Two
recent
entries drew my attention to the Gutenkarte
project, a series of scripts and processes that renders place-names
appearing in a given text and locates them on
a map. The Gutenkarte site announces
future plans for the project, including a wiki-like annotation add-on that will
enable a group of users to collaborate in expanding the place-name information
and related contextual relevance (one day to include digital images and video?).
The project bears many similarities to Franco Moretti’s survey of the shifting
geographies of village life in the nineteenth century. Moretti’s analysis often
moves beyond standard place-names to include positions of and distances between
people and things known to be in particular places. These he distinguishes as
geometries; plotted, they are more like diagrams than maps, he tells us (54).
The Gutenkarte project is not yet as refined as Moretti’s work; mining a text
for toponyms depends on the database’s tolerance place-name ambiguity and
spelling variations (among other things I probably don’t understand). Still,
despite the obvious limitations, the motives underlying Gutenkarte present an
affirmative answer to one of Moretti’s guiding questions, "Do maps add anything,
to our knowledge of literature?" (35), even if it is being applied to literary
texts from the Gutenberg Project for now.
Tag: methods
As Graphs
In with the URL, out
with this: an
html-tags-as-graphs approximation of this page. Movable Type is
responsible for much of the structure. Still, there you have it–a good (and
mighty granular) example of computational methods and visualization combined to
offer up a projection of a localized complex. It looks to me like a dragon fly
(or maybe a cluster map of the dissertation I will one day write).
Unitization Reports
On a break from writing end-of-semester papers for CCR651
and GEO781, I thought I’d shock each of them into a list of noun and noun
phrases by applying the same methods we’ve strung together for CCC
Online. Et voila! The lists aren’t meaningful in quite the way a
sentence-long summary would be. Yet that’s the point. They’re
differently meaningful, suggestive. Maybe even generative if I can trace
through some of the terminal knots tomorrow.
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.
I Will Not Know
Close to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I
had a few minutes to pass in my office. I’d already booted down the laptop
and stowed it in my backpack. I didn’t have the gusto to continue readings (for
next week already) from the two seminars I had today, and I was feeling somewhat
blaze after a full day on campus overflowing with six hours of intense
discussion. So I straightened up one of my office shelves and got to
leafing through a few odd journals casually handed off to me by a colleague last
year. There were five or six yellowed issues of Composition Studies
and JAC; I fixed on JAC 8 (1988), specifically David Foster’s
"What Are We Talking About
When We Talk About Composition?", which ends
As informed readers and deliberately inclusive thinkers, we
must be the measure of our discipline. Science cannot claim ascendancy in any
area of human knowledge, particularly in that complex blend of
knowledge-streams we call composition. We must be wary of those who,
uncomfortable with the ambiguities of discourse and complacent with the
quantitative, empirical perspective, would have us assume that perspective
alone. As informed readers, we must juggle and juxtapose the claims of
different modes of inquiry, recognizing what each contributes and what each
lacks. To ref use this invitation to an intellectual pluralism, to settle in
its place for a single perspective, is to invite the punishment we all hated
in grade school: having to write the same sentence one hundred times. In this
case, it would be “I will not know. I will not know. I will not know…"
Stimulating find, I thought, and then I started to wonder
whether what we are talking about when we talk about composition in 2006 is so
radically remade from what we were talking about when we talked about
composition in 1988. And then my ride was waiting.
Miller on Collaboration
Catch Paul
Miller’s clip on the 24×7 film
experiment weblog. It’s a short piece in which he talks about
collaboration, jazz ensembles, software and interface (via).
Probably nothing in it that goes beyond what he does in
Rhythm Science.
Yet, seeing/hearing Miller on video adds a little something.
The Making of…
Coming back to a passage from Manovich that winked at me when I read it last
week:
A visible sign of this shift is the new role that computer-generated special
effects have come to play in the Hollywood industry in the 1990s. Many
blockbusters have been driven by special effects; feeding on their popularity,
Hollywood has even created a minigenre of "The Making of…," videos and books
that reveal how special effects are created. (300)
Tingle and Self-Development
Nick Tingle’s
Self-Development and College Writing (2004, SIU Press)
proposes a psychoanalytic stance on the "transitional space" of the
composition class. Tingle’s argument leans heavily on Robert Kegan’s five orders
of consciousness–a quasi-Piagetian theory of stage-based psychological
development. Phase one accounts for ages 2-6 (which, taken literally,
suggests pre-birth through the first twenty-four months of life are
non-conscious…discuss). Tingle explains that some of the
discord felt between teachers and students can be attributed to our varied developmental
positions. College-level writing students, in Tingle’s framework, match up with the third order of
consciousness (16), which is often defined by institutional forces and tends to
celebrate subjectivity (as in adolescence). The fourth order in this model
accords with "’a qualitatively more complex system of organizing experience’"
(16); it is a more sophisticated order of self-truth that "somehow break[s] the
identifications of the self with its social roles" (17). Tingle writes
that the modern university is designed to support students’ movement from the third
to the fourth order of consciousness, but because such moves involve
destabilization and "narcissistic wounding," the writing class might function to
enable and support. Furthermore, writing teachers are often positioned at
the fourth order of consciousness (if not the fifth, which he correlates with
postmodernism (20)). Teachers, therefore, must attend to their own
stage-orientation when defining viable writing projects and articulating
developmentally-appropriate expectations. It can prove disastrous, in other
words, when fourth-order teachers presuppose their third-order students to be more
psychologically advanced. Among the consequences: shame, embarrassment and humiliation (89).
Breakfast Theory
A few remnants for 691: Theory as method: Reid’s 1989
cartoon, "Breakfast Theory: A Morning Methodology."
And for daily fiber:
PBS Kids’ Freaky Flakes. P’shoped a EWM-brand box. Plus,
this, from the Detroit News, an article on Kelloggs. Elsewhere
Homi Bhaba
talks about breakfast cereal and globalization.
You know, spring of my senior year in high school, I had a
basketball tryout at Kellogg CC in Battle Creek, MI.
Earlier today on ESPN News (playing low in the b’ground), the
anchor, commenting on Jason Kidd’s off-the-backboard oop to Richard
Jefferson in the Nets-Jazz game last night, said (about connecting up on the fast break) "That’s just good writing
there."
Talks
Before a full week cycles around, I wanted to tack up a few notes about the
Digital and Visual Rhetorics Symposium hosted at SU last Thursday and Friday.
Each of the talks was stimulating/evocative; w/ these notes: I’m going for a patchwork of what was said and what it got me
thinking about (highlights plus commentary). Fair enough?