Editing Wiki

I made a small and tentative addition to the page about Katherine Hayles. I felt a bit like a tagger or grafitti artist writing on a wall. it would take some getting used to!

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Labor and Pedagogy in the Academic Marketplace

Concerns raised are valid good heads-up observations. Byrne however, to my mind, is on the most productive track ("Learning to Love Powerpoint") and he offers his piquant twist on what to make of lemons. Use it for art, dammit! Whack the master's ankles with his own stave-- or at least nibble holes in his shoes. Art has always subverted the tools of domination because it can flow under the door and waft like smoke and change shapes and re-purpose. After all, Foucault has prophesied and it has come to pass-- Orwell too-- why would we expect anything other than power replicating itself endlessly, and with our good help and complicity, using whatever tools evolve? Plain old paper can be a dumber-downer if submitted by the purile and subservient to the erudite scrutiny of the complacent and comfortably housed. Nothing is new under the sun, not really. While Tufte ("Powerpoint is Evil") charmingly belabors the obvious, Byrne makes hay. Noble's concerns ("Digital diploma Mills") let in a frisson of anxiety- mild terror to be clear. Could power get more powerful as it lives inside technologies that connect inside the physical world? It is already the postmodern Yahweh-- that which cannot be named and whom before we are less than worms. Not that it is a bad thing to critique the Shoney's Big Breakfast Buffet of super-size me American educational trends. However-- just because your tour bus stops there doesn't mean you have to eat "hashbrowns" (euphamism) with extra sausage gravy and wash it down with coca-Cola. There's usually some fruit. Or you can strike a Nihlist pose and smoke a Camel outside, or you can anticipate reality and bring some granola bars with you. Byrne has his granola with soy flakes, flax, and almonds too, and he is not having a 3000 calorie biscuit just because everyone else is. This is what you must do. I do not know what we will do when surveillance becomes intolerable, with its "standarization", its streamlining, its "business model" and "ThinkWave" programs (excruciating new torture for high school teachers who must be electronically accountable to parent-stockholders in an almost moment-by-moment report of their child's "progress" benchmarks). And yes, perhaps they could get along with no teachers and just use software, and return to the mid-Victorian goal of molding a middle class through standardization and uniformity and then deliver this grand project via computer. But then we might see revolution, and people taking it to the streets and schools under trees and an alternate economy in which education would circulate unregulated. How many systems might undergo a change? it's hard to tell. Everything seems tentative-- glaciers and asteroids and LIBOR financial instruments... Byrne's way is really practical. Don't be scared. Be alert. Make the best of it and see what shakes down.

TRANSMORPHATIONS...

I looked at W. Bradford Paley's page- he is the author of TextArc and he calls it his "gentle obsession" although he credits others for supporting his project in important ways--with the java code, with the graphical cacheing, with the archive to work with, and the bandwidth to host his display. It was very interesting to look around within the TextArc site and to try its various permutations. I agree with Meg that it makes me feel a bit underpowered; my brain doesn't have enough wattage to see what this is really good for. (Yet?) Although every time I encounter one of these "texts" that use the affordances of linked computing in innovative ways I feel my mind stretch just a bit more. Coming from a text-based literacy as I do, these discursive objects that morph and change are a bit strange. (I decided to look at "Alice" because that already inhabits a bent realm. Funny, the TextArc treatment made Carroll's drug trip of a story seem "normal" because all the examples undergo a uniform semantic fractalization.)
This is from Paley's bio-page which offers a link to a really interesting visual representation of scientific paradigms and where/how they overlap and intersect: "Map of science collaboration:
opens pictorial feature in the journal Nature
Katy Borner's Places & Spaces exhibition (currently at the New York Hall of Science commissioned an “illuminated diagram” presentation of how different paradigms of science interact and where in the world science gets done. The work was a collaboration between Kevin Boyack, John Burgoon, Peter Kennard, Dick Klavans, and myself. One of the two images in that display (Kevin's Dick's and my own) was chosen to open the journal Nature's annual pictorial review as a two-page spread. Follow this link to read a short discussion of the image and related work. " Paley has very broad interests that link together through this visual/mental mapping technique.
The Gender Genie coded all my writing samples as "male" (about 10 separate pieces), but all were theory related academic essays-- even my long papers about females, such as Helene Cixsous and Katherine Hayles. When I submitted one paragraph from the Helene Cixsous text it did code "female" but that particular snippet a quoted her prose. When I (on-purpose) wrote something to be first person and descriptive it did finally code "female". Just goes to show you, assuming the algorithm makes a valid-ish frame-- nothing is perfect; nothing neutral, or ideology-free-- that academia priviledges the male persona as authentic, and so-called "female" writing is other-than. At least I can convincingly impersonate a male when I write for school, which must mean I am learning something.

More...TextArc

The associations enabled with this form seem to be semantic because the words are isolated. This gives the reader a certain ability to exercise a type of critical faculty but also denatures the text and completely decontextualizes words.