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Housekeeping Stuff

  • Shipka recap?
  • Online visit from Hart-Davidson and Ridolfo, probably 4/14
  • Someday (maybe Saturday?), I will catch up with everything (I keep telling myself…)

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Short Seminar Essay

The short seminar essay, one seeded by your blog writings and/or other class activities, which will be slightly longer (between 2000 and 2500 words, or about the length of a conference presentation) and will hopefully be your beginnings of a contribution to the discussion of “computers and composition” as a scholarly interest. This essay will be due near the end of the term.

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?
  • The importance of the “attempt” or the try

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?
  • The importance of the “attempt” or the try
  • Think in terms of something that would fit in the class

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?
  • The importance of the “attempt” or the try
  • Think in terms of something that would fit in the class
  • Think in terms of a conference presentation (because that’s about what the length is we’re talking about here)

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?
  • The importance of the “attempt” or the try
  • Think in terms of something that would fit in the class
  • Think in terms of a conference presentation (because that’s about what the length is we’re talking about here)
  • MOSTLY DONE draft is due April 7 at 6:30 pm for peer review

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Short Seminar Essay

  • Possible topics/ideas?
  • The importance of the “attempt” or the try
  • Think in terms of something that would fit in the class
  • Think in terms of a conference presentation (because that’s about what the length is we’re talking about here)
  • MOSTLY DONE draft is due April 7 at 6:30 pm for peer review
  • FINAL DRAFT due on April 14.

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Rice & Rice “Pop-Up Archives”

  • Lots and lots of DH and archives
  • “Pop up” restaurants and such-- does the connection/comparison make sense?
  • Is a “pop-up archive” an oxymoron?
  • “What is created is not digital archives per se but digital archivists.” (251)
  • Pinterest as archiving tool…
  • https://digitaldistillery.as.uky.edu/

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Rice & Rice “Pop-Up Archives”

“At first, the concept of pop-up archives seemed contradictory, but once I understood the concept of temporal endurance, this article made a bit more sense to me…. The issue I have with this idea, even though I agree that it’s an important idea, is that aren’t we now crossing the line into art? I’m starting to wonder if DH isn’t just an identity crisis. My art background tells me that these concepts relate to performance art, so if that assessment is accurate, how is performance art considered DH?”

“I love The Pop-Up Archives! I just used it in a lesson today with my students, and Steve, I am sorry to say this, but this is one aspect of DH that I could really see working in my classroom.”

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Rice & Rice “Pop-Up Archives”

“The way that the Rice's work at the gathering of temporariness seems to match up well with conversations around futurity in queer studies which critique heteronormative logics in cultural orientations toward the future and anxieties that discipline (re)producibility.”

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Potts, “Archive Experiences”

  • “What these archives in practice and the digital humanities in general desperately need is a sense of audience, appeal, and interaction” (255).
  • The connections between technical communications (which is very interested in UCD) and DH.
  • The problems of “fetishizing” code (257).

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Potts, “Archive Experiences”

“Favorite line in this essay: "fetishiz[ing] the concept of coding... is disconcerting" (257). Now this feels like a discussion about digital "humanities" because of the focused interest on UCD…. I wish she had given an example of a product that did not consider UCD, so I had a better idea of what specifically she is talking about.”

“Of all the articles we’ve read this semester, this one makes the most sense to me. Potts asks important questions about this field, and this piece seems to be a call to action.”

“Mel.org used to be a difficult database to navigate when I was in high school, and I wonder if the team who was in charge of redesigning it recently followed a model of user-centered design as it is much easier to work with now.”

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Losh, “Nowcasting/Futurecasting”

  • The “drinking from a firehose” analogy.
  • The example of Shereen Sakr and “predicting” events based on tweets (289-90)
  • Otherwise, I thought...

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Losh, “Nowcasting/Futurecasting”

“In the middle of the essay, Losh moved away from a discussion on how to prepare our scholars to work with big data, but instead focuses on whether projects should look to predict the future or focus on the present. I think she is advocating for using big data to observe the "now," but I'm not really sure. And what about our ill-preparation for working with big data? What is she suggesting?”

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Anderson & Sayers, “The Metaphor and Materiality of Layers”

“To be honest, I’m a little (lot) confused by this chapter. The layers part of it makes sense. It makes sense that composing/writing has layers that, even though it is difficult to differentiate between them, mark snapshots of time. It sort of makes sense that meaning is constructed in the distance between the layers or material objects. After all, we construct meaning by connecting ideas to each other, and the work of meaning-making happens in the space where the two ideas connect to become something new. All of that sort of makes sense to me. However, I’m really lost with the metaphor bit. Maybe I’m just missing it, but I’m not sure how metaphor connects to materiality and layers.”

“Two quotes stood out to me the most. The first is as follows: “All our sources are re-sources (Reid 2007, 24-25), reconstructions of historical work flows, behaviors, and practices that we can perform again, embody, and repeat differently” (Anderson and Sayers 83). Does this mean that everything is a remix or has the potential to be a remix? Girl Talk style?”

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Anderson & Sayers, “The Metaphor and Materiality of Layers”

“I think this piece does a good job explaining the intricacies of compositions, especially through the ecological mode, zoom metaphor, and tracks. The sociotemporal constructions of these pieces lends to some important modeling techniques for digital compositions.

“Also, highlighting the importance of memory and digital decay is something that does not come up often. "The digital rots. It decays. It degrades" (89). Thinking about the technologies that we teach and show our students, we know that the digital is not permanent. I think Microsoft Word is one of the few products that has be longstanding, however, there are many applications and programs that have phased out of existence, leaving saved files of specified formats dead in digital space.”

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Anderson & Sayers, “The Metaphor and Materiality of Layers”

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