894 Case study #2 outline

Somehow I missed the fact that this was to be posted on Monday with reading notes.  At any rate, here it is now.  It is a bit messy, and I don't know how robust it is, but it gives me some structure to go with.

1)      Introduction

a.       Chose these theories in order to examine the activity system and ecology within which the genre exists.  These theories more suited to genre than Foucault (previous one)

b.      Looking at my OoS: dearth of research about interviews as a genre, even less about published interviews of scholars.  There are a very few studies that might offer some slight connection

2)      AT versus CHAT—First, I’ll start by defining the theories and highlighting the similarities and differences between the theories.  I might suggest—I think this is true—that the two theories have some overlapping elements as a result of similar influences that they are drawing on. 

a.       Common background

                                                   i.      Vygotsky is a major influence

1.       See Russell, p. 53

2.       Spinuzzi, p. 38

                                                 ii.      CHAT as complex version of AT (generations idea?)

b.      Brief description of AT (key concepts & terms)

                                                   i.      Simple version (Nowacek, Russell)

c.       Brief description of CHAT (key concepts & terms)

                                                   i.      Complex version of AT (see Spinuzzi)

                                                 ii.      Prior’s adaptation for rhetoric (see p. 17 for definition of CHAT from his perspective)

                                                iii.      Problem for Prior’s version of CHAT is not indicating how three lists (p. 18) interact.  Functional systems comes closest to CHAT diagram.

                                               iv.      Use quote on p. 22 about interlocking systems

3)      How might the OoS be defined in AT & CHAT (including Prior’s version) (How does the theory define your object of study (as a whole, broken into pieces?))

a.       AT—interview genre fits slot of “tool” or “mediational means”

b.      CHAT—“instrument” or virtually identical with AT

c.       Prior?—hard to tell; it is a form of mediator but mediators are not nodes in this theory

4)      Describing the network formulation—nodes, structuring of nodes, agencies and relationships within & between nodes (What and/or who is a network node? What types of agency are articulated for various types of nodes? How are different types of nodes situated within a network? What are the types and directions of relationships between nodes?)

a.       AT—

                                                   i.      Points on diagram are subject, tools, object, motive; is “tools” a node or a connector though?

                                                 ii.      Human actors have agency (i.e. subjects)

                                                iii.      Tools are mediational, hence lie between subjects and objects

                                               iv.      Subjects+tools+objects are assembled together to drive towards motives

b.      CHAT

                                                   i.      More nodes than AT; see Spinuzzi; however, relationships are similar to the above

1.       Subject = [collaborators, knowledge, community, division of labor]; instruments=tools; objectsàoutcome (almost the same)

                                                 ii.      Not all human actors have agency—or at least not the same level of agency (“community” arguably has less impact on the activity system)

                                                iii.      Instruments are mediational

                                               iv.      Assemblage is similar to AT   

c.       Prior CHAT

                                                   i.      Mish-mash: who knows?  But obviously I have to think about this J

5)      Movement and change within the network—what moves and how & changes within the network (What is moving within the network? What happens to content or meaning as it travels through a network? How do networks emerge, grow, and/or dissolve?)

a.       AT—

                                                   i.      (Rhetorical) action to accomplish motive?

                                                 ii.      Content or meaning is mediated by tools as it is passed on

                                                iii.      ? See Russell p. 55

b.      CHAT

                                                   i.      (Rhetorical) action to accomplish objective?

                                                 ii.      Content or meaning is mediated by tools as it is passed on

                                                iii.      ?  See Spinuzzi

c.       Prior CHAT

                                                   i.      Moving through the network: “action and cognition”? (17)  In a sense, arguably cultural capital and knowledge, to be repackaged by human agents (see 22) “It’s about attending to semiosis in whatever materials at whatever point in the activity” (23)

                                                 ii.      Content is mediated by a huge array of intervening nodes and channels (see p. 17)

                                                iii.      Magic, I think

6)      How would I use this network?  Is one superior or do both capture elements that are valuable?  Can they be combined?  Or are they already in a sense combined, say in CHAT as a Frankentheory?

a.       Strength of Prior’s CHAT (see p. 23)—basically it has the terms to deal with all eventualities

b.      Weaknesses of Prior’s CHAT

                                                   i.      Incompatibility of terms—things are not quite “flattened” as in Latour and yet there aren’t levels either.  Process elements are mixed with spatial elements.

                                                 ii.      Some elements can be conflated or exchanged:

1.       Socialization arguably occurs through activity

2.       Ecology is the spatialization of socialization & activity

3.       Distribution is activity, as are production and reception

                                                iii.      Confounding connections and nodes—(some) items on list on page 18 need to be nodes, but mediators involve “historically-provided tools and practices” which Prior provides a long list of (see p. 17).  “Concrete actions” that are “situated” are probably best seen as nodes.  Or are these formations, or structures, mini-networks? At any rate, since these are then mediated, the mediation appears to be seen as connections.  Prior admits that mediation has disappeared from “Take 2” because everything is mediating.  Isn’t this kind of circular?

c.       What about AT?  Both basic version and Spinuzzi’s version

                                                   i.      Easier to conceptualize and work with (by far!)

                                                 ii.      Handles genre better

References

Nowacek, R. S. (2011). Agents of integration: Understanding transfer as a rhetorical act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Oers, B., Wardekker, W., Elbers, E., & Van Der Veer, R. (2010). The transformation of learning: Advances in cultural-historical activity theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prior, P., & Shipka, J. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity.  In C. Bazerman & D.d Russell (Eds.),Writing selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp.180-238). Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior/

Prior, P., Solberg, J., Berry, P., Bellwoar, H., Chewning, B., Lunsford, K.J., . . . Walker, J.R. (2007). Re-situating and re-mediating the canons: A Cultural-Historical remapping of rhetorical activity. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html

Russell, D.R. (1995).  Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction.  In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction, (51-78). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 

On Writing Space

Here is a view of my writing space over the past week.  Unfortunately, I did forget some days.

Feb 25

Feb 26

Feb 28

Feb 29

Mar 3

894 Reading Notes: Latour

Latour’s key idea and a few key terms

To use the idea of the “social” to explain social phenomenon is like pretending there is a material in which we are all floating, as if the adjective is a descriptor akin to silk or plastic.  Instead, Latour argues, to generate reliable explanations of how the social world works, one has to build a network of connections, spinning filaments that connect humans and objects within landscapes of activity, local point to local point, until a meaningful assemblage emerges.  The essence of ANT is captured on page 108: “I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely: there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (emphasis in original).

•  Actant—Basically “different ways to make actors do things” (p. 55, emphasis in original) without clearly defining the specific agents.
• Collective—A term which Latour proposes to “designate the project of assembling new entities not yet gathered together and which, for this reason, clearly appear as being not made of social stuff,” or, in other words, the ANT alternative to “society” (p. 75).
• Intermediary—This is “what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs” (p. 39).
• Mediator—In contrast to intermediary, these “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry… their input is never a good predictor of their output” (p. 39).
• Oligoptica—Something like a router, in that it is a hub or node from which multiple connections emerge.  It is describe as “star-shaped” (p. 182).  A couple of examples are a newspaper editor’s cubicle or a military command center.
• Translation—Basically, the channel of mediation, “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (p. 108).

Drawing connections between things in the world (picture taken in Taipei, Taiwan)

Latour and literature

In my reading of Latour I was fascinated by the several times that he draws attention to literature in his text.  For example, in his discussion of actant, Latour uses literature as an example to explain the variety of actants that might occur, arguing, in fact, that literature is freer about what can be considered an actant than sociology normally is.  He gives as an example a fable in which a magic wand or even “a thought in the fairy’s mind” are as capable of acting as a knight with a sword (p. 54).  Later, in the discussion of the idea that objects can also have agency he brings up the “resource of fiction” for building connections between objects and humans (p. 82).

I was reminded of this point this week when I was reading an essay in The Best American Essays 2009, in which PatriciaHampl describes visiting an art museum to stimulate her writing.  She goes home and writes long descriptive passages, trying to better capture her memories.  But then something unexpected happens.  “To my growing astonishment, these long descriptive passages, sometimes running two, three pages or longer, had a way of sheering off into narrative after all.  The teacup I was describing had been given to me by my mother. And once I thought of the fact that she had bought these cups, made in Czechslovokia, as a bride just before the Second World War, I was writing about that war, about my mother and her later disappointments, which somehow were, and were not, part of this fragile cup” (p. 50).  The connection that Hampl makes between description and narrative reminded me of the ways that Latour describes the connections between objects and humans.  In fact, as Hampl goes on the parallels grow even more striking:  

“Description, written from the personal voice of my own perception, proved even to be the link with the world’s story, with history itself.  Here was my mother’s teacup, made in Czechoslovakia before the war, and here, therefore, was not only my mother’s heartbreak, but Europe’s. The detail was surely divine, offering up miracle after miracle of connections out of the faithful consideration of the fragments before me.” (p. 50)

Hampl’s use of this object, the teacup, not only creates a network of connections that resonate in her own individual life but ultimately opens to her the ways that she is connected to larger, broader networks, to larger populations and world events.

Mug memories: 

night street in Taipei and a favorite shop...

shopping at 10 pm coming back home... 

pencil box in Dad's shop (until I rescued it)... 

Taiwanese tea, Vietnamese and Malaysian coffee drunk in the USA... 

Reading Latour

Latour has been the most pleasurable author to read yet.  I found Spinuzzi accessible, but Latour has an accessible style as well, and rare for academic books, little glints of humor here and there. I especially enjoyed “On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog,” the simulated interview with a graduate student, in which Latour proves that if you try to “apply” actor-network theory to frame an analysis, you are missing the point. 

Because we recently read about hypertext theory, I realized that reading an academic book—particularly Latour—isn’t that different from hypertext.  In other words, an academic reader will move between the main text and the footnotes or endnotes, and quite possibly the references or even the index. Here, by using footnotes, Latour makes it easier to keep track of the main text.  Of course, this is by no means unique, but for Latour, it is a way that he demonstrates connections to an unusually wide range of sources and it is also a place for odd bits of information.  For example, I liked footnote 179’s comparison of French and American scholarship: “In France, you can be at once naively rationalist and a great admirer of deconstruction. Once transported across the Atlantic, this innocent passion became a dangerous binary weapon” (p. 126).  I might also mention footnote 171, similar for tongue-in-cheek style and in message: “After years of teaching in England and America, I have been forced to recognize that semiotics does not survive sea travels” (p. 122).[1] 

Another thing that was interesting about reading Latour was considering whether there is a French style of writing.  (I also bring into play here my vague memory of Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and an even vaguer memory of Derrida’s writing.)  At any rate, I noticed when I read Foucault that reading longer sections results in greater comprehension.  Latour is much more accessible, but I feel that he also argues cumulatively, driving an argument forward in small successive sweeps, and then circling back to remind the reader of an earlier point.  I feel like Anglo-American scholarship is more systematic, pushing the argument forward in evenly-paced steps. 

One thing that really works for me in Latour is his metaphor of travel.  He uses this to frame his warnings of what is to come and the distance the reader will have to move to get there. 

Walking slowly (ODU, July 2015)

Likewise, he uses metaphors of transportation to describe theories, comparing faster forms of transportation with ordinary social theories that quickly move to the explanation of the social. In contrast, he uses the idea of walking to describe the application of ANT as a theory, like an ant following a path of crumbs, moving slowly and painstakingly along the ground.  

References

Hampl, P. (1981). The dark art of description.  In M. Oliver & R. Atwan (Eds.), The best American essays 2009 (pp. 43-52). Boston: Mariner Books.

Latour, B. (2008). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

894 Case Study Rubric

I had a great deal of trouble with this assignment.  I had been under the impression that the rubric that I created needed to be tailored specifically to the theory.  So I created a checklist-style rubric that addressed genre theory since I had selected Adrienne's case study to read, and she used genre theory.  When I got ready to read and assess Adrienne's case study, however, I saw that she had already done the rubric, and one glance convinced me that I had conceptualized my rubric wrong.  In fact, I only glanced at her rubric for two reasons. I didn't want to steal her ideas, and I also saw that she was evaluating my case study!  At any rate, I went back and rewrote my rubric entirely before reading and analyzing her case study. 

At any rate, here is the basic version:

Explication of theory	Thorough coverage will include
Theoretical framework	Includes reference to key theorists and may also make reference to figures who influenced these theorists or the connections that this theory makes to earlier approaches.
Core concepts and model	Explains key concepts and discusses what this model focuses.
Comparison with other approaches	Alludes to other theories used for similar purposes. May mention specific studies that apply the theory, particularly pioneering studies that defined the theory.
Application of Theory	Thorough coverage will include
Description of OoS	Gave detailed description of the object of study as a foundation for the analysis.
Demonstration of the model	Applied key concepts to describe object of study. In addition, noted insights that could be gained about the object of study from application of this model.
Mapping the object of study	Applied network model through and with key terms from the theory to capture the workings of the object of study with a network.
Adequacy of framework	Evaluated how which parts of the theory worked and which parts did not.  Drew conclusions about value of theory for other applications.  Noted the places not covered by this theory.
Assessment of theory	Evaluated the theory in terms of its general usefulness to the field and/or to understanding this and similar objects of study.

Here is the version that I filled in:

Explication of theory	Thorough coverage will include	Assessment in terms of this trait
Theoretical framework	Includes reference to key theorists and may also make reference to figures who influenced these theorists or the connections that this theory makes to earlier approaches.	Adrienne identifies the genre theorist she is using within the framework of genre studies.  She does imply that other models of genre theory work.
Core concepts and model	Explains key concepts and discusses what this model focuses.	She gives Miller’s definition of genre and describes the core concept that emerges from this, the idea of emphasizing the action behind the employment of a genre.
Comparison with other approaches	Alludes to other theories used for similar purposes. May mention specific studies that apply the theory, particularly pioneering studies that defined the theory.	Admits that other theories also offer insights for this object of study.
Application of Theory	Thorough coverage will include	Assessment in terms of this trait
Description of OoS	Gave detailed description of the object of study as a foundation for the analysis.	In her text, Adrienne identifies her object of study, but her chart is particularly helpful in situating the Facebook profile picture within an individual’s social networks.
Demonstration of the model	Applied key concepts to describe object of study. In addition, noted insights that could be gained about the object of study from application of this model.	She demonstrates how choosing a Facebook profile picture is a social action. Using genre theory, Adrienne identifies several genres that have different forms and offer subtle variations of the primary social action, self-presentation.
Mapping the object of study	Applied network model through and with key terms from the theory to capture the workings of the object of study with a network.	The network in this case is an abstraction of the social network represented within Facebook.  Miller's genre theory doesn’t explicitly use a network framework or metaphor, but the seeing genres within a network, as Adrienne does here, is compatible with the theory.
Adequacy of framework	Evaluated how which parts of the theory worked and which parts did not.  Drew conclusions about value of theory for other applications.  Noted the places not covered by this theory.	Application of the framework does generate insights.  Miller’s theory helps highlight the social action behind the choice of profile picture.  It does not, however, as Adrienne says, “apply judgment to… the picture itself.”
Assessment of theory	Evaluated the theory in terms of its general usefulness to the field and/or to understanding this and similar objects of study.	Because the theory allows the elaboration of genres of profile picture and suggests the social actions that generates each, Adrienne has demonstrated that the theory can be productive.  In other words, she implies that the theory could be valuable in similar cases.

I did not provide scores but conceptualized it in terms of a holistic-type of assessment.  I typically design my teaching rubrics more or less like this, except I would assign a certain score to each row, say four points.  

At any rate, I felt that Adrienne's case study stacked up well against what I understood of the assignment and rather well in terms of the rubric as well. However,  the checklist for the assignment suggested that we should be more broadly situating the theory and the analysis within the field and, in a sense, over time.  By the latter, I mean in terms of situating the theory historically (looking back) and assessing the usability of the theory within the field and for other objects of study (that is, looking forward.)  Within this broader understanding, Adrienne could add a little more in terms of how genre theory may compare with competing theories and in terms of the overall usefulness of the theory (what I've called the assessment of the theory).  In every other category, however, she amply fulfills what I have called a "thorough coverage."

894 Case study responses

I enjoyed reading Megan’s and Star’s applications of genre theory to OoS’s that were quite novel to me. They were using genre theory, a theory that I am pretty familiar with, but applying it to, in Megan’s case, World of Warcraft genre sets and in Star’s, to an art museum.  I have only used genre theory to look at documents, so I enjoyed seeing the ways that they described genres that were more emphatically multimodal and worked within very different activity systems.  I’m a big fan of genre theory, so I always enjoy reading applications of the theory, but it was fascinating to see how it works in these less familiar contexts.  In both cases, it was interesting to see how users employed the genres in very different ways than the textual forms that I usually work with.  I usually look at genres that do some type of knowledge work, and of course these do, but these are more experiential, too.  Incidentally, both of Megan and Star were much stronger at including descriptive details of their OoS than I was.  I spent more time laying out the theory that I was using and defining terms, so I gave short shrift to the details of my OoS.  Since I was over the word count, I don’t know exactly how to do well on both, but I would like to better balance the two in the future.  

864 Reading Notes: Johnson-Eilola & Joyce

Summary of Johnson-Eilola  

Nostalgic Angels, Johnson-Eilola’s (1997) book about hypertext, seems to written primarily in response to early enthusiasts of hypertext within the humanities who believed that the technology automatically offered a liberating alternative to the dominating hegemony of print discourse.  Johnson-Eilola shares the dissatisfaction with print culture but argues that hypertext, while offering potential for pedagogy that is both collaborative and polyvocal nevertheless needs to be treated critically.  For one thing, he argues, hypertext can simply solidify existing power structures.   As Johnson-Eilola says, “hypertext can be (and often is) articulated as a powerfully conservative technology, a way to introduce wider groups of people more quickly and effectively into traditional structures of power” (p. 22). 

An important theme for Johnson-Eilola is the ways that hypertext has changed the relationship between readers and writers.  While he disagrees that the writer has been entirely replaced by the agency of a reader with choices, he points out that “compared to hypertext, print does not seem as capable of collapsing the reader and writer in the visible, surface-level manner enacted by hypertext writers and readers” (p. 143).  Although literary theorists such as Barthes and others argued that reader collaborates with the writer to make meaning in a way that is “primarily mental and unseen, hypertext appears to make the intertextual, text visible and active for the writer and reader… with the reader an explicit rather than merely psychic collaborator with writer” (p. 144).  This does seem to be a point worth making.

To summarize, I want to give one quote that I think captures the starting point of Johnson-Eilola’s argument in the book.  “Despite claims of radical novelty for the technology [i.e.hypertext] in a wide range of disciplines, the various articulations illustrate the ways we (necessarily) map the technology back against our conventional ways of acting and knowing” (p. 175).  That being said, he does believe that hypertext offers value as a pedagogical tool.  “At the same time, we must also remember that we are changed, that new potentials do exist, and that our use of hypertext in writing classes and elsewhere can be used to help students think about their writing and reading as social and political activities” (p. 176).  Bringing new writing practices into composition classes and engaging them critically, as Johnson-Eilola argues, can offer students long-term benefits since “the ways in which a writer is taught to operate within a virtual writing and research environment hold a great deal of influence over the ways in which that writer lives and thinks” (p. 233).

Something I am not sure I agree with

It appeared to be case that for Johnson-Eilola and some of the sources that he cites, to “think in a pluralistic, nonlinear fashion” (144) is a virtue.  Presumably the idea is that linear thinking is laid out by an author and therefore is a masculinist, dominating force on the reader.  But in practical terms what keeps this from becoming simply mental sloppiness, a sort of anything-goes way of thinking that doesn’t serve students well in the real world?!  Interestingly, Johnson-Eilola goes on to cite Landow & Delany (1990) as arguing that critical thinking is well-served by developing non-linear habits of thought that teach students to make connections between disparate things, and that “hypertext also helps a novice reader to learn the habit of non-sequential reading characteristic of more advanced study. Scholarly and scientific writing require readers to leave the main text and venture out to consider footnotes, evidence of statistics and other authorities, and the like; they must then integrate their evidence into a complex intellectual structure” (quoted on p. 144).  I am rather skeptical of this pious hope.  In my experience as a graduate student and as a teacher of novice readers the more important skill is to follow and grasp an author’s complete, linear argument before launching out in other directions.  Following other threads too soon tends to lead to mental confusion.  Advanced study requires more post-sequential reading than non-sequential reading, I would argue.  The goal is to get the argument and then make the connections—or at the very least, don’t lose the thread of the main argument along the way.  I do—at times—make forays away from the main text, but there is always a risk in doing so, and it requires me to stick a mental placeholder in the main argument.  The ability to keep the main argument in working memory, however, comes from a lifetime of reading print.  (Some indication that extensively hyperlinked texts are, indeed, working against critical thinking skills comes from research on how teenagers read websites.) 

I do not want to be seen as insisting on the maintenance of print culture against all odds.  What I do want to do is maintain some things that I see as good in print culture; The techno-topians have plenty to say, and I think to raise a contrary voice can be healthy.

Reading Johnson-Eilola and Joyce

                Both of these authors made me quite impatient.  I think a significant stumbling block was the style.  Postmodern literary theory is not the scholarship that I was acculturated into in my master’s degree.  I find it facile but rather hard to follow.  Sometimes I suspect that the main goal is to sound clever and the attempt comes across as pretentious to me.  To be fair, I recognize that every discipline and subdiscipline has its own way of talking, so I try—not always successfully—not to be too hostile.  Here is an example from my notes.  I wrote, “Hypertext turns us in to angels without maps?  We keep returning to our conventional practices because ‘we allow our nostalgia to channel new possibilities into old pathways’?  Which of course represents ‘existing channels of power’… (13). For pity’s sake, we’re only talking about hypertext, not religion.”

Here is an even more frustrating example from Joyce (2000).  He calls searches gritty “in the sense that the particularity of an evolving planet and its creatures are gritty” (p. 74).  This was my response in my notes:

What?? Dirty like gravel? Diverse and minutely-differentiated? Um. Explain again what this has to do with searches.  Going on: “Yet if they herald a loss it is, I think, the cleansing and morphogenetic loss that engenders a newness” (74).  Why are they a loss? Has this been explained earlier? The searches are approximate rather than specific? Well, I don’t know about Joyce, but I did library searches before the days of databases and the Internet, and those searches also had a groping clumsiness about them, too.  In what ways are newer methods of search “cleansing”?  Sorry.  This guy is not communicating.  I don’t admire cleverness if it doesn’t make any sense.

To be absolutely fair, I did find some memorable and comprehensible quotes from Joyce, but I am not sure I understood exactly what he was getting at much of the time.

                With readings that were a little more challenging for me, an interesting and occasionally helpful aspect was the digital annotations that were attached from a previous reader.  For example, Johnson-Eilola’s described hypertext as lacking constraining pathways for readers. “Postmodern articulations of this hypertext space, theorists commonly argue, encourage us to think of reading beyond the train tracks. There are no longer, it seems, fixed train tracks at all—only the process of readers continually retracking the landscape, becoming writers. Writing and reading become less clearly distinct, polarized activities” (p. 137). The quote was annotated with more or less what I had been thinking.  I also found the summary annotation at the ends of the chapters somewhat helpful. 

Because of my difficulty with understanding him, I will not summarize Joyce’s articles, but I can give a few takeaways.  The first was useful in seeing how things looked in 1996 when theorists were just beginning to tackle what hypertext meant for readers, writers and society. It also gives a bit of history of the early steps towards hypertext and hypermedia.  One thing that did catch my attention was that the article explicitly employed the network metaphor:

“Hypertext structures are often represented as nodes and links: the nodes "contain" text, graphical information, sounds, and so on, connected by the links, which, however, may themselves also contain information Or at least be labeled. Depending on the interface metaphor—the way the program visually depicts its information—the distinction between nodes and links is not always represented in hypertext programs, and the contents of the nodes themselves can often function as links” (Joyce, 1996, p. 19).

The excerpts from Joyce’s (2000) book were arguably poetic but very challenging to read. The article on the library inspired a picture with one of the early weird metaphors. 

I had the idea of putting more of Joyce’s metaphors into pictures, but there were too many and too weird.  Basically, Joyce covers four points.  The first is “collectible object or the nature of the library”, or in other words, what is it and what can it be that the library collects?  The second is “gritty searches or bibliographic instruction,” which is basically how searches are changing.  The third point was completely impenetrable to me, but he titled it “adolescent stacks or the library as publisher.”  Not quite sure what he was getting at, but it seemed to have to do with performance and serendipity. Here is the conclusion to the section in a very unhelpful quote:  “Presence of mind in an electronic age requires persistence. I would like to suggest that the role we might dare to take up as we become publishers of our own pageants is the persistent one of the sacred reader or the adult self. Whether Prospero or Eve, the sacred reader persists in what she reads of the play of self and space, encompassing childhood and adolescence in transcendent performance” (p. 77).  The only stable signifier here is “electronic age”, and possibly “reader.”  I welcome clarification on this section!  At any rate, the final point in this article was “embodied spaces or library as library.”  I can best capture this one with a quote that I think is quite insightful. “Yet another way I wore upon the patience of my library colleagues was with a repeated mantra: the physical collection must lead us into the electronic collection and the electronic collection must lead us into the physical” (p. 78).

The other chapter from Joyce’s book had great imagery and inspired another picture,

but the main thing that I can say about it is that it interrogates electronic culture from multiple perspectives.  Actually, I think it has to do with how our identities are written through and how we interface with and within electronic culture.

Favorite quotes from this week

Valuable insight for pedagogy: “The activity of a community of writers can work to outweigh the weight of conventional, conservative notions of meaning. At the same time, the lived process of this activity helps to prevent the postmodernist from degenerating into nihilism” (Johnson-Eilola, 1997, p. 173)

I am hoping that this is true: “What I often say (l said it in the last chapter) in response to others who claim that the so-called MTV generation has no attention span is that in an age like ours that privileges polyvocality, multiplicity, and constellated knowledge a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings” (Joyce, 2000, p. 74)

I think this is increasingly, if differently, true: “We inhabit new forms in the presence and community of others. In a world of shifting centers, meanings are not so much published as placed, continually embodied in human community” (Joyce, 2000, p. 75)

Interesting insight on the appeal of the new and the next: “In our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasingly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness. There is, of course, a branch of philosophy that concerns those who see themselves as inhabiting the time before the future. That branch, eschatology, is perhaps the archetype of othermindedness and its itch of desire for constant, immediate, and successive links to something beyond.” (Joyce, 2000, p. 81-82)

Profound: “The memory of the world, materialized in the body, for which both the book and the screen stand as repeated instances of embodiment, is itself the world” (Joyce, 2000, p. 101).

Latour?

Being read with some pleasure.  I will put all my thoughts in one blog next week.

References

Johnson-Eilola, J. (1997). Nostalgic angels: Rearticulating hypertext writing. Norwood, N.J: Ablex Pub. Corp.

Joyce, M. (1996). Of two minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Joyce, M. (2000). Othermindedness: The emergence of network culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

894 Response: My Writing Across Levels of Scope

I chose to theorize my writing at the macroscopic level in terms of my role as a writer and implying my purpose for writing, for example, as an instructor in a university writing for students as audience, as an employee and faculty member at my institution writing to communicate for various purposes with various audiences, and as a PhD student writing within my PhD courses.  At the mesoscopic level, I have listed various genres that I write to match my roles as listed in the mesoscopic level.  In the microscopic level, I mention how I specifically engage technologies in my writing practices.  Incidentally, I mention that I almost always use Microsoft Word to draft and then cut and paste into digital environments.  Ironically, I just realized that I am drafting this text directly into my blog space.  So microscopic practices are always pushed by the considerations of the moment--in this case my decision to add prose to a diagram that I am going to paste right here: