Porter, James E., Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey Grabill, and Libby Miles. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” CCC 51.4 (2000): 610-642.
Tag: maps
Peeples, “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping”
Peeples, Tim. “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping.” The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 153-167.
United Lakes of Atlantica
Over the weekend Strange Maps
posted an
inverted map of the world. The imaginary map was designed by Vlad Gerasimov who made it as
desktop wallpaper available at
Vladlabs.
Aside from the Grand Inversion, the map symbols would suggest
that the climate, landforms, coastlines, flora, and fauna are more or less in
tact. In that case, I suppose I’d be most at home just north and east of Bermuda City. Or somewhere within a canoe ride of the Great Islands.
#0033BD
I have no idea where this will rank in self indulgence among my
birthday entries
of all
time.
Inspired by Colourlovers, I’ve
cobbled together a few of the latest hues and tints:
Not exactly the color scheme you’d want to use for sprucing up
the CSS on your site, unless you want that site to look something like me.
Happy birthday to other notable Fifthers:
Donna, KB, Marx, Soren K., and Ann B. Davis.
Web Bearings
The "Map of Online Communities"
posted
to XKCD (one of the few web comics I follow) is
traveling
through the
internets this morning. Don’t miss it. It offers an impressive lot: playful
place-names, the loose association of geographic area with online activity, and
a directional orientation based on abstract magnetisms (practical/intellectual
and focuses on real life or the web). Very much the sort of
imaginary map you might expect to find in Harmon’s You Are Here.
Even though the map includes a note discouraging navigational use, I tend
to think of it as appropriate for that purpose, especially for wanderers who sit
in their cozy homes in the Icy North, gazing sullenly at/through Windows
Live and Yahoo and wondering what’s on the other side of the mountain range.
Note the TITLE text available on mouse-over of the map: I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’
Map, Map, Territory
What if Borges’ (or, more properly, Alfred Korzybski’s) map/territory
contrast is just an overplayed maxim, a dwindling truism due for reversal?
(Fine, so I’m not the
first and
only to consider the question.)
The aggregator turned up
a report about laws in the Philippines and Malaysia that ban what is being called
"participatory GIS", the ad hoc mash-up efforts combining cartography
technologies with material models in an effort to define boundaries for lands
held by indigenous groups. The ban on such processes is, in itself,
fascinating (a way to keep the partitioning of the land specialized, in the
hands of experts). But
I’m also struck by the layers to this story, a coordination of compositional and
rhetorical elements–mental models of spaces, the image-assisted translation of
mental models into scaled relief maps made of various materials, the use of these
constructs for legal claim-making, the implied omnipotence of Google Earth.
From the report, the moment of reconciliation between satellite imagery and
the experiences and memories of the person and tribe (map as totemic?):
The modeling technique often starts by showing village elders satellite
images, which they use to record their mental maps of tribal territories,
hunting grounds, and sacred sites.
The material manifestation–something like a folk geodiorama or raised relief map–blends the
latest digital technologies with everyday craft supplies:
[A]ctivist groups…have been helping indigenous communities mix
computers and handheld navigation devices with paints, yarn, and cardboard
to make simple but accurate three-dimensional terrain models.
Simple but accurate? Accurate enough to warrant a ban, anyway.
Clouds, Graphs, Maps
A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my
CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.
I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.
And Returns
Ph. and I whistled into the Syracuse train depot yesterday afternoon; we’re
home from the excursion to the conference. Everything is unpacked,
laundered, put away.
I have plans to put the paper to an mp3 and sync it with the slides. I
can do this, of course, because my talk was scripted. It’s endlessly
reproducible as a result. But recording will have to wait until I shake off the
cough-inducing tickle that has been getting the best of me all day today.
Sure, I could delete out any of the hacking and rattling that makes its way into
the mix, but why? I’ll just wait it out.
Net Morticians
It wouldn’t surprise me much at all if, in the year ahead,
we hear more about
network blight or the dissolution, abandonment, and decay of once-thriving
clusters of interconnected activity. Danah Boyd’s
entry from Wednesday started me thinking again about the nascent network
cycles that have yet to show significant, extended desultory patterns and
down-trends. Boyd responds to Steve O’Hear’s notion of
social network fatigue (via)
or, basically, the idea that actors in a given system will tire, grow weary, and
as such, the system on a broader scale will slow to a creep or halt altogether.
Boyd
at first expresses skepticism–"Users aren’t going to tire of their friends but
they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends
difficult"–before working through other considerations
related to the fading of social networks and speculation about YouTube, MySpace,
and teens.
Locative Metadata II
I mentioned the other day that I had more maps to share.
I put together another batch built from program-level locative metadata rather
than the field-wide or disciplinary locations shown in the maps of CCCC chairs’
addresses/conventions since 1977 and the institutional membership of the rhet-comp
doctoral consortium. Below I’ve worked from the CCR web site to come up
with simple geographic representations of various features of the program where
I’m doing graduate work: I. Where our faculty come from; II. Where our graduate
students come from (MA institutions); and III. Where our alumni have gone.
The fourth and final map in this batch rolls these three data-sets together,
mashing them into a single map that shows multiple location-associations for the
program. For now I’ll hold off on making the argument that such slices of
locative metadata are significant beyond the usual ways we have both for
understanding a graduate program from the inside (who do we understand ourselves
to be?) and from the outside (what image do we project?). Of course, these
aren’t the only questions for which the maps have relevance, and though they’re
a starting place, perhaps they seem too simple (or unanswerable given
complex variables) to bother asking.