necessarily see multi-modal use of language as a bad thing, I'm interested to know why and how this 'new frontier' developed. I think if we can better trace the path of emergence, then we, ideally, will be able to more effectively utilize this tool.

There's a sort of inevitability that surrounds technological evolution in our modern world now.
Kevin Slavin said in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man and now there's this third corroboratory force" he claims it's algorithms, but in a way I think it's just technology as a whole. I'd like to explore this idea, and look at some of the implications (both negative and positive) of interacting so frequently with hypertext.

The sort of reseach I will need to conduct for a project of this sort is vast. Ironically, I think a lot of the 'historical' information will need to come from more recent sources, so I imagine I'll utilize textual research. I'd like to uncover the foundation of this shift, see if I can pinpoint when and why we made the move towards hypertextualization. I'll start by looking into Ted Nelson's life, the man who coined this phrase in the first place. We will see where this goes!

Process Reflection- A.V. Short

I suppose I started with content for this assignment. Around my room I have a clothesline strung, and clipped to it are pictures of art from around the world. It all started in Greece, when I was traveling and was struck by all the 'unconventional' beauty I found there. I was well versed on Greece's recent economy crash when I visited in 2012 and where I had expected rubble, there emerged this incredibly evocative street scene of artists speaking, or painting rather, their emotions all over the remnants of their country. Growing up in Chicago, I was more than familiar with graffiti and murals but this was a whole new genre. The art in Athens was filled with political commentary; it was a way for broken people to feel in control in a small way, but that said something in a larger-than-life way. One artist repetitiously drew a black and white woman with spaghetti hair that gazed dreamily out at the passerby's. I began to hunt down his work, checking around every corner hoping I could find her again in the next alleyway. Searching for her became more important than anything other aspect of the city, and I felt myself take on her mystified gaze as I walked through those ancient ruins. Something about that trip felt so surreal. Whether it was her influence or just the idea of Greece itself, I can't say, but she moved a part of me and I found her again everywhere I went.
On to Rome, Peru, Chile... I continued to note the dramatic work of street artists, and in each place I went the purpose seemed to shift. In Chile, particularly in the seaport of Valparaiso, I noticed a huge political movement in their art. As you climb the hills over the bohemian city and look out at the Pacific crashing into the city, you can see colorful houses lined up like 'little boxes on the hillside', each one flecked with something unique, just like the people of this city. And if you were to make your way down to the ocean, as you walk you'd run into a mural of Presidente Allende, who was assassinated by the military dictator Pinochet whose iron fist ruled Chile for over 20 years. Almost 25 years later, this mural still brings much controversy to the divided country. But the incredible thing is not the controversy that surround these politics, but the very fact that the mural is there at all. In a country that was so heavily repressed for such an immense period of time, freedom of anything is a right that the Chileans have earned. Their art loves to celebrate vida- life, las reizes- roots, and la cultura- their joyous culture.
After spending what seemed like a lifetime immersed in this art and these cultures, coming back to Bozeman, Montana where our only art is limited to power boxes and galleries was more than disappointing. A part of me missed what's labeled here as 'deviant' culture, and so in my project I wanted to bring these photos back to life somehow.
They meant so much to me that it was difficult to decide on a form. I didn't want it to be purely a slide show (even though this may have been the best service to the art I could have done) for fear of it being 'boring'. I didn't want a lot of words because in some ways I felt the photos should speak for themselves, and because of this I sort of backed myself into a corner. I chose to balance the weight of the pictures with a more upbeat and fun audio track so that the viewer felt like the pictures were moving somewhere, and I paced the pictures at different intervals to help distinguish the really great, more meaningful ones from some that I personally just tended to like the visual of. I think in a sense this was the writing process for this assignment, This was a change for me, since I'm more of a creative writer and tend to love the sound of words on a page. If I had to do it again, I'm sure I would go about the presentation differently, and I'm not entirely happy with some of the choices I did make in hindsight (I would change my audio to something less annoying and the font to something more serious, also wtf is up with the horrible quality?).
Overall, though, I'm just happy to have had the chance to share these photos with a group of people. I think it's important to share art from around the world because other cultures often have a really different definition of beautiful than the one we find ourselves trapped in the great U.S. of A.
As far as what I know now... I know how to make a video!  

Bernhart, Wysocki, Kress, and Solomon

Anne Wysocki, again, She seems interested this time in a looking at visual texts and determining not what it says, but how it says it. I  love this concept, but since it seems everyone this week chose to gravitate around Bernhardt and Wysocki, I'll look further into what Kress (ugh) and Solomon have to say.
Martin Solomon's 'The Power of Punctuation' causes me to think twice as I write this. On my blog, the options for text variation (outside of the initial setting) consist of 'normal' which without question, I always use for posts, and three others: heading, subheading and minor heading. To indicate these, the creator of this blog site uses size changes and boldface text, declining slightly as we move from heading down to normal. Is it not somewhat strange that we innately know these characteristics to define, or categorize, thoughts?

You Should Naturally Think Now That This Is A Heading- Something New And Important Happens Here 

Solomon's focus is less of size and appearance, but more on the physicality of  punctuation of the page. He explains: "Most punctuation marks are designed to be seen, not heard. These subtle, often understated, devices are quite important, however, for they are the meter that determines the measure within the silent voice of typography" (282). He goes on to assimilate punctuation to music, in that it helps direct pitch, volume, and separation of words. 

Gunther Kress, though he focuses more closely on genre in his article ' Multinodality, Multimedia, and Genre', still can reinforce Solomon's idea of how punctuation can in a sense 'manipulate' the reader's interpretation of a text. Kress explains the relationship between 'participants' and 'the act of communication' as an "objective" one (42). "The viewer is presented with the text-element "front-on." It is objectively there, with maximal "involvement" of the viewer, that is, the viewer is positioned as confronting the image straight on..." (Kress 42-3). He seems to be getting at here the idea that the way we present a text can help determine the reader's level of involvement or inclusion in it's interpretation. And just look at all the punctuation Kress used to contribute to the reader's understanding! It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is always a right and wrong, a black and white, with writing and grammar, when in reality (or Solomon's reality, at least) we do have a relative freedom to help express our own style as authors and to guide our reader to see the text the way we want them to. 

Wysocki and Jaimeson

The Sticky Embrace of Beauty- what a wonderful title! And what better way to open an essay that with a epigraph that contemplates the values of our society. I love that I am armed as a reader from the moment I lay eyes on the text: the floral framed introduction, multiple epigraphs that really do work immediately in the essay, and a title that pushes the boundaries of the standard academic essay-- it is embellished and flagrant and all together interesting. I find it even more interesting after reading the subheading, and noting that she even chooses to use the word 'formal', something I would have expected to see in an essay composed more closely to the likes of Jaimeson's.

Right away I love Wysocki's humorous entry into the article, but I begin to ask questions immediately too. She mentions beauty as an inherent quality... and I wonder, is that even fundamentally possible? She also throws around phrases like 'consistency' and 'content' without defining them for her own purposes. She does note that form's current function, is to 'take what is messy and particular and to abstract it and generalize it and universalize it'. She says:

"We have learned to think that form should do this, and we have learned to expect that form should do this, whether we are working with visual representations such as photographs or with the visualities of type on a page" (22). And then the magic happens. Wysocki pushes hard on tradition, using "contemporary" modes to make use of some of our tools-- like inserting images, bolding important passages, underlining key and emphasized words, and playing with in-text examples of her point-- that are nearly shunned in academic essays.


http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/07/this-is-what-happens-when-a-kid-leaves-traditional-education/

You can skip to 4:00 minutes, and get a better feel for what boundaries are being pushed here, 7:00 for the implications on writing, but I recommend you watch it all. 

This kid has some serious thoughts, -- let's hack writing (something that should be creative already) and take a new twist on our prose. Wysocki, is essentially, a hacker. Love it! 

Something the past two weeks of class have made me aware of is how arbitrarily narrow my frame of my own writing has been. Since I tend to identify more as a creative writer, I am all for breaking out of traditional formatting and playing around with unlikely word choice and sentence structure. It dawned on me, first last week with color and now this week with the freedom associated with image and form, that I do not use nearly enough variation and pizaz as I should in the age of technology. Even here, on this blog, I have virtually any image at my fingertips, as all of the internet awaits. I have tools that would have spun Plato's head back into his cave and roiled the entirety of Galileo's galaxy.




You have these powers too-- but why aren't we using them?
Is it because it's too 'easy' to just write the way we know how?
Or is it because we feel our work might flee from the norm, that we may not be a widely accepted because of it?
Is is more of economic issue? (though magazines seems to defeat this one)

After reading Wysocki, I opened up the PDF for Jaimeson's essay... how dissapointing. No arrows, no pictures, no differentiation of one paragraph to another. No 'unncessary' indentation... just words, and boring words, on a stream of white pages.

I think Wysocki
made her
point.

Audio Video Short

In the time I've spent around the world, I've developed a small obsession with street art, and have constantly been amazed by the sheer lack of it here in the United States. Though there is plenty on the streets of New York, it is not as much an open part of our culture as it seems to be in other countries. Particularly notable in Chilean and Greek artists, street art fills a space of silence in a modernized world. Whether it serves to help rally against a dictator, to reclaim a 'homeland' or merely express an artistic craving... art is an evolutionary act. 

Check out the Global Street Art movement's blog to learn more. 

Enjoy!

McCloud 7-9, Wolf, Mishra

It seems the theme of the week seems to lay here:  instead of here, in the words... Though from the McCloud reading last week, I'm not so sure the two are drastically different. Wolf brought to the conversation the idea of computer simulation, and the effect of images (and their validity) on human interpretation. She surmises: "Computer simulation's speculative nature blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction a complicates the question of how far an indexical link can be stretched and displaced and still be considered valid in society, as facts get skewed, left out, misinterpreted, or filled in by theory and speculation" (Wolf 429). In particular, she mentioned that in court, often black and white images could be references but color images were thought to sway the audience. If this theory is accurate, then does color make a difference here too? Immediately our eyes are drawn to color, and naturally we are more apt to remember something that is distinct like the above phrase. But why is it then that we don't see more freedom of 'manipulation' in the ethos of traditional writers? Think of almost every book you've ever read- can you think of one that was not printed on ivory paper with black or greyed ink? Why as writers, are we not able (or not willing) to play into the tools we are given?

**When I google searched this, I found absolutely nothing- no discussion, no forum, no other contemplation of why this happens to be the case. Though I feel it may have originated as an economic decision, and of course has its historical contexts (because printing is expensive) but I can't help but ask- haven't we evolved past that yet?

Color in photographs is one of their main attractions, and artists avidly use this to distinguish their work from other artists. McCloud talks about the flagrant use of color in comics, and from his chapter 8, it is easy to see the moves that color can make for that industry. I think back now to hyperreading, and wonder if the use of color and the heightened sense of freedom in format has anything to do with this generations tendency to prefer online media versus book in hand. Would this pattern change if we incorporated more technique associated with these mediums? 

McCloud 1-4

Who knew comics were an art? Not this girl. As 'graphic novel virgin', the first time I'd ever read anything besides the Sunday Funnies was in Amy Thomas' class, Literature Unbound, where we critically looked at The Walking Dead- in both it's television and (original) graphic novel forms. Talk about inter-texuality... For her class, we also read from McCloud to help us gain a general sense of, really, what's behind the art of comics and graphic novels.

One of McCloud's biggest points of focus lies in the differences between Eastern and Western comic design and the shifts in the artistry and design, and how that changes the way the reader perceives the finished work. He makes a point that Japanese comics are heir to a tradition where "they emphasize being there over getting there"(McCloud 81). I try to translate this into my work as a creative-minded writer, and think about ways in which I may tend to focus on the 'getting there' of a story, over, perhaps, the element of 'being there'. Something that comes to mind (since we always go back to what we know) is Virginia Woolf and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. As many of you are familiar with her work, I'll skip the summary (you can find it here if you find yourself ignorant), but the book tells a story that takes place in a single day- a very narrow time frame (much like we see in Joyce's work, and other stream of consciousness-esk writers). Within this tiny time frame, I imagine that Woolf was forced quite often to ask herself this same question of where her text takes the reader- and in this instance, I see a crossing over of both the East and the Western ways of thinking (or so they call Modernism). 

Going back to Porter's essay where he mentioned that "writing is non-linear", I think comics really lend us a sense of that. Not a 'classical' form of literature, where we may read left to right and focus on only the prose on the page, comics ask more of us as an audience as well as a writer. Just look at their versatility! From graphic novels to political statements, humorous or tragic, they build relationships in very tangible ways, making the reader, arguable more loyal, to the source. Just think about Garfield, Charlie Brown, or X-men... comics are able to fill a gap that prose alone cannot. 

 They are a great medium through which we can further our understanding of 'texts' outside of the traditional sense. I'm not sure before my experience with McCloud, and his expression of the craft that goes into this form of literature, I would have been tempted to pick up a graphic novel. Knowing what I know now, about the level of interaction between author and audience, and the inevitable vulnerability of a comic writer, I am much more interested in the genre as a whole. I think it is incredibly important, now more than ever, to keep looking across genres and asking ourselves (especially as writers) 'what can this do for my work?' How can lessons in comics translate into lessons in literature? And in what ways can I pull on the things McCloud is saying, like the blood in the gutters (or the formatting, ie. breaks in between chapters, paragraphs) to further my view of writing as a whole?  

Sosnoski, Jakobs, and Hayles

Hypertext.
As I sit and type, I am thinking about how this very action can (if it does) differ from constructing prose, pen and paper in hand, in the 'traditional' manner of writing.  Do we see the same cross over from Hyper-writing, if you will, impacting traditional writing skills? Is this a natural correlation to make if reading skills are in a (supposed, according to Hayles) decline due to Hypertext/reading?

Sosnoski talks about computer-assisted reading, and renders it somehow different from reading that same text in a printed version. Putting his essay in conversation with Hayles, we begin to understand why these two mediums differ. Hayles claims that Hyperreading actually require changes in brain architecture (67), in addition to adaptation to new reading strategies that Sosnoski points out; filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, filming, trespassing, de-authorizing, and fragmenting (163).

It is arguable whether or not these new skills required for Hyperreading are in direct opposition to close reading. I find myself often in the position in a college semester, where I simply do not have to time allotment for the reading I need to do. In these instances, perhaps due to my experience with Hypertexts, I can use my adapted reading abilities to skim and peck the texts and still come away with a general understand of a text- still able to put it in conversation and learn or benefit from the discussion. I think the contingent issue at hand is not the use of these new skills, but the perpetual use of them.

Students in generation X are resourceful, as well as lazy. I have friends who 'hate to read books'- perhaps because they struggle with the restricted and academic format, and perhaps they take more easily to the flexibility that can be found in Hyperreading. But take caution, the internet has opened up a world of quick-fixes and easy solutions, like websites that will actually write your essay for you  (http://www.essaywritingsoft.com/essay-generator.html ) or translators that make it possible to read a novel in Spanish while not comprehending the language. In our world today, there is no offline. We are constantly connected, perpetually plugged-in, and watching our trends of modernization, we won't be slowing down anytime soon. Not all hope is lost, though. The Atlantic found an interesting trend between number of books read and level of education, showing that on average, Americans in college read 9 books per year. What their study fails to differentiate is if these books were read with the aid of a Nook or Kindle (Hyperreading?) or were traditional novels in print. Check it out, and think about what Sosnoski or Hayles would have to say-- Jakobs would probably spiel about the webpage's setup.

So as Hayles proposed, we need to stop haranguing Hypertext and asserting that deep reading Joyce's 'Portrait' is the only way to identify well constructed prose, and begin to look for ways to combine and better navigate a combination of Hypertext and close-reading, so future generations can remain balanced and evenly skilled. Hayles surmises: "The larger point is that close, hyper and machine reading each have distinctive advantages and limitations; nevertheless, they also overlap and can be made to interact synergistically with one another" ( 75).

I'd like to state that I found Jakobs essay dry and virtually useless, focusing too much on teched-out language and forms that are not easily relatable or even understandable to the average reader.
Not a fan- I'd argue we could drop this from the readings the next go around and be no worse off, though I'd like to see how others react to this work, since we all have our preferences...