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Category Archives: Computers and Writing

Day of DH: Making and the Physical-Digital Interface

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Making, Media Ecology

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An Arduino with BOE shield

Parallax BOE Shield and Arduino – the brains of our BOE robot.

I’ve been meaning to write for some time about my growing interest in making, specifically in Arduino, Processing, and paper circuits. While I’ve tinkered with coding over the years, I’ve never had an interest in electronics, at least not until last summer. I bought an Arduino last September, sponsored a high school making club during the fall, designed a Making and Writing course before I decided not to teach at the high school this spring, and introduced Arduino-based robotics and Processing into our homeschooling curriculum. (Oh, btw, as of this fall I’ve been co-homeschooling a 9th grader. I really should be better about blogging.) I’ll post more about my making activities and how they fit into my academic endeavors soon. In the mean time, here’s a post on making and the physical-digital interface I’m cross-posting from my Day of DH blog.

As a technorhetorician, a media ecologist, and a digital humanist, I’m becoming increasingly interested in the physical-digital interface of physical computing and interactive programming.

A lot of this interest is playing out in my exploring both the Arduino microcontroller and the Processing programming language. As the Arduino programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) are based on Processing, the two work quite well together.  For instance, there’s the example project that interfaces an Arduino with Processing to creating an RGB LED lamp, the color of which is based upon word frequency within an RSS feed, or the much more simple example of simply turning on an LED by mousing over a Processing-created image, which I was able to do in just a few minutes. You can see the results in this Vine. Apologies for the shaky video – I held my phone with my weak hand as I used my better hand to control the mouse.

And then there’s these digitally interfaced physical books, from the basic MaKey MaKey + graphite + Scratch to Jie Qi’s Circuit Sketchbook

to Waldek Węgrzyn’s Elektrobiblioteka that uses conductive paint-based silk screen printing and a small embedded microcontroller to create touch-sensitive illustrations that call up and interact with digital content.

While I’m still learning both Processing and Arduino, as a digital humanist I’m often thinking of the ways in which we might use a visualization and generative art program like Processing to process and interact with text. For instance, there’s this fairly straightforward visualization of Goethe’s Faust and this “tube map” that’s created by inputting  text. More interesting, however, are things like the codeable objects Processing library and the potential for interactive books making use of paper circuit technologies and embedded microcontrollers.

Three tasks I’m working on today is organizing a session on making, making pedagogy, and critical making and design for CCCC 2015, brainstorming a possible DIY craft and making workshop for the same, and figuring out if I’m ready to propose a paper circuits workshop for THATCamp DC at the end of this month.

And later today, as a last-minute addition to today’s home schooling (as in decided about 10 minutes ago), we’re going to have our first go at programming an ATiny85 chip and using it to make this paper-based microcontroller:

You can find the tutorial at Jie Qi’s The Fine Art of Electronics.

Collin Brooke’s Twitter Summary of Lingua Fracta

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Memory, Rhetoric and Composition

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Twitter Summary of Lingua Fracta On May 3, 2013, Collin Brooke (@cgbrooke) took up the challenge of summarizing his book Lingua Franca: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media in a few tweets. The three tweets are as follows:

  1. Tweet 1: @kristinarola New media require us to acknowledge that technology and rhetoric are inextricable. #LF
  2. Tweet 2: @kristinarola A rhetoric of new media attends to interfaces (vs objects) that manifest ecologies of code, practice, and culture. #LF
  3. Tweet 3: @kristinarola The classical canons of rhetoric are an ecology of practices that help us map the affordances of all media. #LF

Collin then captured the three tweets in the pic you see above.

I’m particularly struck by the third tweet which is a nice summary of what I’m doing when I’m working to tease out various conceptions and practices of memoria.

McLuhan Remix: A Video Essay

15 Sunday Feb 2009

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Marshall McLuhan

≈ 1 Comment

McLuhan Remix is three-part video essay with supporting web site created by Jamie O’Neil aka Kurt Weibers, a video/performance artist and assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo. Below I include the McLuhan Remix: Prologue and first paragraph of the web site intro.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

The Medium is the Mix
Remixing is the most important aesthetic and epistemological outcome of the technologies of digital media and the Internet. This video-essay is intended for today’s students (digital natives) who are studying McLuhan’s words on paper. McLuhan knew how to mix concepts to create a powerful reaction. He utilized electronic communication channels (audio and video) in his time, and he spoke through them with incredible fluency. Today, YouTube mash-ups are an emerging form of literacy, rarely used for scholarly purposes. This is because the digital era of “cut&paste” has mostly been problematical for traditional academics (it is unacceptable to remix a term paper). But networked, digital authoring also greatly expands the range of expressivity… How then would McLuhan expect an essay to be composed today, nearly a half-century after his time?  [Read more.]

Since I keep introducing The Medium is the Massage to students as an exemplar of electronic composition in the print medium as well as a theoretical text, it’s been my intent to rework the FYC Annotating McLuhan project into a video project remixing the book (both the print and audio versions), research, and video and audio recordings of McLuhan. For the time being, I’m going to use the video essay as a supplementary text in the current FYC course and plan on using it as a theoretical text and exemplar in next fall’s Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course.

Via Lance Strate.

DJ Spooky on Remix Culture

15 Tuesday Jul 2008

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Scholarship, Teaching Resources

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Paul Miller’s talk on remix culture, given at UNC-Chapel Hill on Feb. 8, 2008.via Johndan, where I first saw it, and Kathie, who reminded me to bookmark it.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Information R/evolution

18 Thursday Oct 2007

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology

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While I’ve been seeing references to Michael Wesch newly released “A Vision of Students Today,” I’m not seeing any mention of “Information R/evolution,” which is much more of a follow-up to “The Machine is Us/ing Us“:

Update: I should say thank you to Lance Strate for posting a link to the video on the Media Ecology Association discussion list.Also, like Michael, while I like the video, the assertion that the internet doesn’t have material constraints. Of course it does. All media have materiality, even the virtual.

Rice on the Network as Rhetorical Strategy

25 Saturday Aug 2007

Posted by John in Computers and Writing, Digital Studies/New Media, Rhetoric and Composition

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I wanted to blog about Jeff Rice’s post “Situated Networks: Practices in Teaching Writing” earlier, but my own situation didn’t allow it. I’m a bit more settled now in my new place, establishing myself within new networks while maintaining (or not) old ones. As always, Jeff’s work intrigues me, in part, I’m sure, because its often situated at the intersection of rhetoric and composition studies and media ecology.

In response to 17 reading strategies suggested in a new edition of an old composition textbook, Jeff writes:

Why not add: to situate? Indeed, why not add such a “strategy” since, among the text’s table of contents, I struggle to see myself as situated in these reading selections: “Why Not A Football Degree?” “Working at McDonald’s,” or “Dating.” Admirable subject matter, no doubt. But situated? Not really. What pulls me into such a reading? The questions at the end of each chapter? “Explain how dating is socially constructed….”

Situations, or networks, are the result of intersections. For the sake of pedagogy, they don’t have to be assumed as random or treated as avant-garde methodology: shooting randomly into the crowd. Rather, guidance as to where to locate the intersection is encouraged, particularly for those, as McLuhan taught, who are schooled to think differently. Ulmer teaches via the mystory. The Rhetoric of Cool extends hip hop pedagogy to the scholarly level, disciplinary intersections at the level of topoi (cool).

A textbook always feels like the last place to find intersections. A textbook, for instance, cannot account for the here and now intersections motivated by impulse or inspiration. The “why did I just think of that” series of connections. The blog invites such connections through its emphasis on the “post”: post it. Write it daily. Respond. Connect.

Many reasons why I find this blog worthy, of course. Situated networks as a rhetorical strategy, as Jeff discusses them, is a form of memorial composition (to use Sharon Crowley’s term). As a rhetorical strategy, it asks us to consider our situatedness, our environment, as a database from which we may draw material for rhapsodizing (rhapsody shows up as an important concept in both Ulmer’s and Rice’s work, and both Ulmer’s Heuretics and Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool are, at least in part, I argue in my dissertation, memory texts).

I’m also interested in the post because we’ll be reading Rice’s “Networks and New Media” (part of the College English symposium “What Should College English Be?” (69.2 (2006): 127-133) in the New Media Writing and Online Design course I’m teaching this fall. And, in fact, I’m using this essay’s focus on new media and networks as one of our preliminary working definitions of what new media is/can be (along with definitions from Anne Wysocki, Cheryl Ball, Lev Manovich, and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin) of new media.

And thirdly, I’m interested in the idea of the network, as Jeff discusses it, because I see so much overlap here with Ong’s discussions of ecology, which make up part of what I call his “digital turn.”

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