Here is the schedule for our second meeting:
- Theory: Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought”
- Practice: Working with Photoshop
- Homework: Reading / Reading / Coding
Walter Ong
Things I want to address:
- Technology, artificiality, cybernetics
- Knowledge as abstract, objective (difference between Knowledge and know-how)
- Apparatus theory
- Ong’s claim that computers extend the trajectory of literacy; secondary orality [ironically, technology reprioritizes local context even while it fosters the “global village”]
Here’s a link to my stock lecture on Walter Ong.
Practice: Working With Photoshop
Since the first project asks you to manipulate images, I wanted to dedicate some class time to working with Photoshop. I have sent out a .zip folder containing several images. You should download this folder to your desktop and unzip it.
We will be editing these files in class, learning some of the standard tools and language for working with images.
File Formats:
- .jpg is a compressed file format. This is the most common format on the web
- .png is a more robust format that allows for transparency and maintains multiple layers
- .gif is a format that supports animation. We will work with .gifs later in the semester
In class we are going to quickly run through a range of tools in Photoshop. I will roughly be following the online guide provided by the UNC Health Sciences library. We should address:
- Image Size / Canvas Size. Working with pixels.
- Cropping
- Brightness/Contrast
- Layers
- Lasso work
- Text
- Clone Stamp
You should also know that you have access to many powerful softwares at home via the USF Application Gateway.
From Ong to Ulmer
It is difficult for me to provide a quick overview of Gregory Ulmer’s work, because his project is quite complicated. But I want to provide some kind of introduction, however brief.
Ulmer’s work is in part inspired by Ong–in fact, it picks up where Ong left off. If Ong explicates the impact of literacy, then Ulmer’s work begins by hypothesizing what the impact of electracy might be. He finds the basis of this hypothesis in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, a poststructuralist and postmodernist who challenged Modernity’s investment in logos (abstract, universal, Truth).
Ulmer searches for a more imaginative and creative approach to language and language instruction. Why does American education have such an investment in teaching the research paper? Why don’t we invest more energy into teaching creative expression? These are some of the questions that motivate his work.
His solution to these questions involves developing complex systems of invention (how we generate thought). Invention is one of the five core canons of rhetoric. At the beginning of the reading selection from Heuretics, Ulmer references one of these systems: the CATTt (an acronym for Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target, tale). We won’t be using the CATTt system, but I am interested in his theoretical approach to invention, and his ideas on how cybermedia (as he identifies it in Heuretics) affords new methods for inventing and expressing (ourselves).
Homework
For homework, I would like you to do some theoretical reading, some technical reading, and practice some coding
Read Ulmer’s chapter on “Hypermedia” from Heuretics [PDF], Read Ulmer, “Electracy: An Introduction”
Remember that your first project asks for a web installation that remediates and explicates Ong and Ulmer.
Skim Robbins 3-20. Make sure you can answer all the questions on page 20. Read Robbins chapter 4 “Creating a Simple Page.”
I want you to use what you learn from Robbins’ 4th chapter to code up 10 pages of .html. Pay particular attention to Robbins pp. 56-57 for setting up a page. Ignore style sheets at this point–I only want “naked” html. Make sure you validate your .html using the W3C validator. Select 10 quotes from Ong’s essay. Create 10 html pages with a quote from the Ong on each page, an image on each page, and a link from one page to the next.
Good luck!
