Singing the Search

For several weeks after I’d happily accepted EMU’s offer of a faculty
position, the dmueller-edition Q&A recordings continued churning through my
portable MP3 player every so often. By then I found them somewhat
silly-sounding, an off-key sequence of quirky, wandering think-alouds, something like little pacts
between me, my iPod Shuffle, and Kathryn Hume, whose

Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt
was never out of reach from September
through late February. I finally removed the tracks after CCCC, more than
a month after I no longer needed to listen to those droning loops of me
rehearsing 120-second answers.

Continue reading →

Consulting by Discontinous Email

In preparation for a Writing Center mini-seminar this Friday, I just finished reading the Yergeau et al. article, “Expanding the Space of f2f,” from the latest Kairos (13.1). In this nodal hypertext, Yergeau, Wozniak, and Vandenberg suggest a few of the ways AVT (audio-visual-textual) platforms productively complicate face-to-face or “discontinuous email”: two default modes of interaction in writing centers. They include several video clips from consulting sessions using Sight Speed, a cross-platform (and bandwidth heavy?) AVT application.

This is a pro-AVT account, with lots of examples to illustrate some of the
challenges students and consultants faced. The authors offset the positive
tenor of the article with grounding and caveats, noting, for example, that while
"[they] revel in the recomposition of f2f via AVT, [they] want to avoid an
attitude of naive nostalgia." Most accept that face-to-face consulting
allows for communicative dimensions not neatly duplicated via distances,
interfaces, and so on. But AVT consulting refreshes the debates between
synchronous and asynchronous, conversation and response, f2f and online.
The piece goes on to deal with the haunting of f2f genealogies of interaction,
Bolter and Grusin’s remediation (i.e., matters of transparency and opacity), the
(unavoidable?) regulatory role writing centers play, the degree to which
discontinuous email consulting undercuts much of what has motivated the growth
of writing centers over the past 25 years, and the bricoleur spirit of
online consulting initiatives. (I would link to the specific locations in the
piece where this stuff comes up, but the nodes-as-frames presentation
unfortunately does not provide identifiable URLs for any of the sub-content).

Computer technology’s rapid half-life aside, we also realize that
individual writing centers have their own specific needs, and any discussion
concerning potential AVT technologies must consider that center’s available
resources, as well as its student requests.

This point about reckoning AVT possibilities with local considerations is,
among other things, the purpose of Friday’s meeting. We have been piloting
online consulting sessions this summer, both by IM and by discontinuous email. I
tend to cautiously embrace consulting by IM because I experience the
conversational quality that makes writing center work worth doing. I have
many concerns about the way our email model is set up right now, and I suppose I
shouldn’t air those out here.

Along with Yergeau et al., we’re reading Ted Remington’s
"Reading,
Writing, and the Role of the Online Tutor," (PDF)
which argues that email
consulting is potentially promising because it makes for a more
text-focused experience. Interpersonal dynamics and conversation don’t
detract from the text-as-written in quite the same way as in f2f sessions.
Also, he emphasizes that consultants, by writing, respond in kind, modeling the
textual qualities they value by virtue of the response itself. I’m not
convinced, at least not from this summer’s pilot, that students regard the
comments I make on their emailed drafts as any sort of model. But perhaps
this is because our current set-up doesn’t give us any way of knowing whether
students ever even read the comments at all, much less whether they regard the
writing the consultant does as exemplary. The time constraints (i.e.,
consultants are still paid hourly when responding via discontinuous email) also
throw a wrench in the works: there is only so much fine-tuning the
writer-consultant can do when dedicating one hour to a five-page draft.

Yergeau, Melanie, Kathryn Wozniak, and Peter Vandenberg. “Expanding the Space of f2f: Writing Centers and Audio-Visual-Textual Conferencing.” Kairos 13.1 (Fall 2008). 17 Aug. 2008. <http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.1/topoi/ yergeau-et-al/index.html>.

Req: Your Best Frere Jacques

I’ve promised D. I won’t get too
Vygotskian on Is., but I do
have one sound experiment I want to try out. You (yes, you!) are urged to
participate. You won’t be world famous for it, but you will be famous to
one
. It
works like this:

1. Pick a favorite nursery rhyme, lullaby or fairy tale (or write a new one,
if you want to). The shorter the piece, the easier this will be.
Odeo tells me any single recording can be up to
an hour. Really, it’s okay if your piece can be read in a couple of minutes. It
doesn’t matter for now if there are duplications, if, that is, folks
accidentally choose the same piece. Feel free to comment here with a note about
the rhyme/lullaby/tale you have chosen (Collin
has already claimed "Three
Billy Goats Gruff"
). I ran a cursory search and located
these
few
resources
to
help.

2. Call Odeo at 415-856-0205 (this is normally used for podcasting
from a cell phone, but it’ll work fine for this, too).

3. Follow the voice prompts.
A. Enter your (meaning my) primary telephone number: 315-708-3940.

B. You entered 315-708-3940. Correct? 1 for yes; 2 for no.
C. Enter your pin followed by the pound key: 40402006#.
D. Begin recording at the after the beep. To end recording, press #.
E. After you are finished, you have three options: 1. Post, 2. Review, and 3.
Re-record.
Posting the sound file will save it to the Odeo system where I can access the
MP3 file. Reviewing the recording lets you listen to the file before deciding
whether to post or re-record. Re-recording lets you give it another try. After
you post the recording, you will be asked whether you want to make another
recording or end the call.

The generic script might open with a hello to Is. and an introduction of
yourself (Hi Sweetie, this is your great aunt," followed by the
rhyme/lullaby/tale). But you’re welcome to break form, have fun, whatever.

I’ve tinkered around with the Odeo system, and as far as I can tell, this
will work. It’s tamper proof (giving out the pin doesn’t mean that just anyone
can log into the system and access the sound files). By the end of the month,
I’d like to have a huge batch of audio files from family and friends welcoming
Is. with their favorite rhymes/lullabies/tales. I have set Odeo so that the
sound files won’t be public (although I can make a file public if you want me
to). But I’ll be able to access them, burn them to a CD and produce a series of
more personal bedtime sound-pieces. After all, why should a baby be listening to
Neutral G. Nobody when she could be listening to your voice?

Last thing: You don’t have to use Odeo. If you’d like to record
something another way (on your own machine using Audacity or Garage Band, for
instance), just email the file to me. Odeo makes it super-easy, however, for
everyone with a telephone to participate. Although Is. can’t hold her cell phone
to her ear for a few more weeks, she can still hear your best
Frere
Jacques
this way.

Last last thing: Keep ’em coming until August 31.

My choice: “Over in the Meadow”.

Phonographies

But that’s not what I went to the bookstore for. I stopped down there
to purchase a copy of Weheliye’s

Phonographies
(a late arrival, absent from the shelves when the semester
started). It’s assigned for Afrofuturism in two weeks, and as I’ve
been trying to maximize break for getting a jump on the end-o-sem workpile, I
read through the library’s copy of the book, finishing it last night. But
it’s good enough to own. In fact, if the "DJing is writing, writing is
DJing" plug in Miller’s Rhythm Science resonated for you, Weheliye has an
entire chapter on the mix (c. 3). His opening chapters (the Intro and c.
1) also have a few good pieces on the record’s function as an inscribed sonic
medium. There’s much here to elaborate up the uncanny ties between writing
and phonography, to extend them, etc. The second chapter, "I am, I be,"
links sound to identity, working across issues of opacity and "sonic conjuring"
to categories and constellations of the subject (also echoes W.’s article on
black subjectivity, the optic/phonic and posthumanism in Social Text).
The third chapter: DuBois and the mix. c. 4: sound’s construction of space, read
through Ellison’s "Living with Music," and Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like
That
. And c. 5 reads the circulation of the diasporic motif in songs
by The Fugees, Advanced Chemistry, and Tricky and Martina. The "Outro" has
a bit to say about about his methods and also, drawing on Massumi briefly, makes
a case for affirmative methods: "’techniques which embrace their own
inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so
meagerly) to reality’" (208). Chapters 4 and 5 stand out from the others
as places where Weheliye gives readings; his approach in those chapters
is somewhat less theoretical than in the others, aligning with more literary
studies or cultural studies re-presentations of sources. And yet, I expect
to return to c. 4 for his arguments about "sounding space/spacing sound" and the
issues of space remade by music, noise. For a more careful review, read

this
.