Class today has a few goals:
- Discuss Ulmer, his relationship to Ong, and his concept of electracy
- Discuss Project One. Ask questions, and I might answer them
- Troubleshoot HTML. What was helpful?
- Homework:
Ulmer and Electracy
This video will give us a bunch of things to address/consider:
- Grammatology / Apparatus theory / technological determinism [Part machine / part social / desires and needs]
- Society of the Spectacle / Entertainment Industry
- What will have been invented? What are the new opportunities of the new apparatuses?
- Technology / Institution / Subject-Identity Formation (how do we conceptualize or experience our lives in a different way)
- Orality: religion and ritual, communal spirit (individuality is akin to death)
- Literacy: nation state and method, individual self or soul (the distinction between the written word and the transcendent meaning gets laid onto the distinction between the physical body and the transcendental spirit/self/soul; the mind body distinction
Project One
Here’s what I initially conceived:
Our first project speaks directly to this course’s two main objectives. You will construct a web sites that explicates and remediates 3 different (and complicated) media theorists: Walter Ong, Martin Heidegger, and Gregory Ulmer. These websites will be composed in “hand coded” HTML and CSS, using the tutorials provided in the Robbins book.
I’ll be asking you to invent a new genre for the digital essay. How do we remediate the essay to maximize the impact of digital composition? How can we incorporate both images and links in productive, and perhaps unexpected ways?
Obviously, we are already off-script since we aren’t going to be reading Heidegger this semester.
What I am looking for is a strategy of invention/aesthetics/communication unique to electracy and images. I am looking for a project that plays with juxtaposition (here’s the google image page for examples of juxtaposition). I am looking for juxtapositions between quotes from the Ong and Ulmer readings and images that create some kind of tension.
We will discuss this more in class.
Draft of a rubric:
- Image quality
- Links that work
- HTML is W3C compliant (it validates, or if it doesn’t validate, there are minor errors)
- Every .html page shares one .css sheet
- Every .html page has at least a header and a footer
- Thought-provoking, non-trivial, juxtapositions
- Beyond quotation, offers some kind of understanding of Ulmer (either in the project, or in an introduction/preface, or in an afterword, or in an about page)
- Uses color strategically
- Demonstrates the ability to position images
- Thinks about and executes layout
- Upload to USF server space.
Homework
Read Santos et al. “Our Electrate Stories” (Home and Electracy sections). This will help flush out what I think Ulmer is up to, and why I think it is important that we consider/work through the questions he raises.
Finish coding 10 pages of html. Make sure they validate. In Thursday’s class we will address HTML layout (Robbins pp. 79-85).
