Machina Memorialis: My Favorite Posts of the Year
Since I’ve been getting all year-end metaish, I thought I’d scan each month for my favorite post. And because I didn’t include the first sentence of each post in yesterday’s review, I’ll do so here:
January 20: Of Singularities and Orality-Literacy Studies; or OLS and Technological Determinism
I’ve never really been happy with my January 19, 2007 post on orality-literacy studies and technological determinism, and a couple of things I’ve read recently have made me want to return to the topic.
Why do I like this one? Maybe because it mixes so many of my interests or maybe because it reveals my penchant for writing blog posts that need footnotes.
February 11: Cthulhu Week: Neil Gaiman and Lovecraft
In honor of my seeing Cloverfield, which supposedly has nothing to do with Lovecraft, I’ve decided that this will be Cthulhu Week here at Machina Memorialis.
Why do I like this one? It’s not the first post of what became Cthulhu Week, but it is the post in which I decided there would be a Cthulhu Week. And there’s a Chaucerian reference to boot.
March 5: Order of the Stick Gary Gygax Tribute
I wasn’t going to do a Gary Gygax tribute post even though role-playing games were a huge part of my life up through my undergraduate days.
Why do I like this one? Simply put, if I’m to be honest, I have Gary Gygax as much as Tolkien to thank for being an academic.
April 19: Emerging
I thought it might be time to emerge, if only for a brief while.
Why do I like this one? April was a low blogging month so there’s not much to choose from. But it’s also the post in which I announce I’d been hired by Creighton.
May 10: Restructuring Thought
Among humanities scholars, one of more controversial claims of the OHM Thesis maybe best represented by the title of one of Ong’s articles, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” the idea that technologies such as writing, the printing press, etc., can actually restructure consciousness.
Why do I like this one? I touch on Skara Brae, Conan, the Phaedrus, The Medium is the Massage, cyberpunk, Walter J. Ong, and memory in one coherent, unified post. Maybe I’m just flattering myself, but I like to think that these are the kinds of posts that make Machina Memorialis unique in the blogosphere.
June 16: Playing with Wordle
Playing around some more with Wordle, which I first wrote about the other day.
Why do I like this one? It’s a bit of fun while also being serious.
July 13: Untitled
After playing with Wordle (see these two posts), I wanted to use a Wordle word cloud of a blog post as the title of that post, only to quickly realize that I can’t.
Why do I like this one? More fun while being even more serious.
August 17: Mnemonic Practices 5: Homo narrans
While I often discuss mnemonic practices, I haven’t written about my personal mnemonic practices in quite a while.
Why do I like this one? I started Machina Memorialis to be a practitioner of my chosen research fields as well as a scholar of them, and as one who studies individual and social practices of memory, I believe it is important that reflect upon my own mnemonic practices from time to time.
September 27: Where the Deep Ones Are
Renowned Mythos aficionado Ken Hite retells H P Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in this parody of classic children’s literature.
Why do I like this one? How can I not love Mythos for kids?
October 28: I’m Acoustic Space And I’m Visual Space
A great media ecology/orality-literacy studies video made by some students, using the Mac ads as a model.
Why do I like this one? When I saw this video, I thought to myself that the day one of my students makes a video as cool as this I’d know I’d figured something out in terms of assigning videos. While they are very different kinds of videos, a month later two students turned in videos that gave me much the same thrill I felt when I saw this one. I hope we’ll get them posted so that I you all can see them too.
November 21: Contextualizing The Medium is the Massage, pp. 94-96, 119
As regular readers will know, I’ve been working with The Medium is the Massage in a number of classes over the past year, and the more I work with the book, the more fruitful I’m finding it (and the more I’m finding students getting out of it).
Why do I like this one? As I explain in the first sentence, I can’t seem to get away from The Medium is the Massage, and while some students aren’t all that interested in the book, I’m finding that the more I teach it—which means the more I understand it—the more positively students respond to it. This semester saw the addition of The Medium is the Massage annotation project that resulted in some very cool projects ranging from poster-board displays to hypertext document that used the annotated page as an image map. I’m going to revise the assignment next semester to involve much more extensive research.
December 5: The Apparatus and Weak Technological Determinism
I’m slowly making my way through Ulmer’s Teletheory and I thought I’d go all commonplace bookish and post some passages and thoughts.
Why do I like this one? Well, to begin with, I discuss technological determinism without making reference to the Trousers of Time…
Mentioned but not really tagged. (In other words, tag yourself if you want.)
- Bill at bill degenaro
- Jenny at Working Blue
- Larry at The Ruminate
- Wendy at my life as a guinea pig
- Deanya at Degrag this Blog
- Lance at Lance Strate’s Blog Time Passing
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