http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0vnRmej0Q&p=209B18F5F006F557&index=3&playnext=2
VHEMT has a Facebook page as well:
Suppose we wanted to categorize or tag these and related stories. What tags would you use? What other types of environmental news stories, not depicted above, do you typically see? What tags would we give these stories?
A world without people? A blog post by Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton.
This link will take you to a trailer from the documentary "Tapped," which focuses on the bottled water industry.
The image above is taken from an article in Frankly Green.
A short video about Aldo Leopold and the land that inspired A Sand Country Almanac.
This Leopold-based video is a bit longer (10 minutes) and more of a mini-documentary.
Here's another video which invites you to redefine "environmentalist" and "conservative" in light of Leopold's work.
Here's a satire of green-based advertising.
Here's a discussion of greenwashing, which includes a Colbert satire:
Here's a news feature on the "Six Sins of Greenwashing. (See p. 346 in your text.)
Item# 34728
This video looks at urgent environmental concerns facing planet Earth and what people can do to repair the degradation humans have caused. Air and water pollution, the effects of pollution on health and the environment, deforestation and loss of wetlands, ozone depletion and global warming, and the negative impact of agriculture, construction, and recreation/tourism are discussed. The program ends with anti-pollution initiatives like recycling and greater energy efficiency. The key message? Individuals can make a difference! A viewable/printable instructor’s guide is available online. Correlates to National Science Education Standards, National Educational Technology Standards, and Standards for the English Language Arts. A Cambridge Educational Production. (22 minutes) ©2006
This post pre-dates our time together, but it focuses on the Bruffee article that began our semester. Do you agree with Bruffee’s enthusiastic endorsement of collaborative processes?
This post is interesting to contemplate in relationship to several of your projects.
Kristeva writes that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” (p. 37). What do you think about such a statement? Do you think it’s true? Did you see this sort of intertextuality play out in your writing this term? Or were the ideas born—more or less—out of your head?
You’ll find this post relevant to intertextuality. Bakhtin emphasizes “context over text,” which means that meaning itself shifts depending on your perspective. By implication, you—as a writer—are not entirely in control of the meaning of your text.
Jeff Rice references this word, which both Plato and Derrida use to discuss writing. The term positions writing as both cure and poison.
If you’re interested in reflecting on your webtexts (perhaps compare/contrast it to a traditional essay?), then this post will be helpful. It’s a summary and exposition of Rice’s key chapters.
This post concerns many issues that Ede and Lunsford take up. You’ll find material that defines the term and social position of “author.” Where do you fit into that term? You’ll find material on the printing press and a discussion of the solitary author.
First, work with a partner to define the term "author." What is an author; how does "author" differ from "writer"? What sorts of texts do authors write? There are many texts in our world to which no authorship is attributed. Please list a few.
Ede and Lunsford note that “…the concept of individual authorship, which strikes most people as commonsensical but also somehow inevitable, is actually a cultural construct, and a recent one at that" (77).
Book, either numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writer; or a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc.. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this book before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the paper maker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book binder, sometimes even the gilder and brass-woer, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture (Zinck col. 442, cited in and trans by Woodmansee, "Genius" 425).
Before copyright laws could seem not only just but inevitable, society had to accept the idea that there is a crucial distinction between the production of literary texts and, say the raising and selling of apples and that the writer’s role in creating a book is somehow privileged—different from that of the printer or the bookbinder (82).
Those opposed to the establishment of copyright laws did so on two main grounds: (1) a book, being a physical object, becomes the publisher’s property (and then the buyer’s) once it is purchased from the writer; and (2), ideas, once expressed, belong to all, not just to the person who first articulated them (83).
| Illuminated Manuscript and Printing Press | |||
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Based on what you've seen, what role did the printing press and copyright laws play in the development of the modern concept of "authorship." How does this concept differ from medieval or renaissance concepts of the the author?
Wordsworth and other’s descriptions of the author’s responsibility and achievement guaranteed a privileged place for both authors and their creations: “Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objection which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown (85).
Multilinearity is one of the defining characteristics that distinguish a print-based text from a web-based text. An online text that incorporates a multi-linear structure—a structure comprised of multiple nodes with multiple pathways of access to those nodes—allows readers to choose their own paths through the text.
In a web-based text, by virtue of active participation in selecting links, readers are forced to look at the structure or form of the text rather than through it and to consider how the form is part of the message. According to Bolter (1991), if the form does not contribute to or enhance the message, but merely presents the content in a generic way, then the formal design is a waste of the new writing space afforded by the medium. A formal or form-based enactment of the content occurs when the organizational structure of the web-based text demonstrates and/or reinforces the content of the text.
Authors of hypertextual pieces, such as webtexts, are challenged to find ways to orient readers in order to help them read efficiently and find their way around the text (Landow, 1989). Readers can become “lost in hyperspace”—a disorienting experience in which readers cannot determine where they are in relation to the information contained in the text, or how to return to a previously viewed node or find a node they think exists (Conklin, 1987). A significant method for enhancing reader orientation includes the incorporation of an overview or introductory node, textual or graphical webviews, and explicit navigation directions—instructions for moving through the text.
Links make possible the unique contextualization afforded by the online medium. Linking to external primary source material on the Web as well as internal contextualizing nodes can potentially enrich a reading of a text by offering additional layers of information for readers at varying levels of knowledge and interest in the subject. Regardless of where the links lead, readers are much more likely to view contextualizing material when it is easily and readily accessible by simply activating a link (Landow, 1989). The link is the main vehicle for movement within a web-based text. Clear navigation design is dependent upon the construction of an effective link strategy so that readers have informed options for moving through the text.
From several web usability studies conducted in the late 90s, Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes (1998) concluded that substantial differences exist between reading from the screen and reading print from a page; hypertext authors attuned to these differences can take steps to enhance the reading experience. For example, Nielson and Morkes found that screen reading is slower than page reading; readers prefer to scan rather than read word for word from the screen; and readers prefer viewing short segments of text rather than scrolling through pages of text. A web-writing convention that has emerged from these reading analyses involves the process of “chunking” or separating content into small sections or nodes, which according to Nielsen, Morkes and others, provides a more reader-friendly experience within this medium.
As with navigation design, decisions regarding the visual design of a web-based text—including the manipulation of elements such as typography and color—depend on the goals of the text and the perceived needs of the reader. In other words, an effective visual design can support and enhance the meaning of the text; visual elements can be used rhetorically to gain the adherence of readers. Karen Chauss argued in “Reader as User: Applying Interface Design Techniques to the Web,” (incidentally, Kairos’s first Best Webtext award recipient), that the unique interface abilities afforded by the online medium require responsible use: “When writing for electronic media, writers can incorporate an array of graphic elements with greater ease than for print media. Lack of experience, coupled with ease of inclusion, can make for some wildly designed sites which distract rather than support the user.” Furthermore, as Pullman (2006) acknowledged, the new responsibilities for web authors necessitate judgment that may not be adequately cultivated: “Twenty years ago page layout and text design were the purview of graphic artists and printers; specialists with specialized knowledge.” Visual design, or “visual rhetoric” as it is referred to within the relevant literature, offers a broad range of information regarding the effective manipulation of typography, color, and layout.
The ability to incorporate multiple media within a text is, without question, the most significant allowance of the online medium that cannot be replicated in print. The inclusion of audio streams, for example, either in presenting content or providing background sound can arguably add dimension to an otherwise single-sensory text. Similarly, the incorporation of animation, advanced graphics, or video streams can affect the reception of an argument based on a potentially charged pathetic appeal.Hypertext critics commonly acknowledge that, because of the use of the hypertextual and/or hypermedia allowances of the medium, web-based texts demand new writing and reading strategies (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993; Carter, 1997; Landow, 1997; Walker, 2006). These new strategies point toward non-textual ways of making meaning. For example, the ability for form to enact content within a web-based text suggests that formal design shares a semiotic role. Additionally, the advent of new media texts—online texts in which the written word is not the “primary rhetorical means”—changes the ways in which readers and writers understand and construct these texts (Ball, 2004). These new forms require readers to understand how non-textual elements combine with text to make meaning. The primary meaning-making methods in web-based texts fall into four categories: (1) purely textual, in which the meaning is derived solely from the text; (2) textual supplemented with visual elements that may enhance the meaning of the text; (3) textual combined with visual and other non-textual elements—video, audio, animation—that enhance the meaning of the webtext; and (4) textual combined with non-textual elements that comprise, or present, the meaning of the webtext.
“In digital culture, Ulmer writes, the topoi are replaced with Plato’s forgotten concept of chora, the open receptacle of meaning.” Chora, when updated for digital cutlrue, functions as an argumentative/narrative strategy b means of pattern making, pattern recognition, pattern generation” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 34).
While all reading and writing practices demand partiipation to some extent, writing multiple meanings simultaneously generates a method more conducive to digital culture, which itself (through Web, film, video, and other media) is constructured out of multiple texts and meanings that often overlap and interlink. “The past mechanical times was hot, and we of the TV age are cool” (Understanding Media 40). As McCluhan writes, the task is to transfer choral practices into pedagogy so that we not only understand what a cool medium is but that we write cool as well. “Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other (McLuhan Understanding Media 47 qtd. in Rice 35).
The best demonstration of choral moves on the Web can be seen (but not only found) in the hypertextual link that allows writers the capability of developing threads around single words or ideas, and that reuires readers to naviage these threads in various ways. The link is indicative of a new media push to reoganize space in terms of meaning contruction. (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 35)
Dictionary.com:
–adjective
1.
suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, person, occasion, etc.: an appropriate example; an appropriate dress.
2.
belonging to or peculiar to a person; proper: Each played his appropriate part.
–verb (used with object)
3.
to set apart, authorize, or legislate for some specific purpose or use: The legislature appropriated funds for the university.
4.
to take to or for oneself; take possession of.
5.
to take without permission or consent; seize; expropriate: He appropriated the trust funds for himself.
6.
“In order to apply this cool method of writing, students are asked to identify specific cultural influences from their own lives. These influences may come from background, school, history, politics, music, objectives they’ve owned, anecdotes, and a variety of other sources….[S]tudents appropriate these influences from their original contexts…. Students then present and juxtapose these influences in order to find a pattern” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 71).
From dictionary.com:
–noun
1.
an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast.
2.
the state of being close together or side by side.
“The challenge for composition studies is to translate the theoretical principles of juxtaposition to a pedagogy appropriate for digital writing. This kind of writing would ot analyze juxtapositions found in either popular media or professional discourse and report on their rhetorical effectiveness but would produce a writing comprised of juxtapositions. It would be, therefore, performative….[P]atterns motive readers and writersto find unrealized connections among disparate events and material things. [Composing by juxtaposition] favors discovery over the restricted topic sentence since writers composing with juxtapositions do not begin with an understanding of what they will write about. Nor do writers concern themselves with mastery of a given category (science), subject matter (film), or already establishe d belief (topos) Instead, writers writers look for ways to juxtapose from a variety of categories and subjects…in order to invent” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 91).
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“The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve" (Holquist 426).
“Is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greaterwhole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of the utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be not actual monologues" (Holquist 428).
"Perhaps the most obvious theory that hypertext embodies and makes explicit is Julia Kristeva's (1986) notions of intertextuality: Kristeva, influenced by the work of Bakhtin, charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue" are the writing subject, the addressee (or ideal reader), and exterior texts; she describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes:
'The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus) . . . each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. (p. 37)
Essentially, every text is informed by other texts which the reader has read, and the reader's own cultural context. (emphasis added, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/features/eyman/julia.html)
"If, as Rorty suggests, knowledge is a social artifact, if knowledge is belief justified through normal discoruse, then the generation of knowledge, what we call creativity, must also be a social process [...]. But the discourse involved...cannot be normal discourse, since normal discourse maintains knowledge. It is inadequate for generating new knowledge" (647).
