Machina Memorialis

About the Old Machina

2006-09-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

While I've moved all my posts to the new Machina Memorialis site, I've decided to keep the old site up as an archive to keep links, both mine and others, from going dead. And in case you missed the first announcement or didn't get around to it, new Machina Memorialis posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina/. Please update links and readers accordingly. Thank you!

Machina Memorialis Has Moved

2006-07-02T14:44:00.000-05:00

D'oh! I should have mentioned this a few days ago: While I have returned to blogging, I've moved to a new blog using WordPress. New posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina.

Ong Orality-Literacy Contrasts Bibliographies

2006-06-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've compiled both a long and short bibliography of Ong's publications on oral-written-print-electronic contrasts. In addition to the two versions, there's an introduction which offers some important qualifications. As the introduction explains, while extensive, the long bibliography is not comprehensive, and while highly selective, the short bibliography is not intended to be taken as a "best of" or "must read" list. My bibliographies are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

And speaking of Ong bibliographies, I heard a few days ago that Thomas Walsh's definitive Walter J. Ong Bibliography (put together using Ong's own files) is in the process of being put online. The bibliography, which contains has something like 430 entries (each entry includes full reprinting history for a total of some 1,200 items), has been marked up in XML for flexible searching. I'm not sure when it will go public, but I'll let you all know.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

Orality and Literacy | Walter J. Ong | Walter Ong

Ong Bibliographies

2006-06-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

Back in February, I posted a complaint about an bibliography of the orality-literacy wars I found on Palimpsest. My complaint wasn't that the bibliography had been posted--I had a vague memory of someone asking if they could use it and, more importantly, it was attributed to me, but rather I was concerned that it was misidentified as an orality-literacy bibliography. I should have mentioned here earlier that the bibliography was properly labeled before I got around to asking that it be changed. This is way too late in coming, but I wanted to acknowledge this, if, for no other reason, I like the idea behind Palimpsest and want to support it.

I've had many requests for an orality-literacy bibliography over the past few years, and I got a number of them a few weeks ago while at C&W, so I'm putting one together. Rather than attempt a definitive orality-literacy bibliography, I'm focusing on Ong's work and it'll list readings which help contextualize and extend Orality and Literacy. It'll have three parts: a long version (about 40 items), a short version (about 16 items), and three suggested retrospectives. I'll pass it on to Palimpsest once it's done.

C&W and KY

2006-06-05T19:55:00.000-05:00

I'm back from Computers and Writing. Well, I've been back for a week, but less than 100 minutes after my plane landed in St. Louis, Tracey and I were on the road to Kentucky for a Virtue and Vice themed vacation (we visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries and the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill).

The distilleries were cool. While Jim Beam doesn't do a tour of the distillery proper, they do have a cool set up. Maker's Mark's grounds are beautiful, and while they don't offer samples of their bourbon, they do let you taste it as it ferments (fermentation takes place over four days and they let you sample each day).

The Shaker Village is well worth visiting. Plan to spend at least a day and maybe more if you want to go on a number of area hikes, a river boat cruise, or participate in one of their workshops (they'd just done a dry stone construction rock wall workshop a few weeks before we visited). While we didn't stay overnight (there's something like 80 rooms and I've been told by a friend the accommodations are good), we did eat in the restaurant and the food is excellent.

I uploaded some of pictures from the trip to Flickr. The oddest thing we saw was an traveling Angus Beef exhibit, which consisted of a cargo truck (which had most of the exhibit, I'm assuming), and a pickup pulling a cow statue:

I'll post more on C&W in the next few days.

MLA Field Bibliography Fellowship

2006-06-05T19:36:00.000-05:00

Back in Feb., I mentioned that I'd applied for one of the 2006-2009 MLA Field Bibliography Fellowships. MLA hasn't updated the website yet, but beginning July 1, I'll be one of the Field Bibliography Fellows! I don't yet know what journals I'll be covering, but my application listed the following interests: the history and theory of rhetoric; composition studies; medieval literature (particularly Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse); medievalism; orality-literacy studies and the media ecology of oral, chirographic, print, and digital cultures; digital English studies; science fiction; and fantasy. As I noted in my application letter, my interests are quite diverse. While the journals I'll eventually cover will depend upon what isn't already being indexed by a field bibliographer and what I have access to, I'd like to cover a mix of areas. I am planning on checking to see whether or not Kairos is being covered by a field bibliographer, and if it's open, I'm going to request it.

C&W 2006 @Get Info Blurb

2006-05-22T16:42:00.000-05:00

While I don't have a fancy video or anything like that for @Get Info at Computers and Writing, I do have a little blurb. I intended to make a video last week, which would have been me saying something like what I've got below with various places in the archive as backdrop, but plans changed. My hope is that the subject itself will be enough of a draw...

@Get Info Blurb for “Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy”

In February of 1990, Ong wrote a letter to Harvard University Press regarding his most recent book project, entitled Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization.

Wait, I’m sure many of you are thinking, Ong wrote a book on digitization? Kind of. He wrote 40,000 of a projected 50,000 words, some of which did make it into print in such publications as “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I’.” And he wrote a number of other things on the topic that didn’t make it into print, such as the presentation “Secondary Oralism and Secondary Visualism,” and my favorite, the unpublished but brilliant article “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.”

And that’s what my presentation’s going to be about: the stuff that makes up Ong’s “digital turn.” While I’ve talked about what’s in the Ong Manuscript Collection before, this is my first presentation about what I’ve learned while working in the archive.

Session G.3, which is Saturday right after lunch.

computer and writing | C&W2006

C&W 2006 Handout (Select Bibliography)

2006-05-22T16:27:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd post my bibliography handout, which goes with my Computers and Writing 2006 presentation "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy." There should be streaming video archives of a number of the presentations at http://richrice.com/cw/website. On it are a number of unpublished material found in the archives.

Select Bibliography for "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy"

“Kleine, Michael and Frederic Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Forum 7.2 (1996): 65-86.

Ong, Walter J. “A.M.D.G.: Dedication or Directive?” Review for Religious 11 (1952): 257-263. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 1-8.

---. “The Church and Cosmic History.” American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 1-15.

---. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 4-21. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 527-49.

---. “Ecology and Some of Its Future.” Explorations in Media Ecology 1.1 (2002): 5-11.

---. "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time." Thought 34 (1959-60): 547-68. Rpt in revised form in Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives. Ed. by Walter J. Ong. New York: Macmillan, 1960. 125-48. Rpt. in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 61-82; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 2: Supplementary Studies, 1946-1989. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 85-103.

---. Forward to The Barefoot Expert: The Interface of Computerized Knowledge Systems and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. By Doris M. Schoenhoff. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. ix-xii.

---. Forward to Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. By Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. xiii-xiv.

---. “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I.’” Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 183-203.

---. “Information and/or Communication: Interactions.” Communication Research Trends 16.3 (1996): 3-16. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 217-38. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 505-25.

---. “Knowledge in Time.” Introduction to Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium. Ed. Walter J. Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 3-38. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 1. Selected Essays and Studies, 1952-1991. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 127-53.

---. "The Knowledge Explosion and the Sciences of Man." American Benedictine Review 15.1 (1964): 1-13. Rpt as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 41-51. Rpt. as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 55-68.

---. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Oralism to Online Thinking.” Explorations in Media Ecology 2.1 (2003): 43-4.

---. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

---. “Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

---. “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. "Secular Knowledge, Revealed Religion, and History." Religious Education 52.5 (1957): 341-49. Rpt as "Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion" in American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 74-95.

---. “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Voice, Text, Fundamentalism, Hermeneutic, and God’s Word: The Personal Grounding of Truth.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.

Swearingen, C. Jan. “On Photographic ‘Literacy’: An Interview with Walter J. Ong.” Exposure 23.4 (1985): 19-27.

Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive.

computer and writing | C&W2006 | digital culture | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Eurovision Upset: "Monsters" Of Rock Win

2006-05-21T08:35:00.000-05:00

Eurovision? What?

Most of you, I'm guessing, don't follow the annual Eurovision Song Contest, Europe's battle of the bands. I don't either except for the little bit of coverage it gets on the BBC World News, but this year was different. While Eurovision is usually dominated by Europop so bad even Europeans make fun of it, this year's contest was swept away by the Finnish "monster metal" band Lordi and their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah." Even for me, a casual observer of Scandinavian metal, Lordi's invention of monster metal just makes sense. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done by a metal band before, Scandinavian or otherwise. It's a logical move blending the stage presence of KISS, Alice Cooper, and the like with the metal band monster mascot like Iron Maiden's Eddie.

And the song's not bad either as far as metal tributes to rock go. And it's much better than the usual Eurovision fare. Youtube.com, of course, already has a number of videos of the Eurovision performance:

BBC stories on Lordi's win:

Finnish monsters rock Eurovision

How horror rock conquered Europe

Finns shocked by Eurovision band

Link Roundup

2006-05-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

The Scotsman has a short piece based on an interview with the Vatican's astronomer. The story has a very Ongian take on the intersection of science and religion: "Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer." Via Neil Gaiman.

Cow abductions. Watch the video on the front page. Via Lisa at The Truth Hurts.

Michael Drout's How Tradition Works: A Meme-based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century is now out. It's a must read book for me, but I'm not sure if it's going to be a read-for-dissertation book. It would have been a must-read for the old dissertation, and while it's something I should read now, the cut off point for new books has probably been passed.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education has published the report "Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences."

The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative is funding the NEW TIES project, which seeks to create a "computer society" of software agents capable of developing their own culture and language. Via CogNews.

I forgot to add:

University of Toronto Press has published Marcel O'Gorman's E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities, a book which I want to check out.

Matthew Driscoll of the Arnamagnæan Institute has an article in the new issue of Digital Medievalist that describes the new manuscript description module in TEI P5: "P5-MS: A General Purpose Tagset for Manuscript Description."

Ong at MLA 2006

2006-05-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

MLA has accepted my panel "Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy at 25," which I hope will be the first of a series of 25th anniversary celebrations for the book. MLA's on board, C&W 2007 will likely be a go, so now it's up to CCCC. Steve may be right: 2007 just might be the year of Ong.

The MLA panel's three papers and presenters are:

"Orality, Literacy, and Ong's Asymmetrical Opposition" by Jerry Harp of Lewis and Clark College

"Orality and Literacy as a Methodological Apparatus for Examining Women's Rhetorics" by Melissa Fiesta of California State University, Long Beach

"Ong, Derrida, and the New Media Theory" by David Martyn of Macalester College

We'll be posting abstracts later this summer.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

MLA | MLA2006 | Orality and Literacy | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Miscellanea

2006-05-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

I meant to post this much earlier, but the time between returning from a celebratory dinner and discovering the theft of the Neon was about 8 hours. Any way, on May 2, Gina Merys defended her dissertation, "Teaching Freedom: The De-Colonized Classroom, Empowerment, and First Year Writing," and she was hooded yesterday. Dr. Merys joins Creighton University as an assistant professor later this summer.

I finished grading over the weekend and submitted grades on Sunday. For the most part, the final papers were good, and a number of them taught me something about the texts we read, which is always a great thing. All in all, a good class. I'll be posting a wrap up in the not too distant future.

We bought a new PT Cruiser on Tuesday because, as I mentioned yesterday, our Neon was stolen and totaled. While it means having a car payment, and, therefore, me having to pick up freelance work this summer to cover it, we wanted a new car rather than an used one. My mother-in-law loves brokering car deals, so we let her at it. She got us a better price than we were hoping for and other than the color, the car has everything we wanted. While we wanted black, we got magnesium, which was our second choice.

I need to need to reread Heaven's War. With the movie hype going around, I couldn't help but note some echoes of the Da Vinci Code, which isn't to say that Heaven's War has anything to do with the Da Vinci Code but rather that both stories draw from the Grail/Knights Templar/Merovingian mythologies covered in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I've not read either book, but I know good amount about both, so I was able to pick up Heaven's War's use of Holy Blood, Holy Grail well before I read the notes in the back of the book. I've been told by a number of people that I should read the Da Vinci Code at some point and I probably will. Even if it wasn't enjoyable, and I've been told by enough people that it is, it's medievalism and it's bringing students into medieval studies courses, and that's a good enough reason to put it on a "to read" list. Heaven's War itself focuses much more on Charles Williams than on Tolkien or Lewis, which I found disappointing, but I expected as much. The title, after all, is a nod to Williams' own grail story, The War in Heaven.

The backyard lawn, which we replanted last October is doing quite well. Too well, I think. It needs to be mowed more than once a week and it's so thick it jams up the lawn mower. With this new found lawn success, we're probably going to rent a roto-tiller again and tear up the front yard, which not only suffers from the hard-packed Missouri clay but a steep slope and too much shade. We're also thinking about turning the front yard slope into terraced flowerbeds. We've also got canna coming in and the hostas have grown in. We've filled our screened-in porch with flowers and other plants (including two basil plants), and we've also got a number of moonflower seedlings ready to transplant. I need to build a trellis to put up alongside the porch so we can enjoy the moonflowers when we sit out there in the evenings. I'm also supposed to build a number of bamboo border fences in the Yotsume style. The bamboo has even been ordered.

"No sign of theft"

2006-05-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

Just over two weeks ago, our 1995 Neon was stolen, taken for a joyride, and, as is almost always the case in St. Louis, intentionally crashed before abandoned. The aftermath, for the most part, was one long nightmare. Before we could see our car, we had to once again talk to the police, who tried to get us to admit to crashing our car and fleeing the scene. That was a two hour nightmare in which the detective told us a number of lies, including that she had sent someone down to the impound lot to check our car and that there were no signs of theft. (When we finally got to see the car, we found the steering column exposed, the ignition lock busted up, and ignition lock fragments all over the floor of the car.) At some point, I called my dad, who is an attorney, a retired FBI agent, and a retired judge, and he told me how to push back. He also told me it would piss the detective off, but that she'd give us the paperwork to get our car. She got pissed off, but she did let us go shortly after. She wouldn't, however, ever give us a theft report number. I had to call back to ask for one and she told me there wasn't one. I then asked if she'd had someone look at the car because, contrary to what she'd told us earlier, there were clear signs of theft. She said someone would look into it, and called the next day to tell us that the car had been stolen. She then told my wife that the accident report would also serve as our theft report. When we picked it up five days later, it didn't. We've finally gotten it all resolved, but it took the intervention of the Crime Victims' Advocacy Association.

And here, for your enjoyment, are a few more pictures of the non-existent signs of theft: The ignition, in b&w:

A pulled back view. Note the small item on the floor mat above the black rectangle of rubber -- that's the biggest piece of the ignition lock. Apparently it's too small for a St. Louis Police officer to notice. But then, they assumed I've driven the car for the past three years with the steering column and ignition lock in the state you see above.

"Heaven's War": The Inklings Vs. Crowley

2006-05-08T20:02:00.000-05:00

I don't remember where I learned about Heaven's War by Micah Harris and Michael Gaydos, but it was sometime in the last 6 months. I ordered it last week as a post-semester diversion. It's short, so it won't be that much of a distraction, and finishing up a semester of teaching science fiction (it's finals week), I can't rationalize reading something like the Quicksilver, the first novel in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which has been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I could, probably, rationalize Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus or Tales of a Scottish Grandfather Vol. 1: From Bannockburn to Flodden: Wallace, Bruce and the Heroes of Medieval Scotland by Walter Scott (justified, even, as Scott engaging in the production of social memory). But, really, I just can't pass up this comic, which is described as such:

1938: As the world moves toward global war, a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind's fate. The infamous Aleister Crowley plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will.

Only "The Inklings"--20th century fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams--oppose his scheme. Their altercation with Crowley will take them to the very threshold of Heaven--and one of the Inklings outside time itself!

Lewis and Tolkien have long been favorite authors of mine, and I've enjoyed their scholarship as much as their fiction. And not only did I TA and then teach my own Tolkien course before the movies made it fashionable to do so, I team taught a class on the Inklings with T.A. Shippey a few years ago. Like I said, I can't pass this up.

It came much earlier than I expected, so now I've got to put it away until I've submitted grades.

And need I mention that I've got Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley" going through my head?

Aleister Crowley | Charles Williams | comics | C.S. Lewis | graphic novel | Inklings | J.R.R. Tolkien

Resources on Electronic Scholarly Publishing

2006-05-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

Via the Humanist Discussion Group:

Version 62 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,680 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.

The Open Access Webliography (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.

Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information: The page-specific "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" (listing all indexed items) deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 2,300 indexed titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated.

digital scholarship | electronic publishing | Open Access

CFP: The Digital Archive

2006-05-04T21:14:00.000-05:00

via the Humanist Discussion Group:

Image (&) Narrative (www.imageandnarrative.be), a peer reviewed, online journal published by the University of Leuven (Belgium), is inviting submissions for a special issue on:

The Digital Archive

In human societies memory is organized in two basic forms: material forms (tablets, paintings, books, etc.) on the one hand and immaterial forms (oral history, dances, songs, etc.) on the other hand. These forms represent two organizing principles that function in different ways. While material forms of memory are fixed, immaterial ways of remembering are fluid. Tablets, paintings, texts, & are affirmative and stable, while conversations, oral traditions, ... have a more ambiguous or dialogic' character. Especially in western societies, the first organizing principle has gained more authority. Material memory' has laid the foundation of modern bureaucracy and of every industrial or post-industrial company. Contracts and laws are the most evident examples of material memory' which guarantee the relative stability necessary for every modern organization. In this context, the classical archive often functions as a library of proof' on which societies can always rely when appointments are discussed, rules are violated or facts are disputed. In other words, the classical archive as a reservoir of material memory is one of the crucial foundations that have made modern society & modern.

The introduction of digital databases transforms the way Western societies use their archives. The most visible result of digitization is of course the fact that the classical archive, once digitized, becomes a more fluid one. Although it may not become as instable as conversations, oral history or urban legends, the possibility of permanent transformation is real. As soon as new data enter a networked archive, the database can reorganize itself just as oral legends transform over time when the storyteller or the audience changes. At least we can say that the digital archive is a strange hybrid between material and immaterial memory machines. But in the digital era classical' archives do not disappear. Just as the paperless' office has proven a fiction (utopian or dystopian, following the sources), the world of archives is not one-dimensional. Classical and digital archives coexist, not always pacifically, their respective logics, areas and scopes interact, and their users have to switch permanently from one type of archive to another.

Deadline for submissions: 1st of November 2006
Please contact:
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
rudi.laermans@soc.kuleuven.be
pascal.gielen@soc.kuleuven.be

archive | cfp | digital archive | digital scholarship | memory

Writing Tickets

2006-05-02T07:34:00.000-05:00

When I read Laurence Musgrove's IHE piece "The Real Reasons Students Can’t Write" last week, my reaction to it was, not surprisingly, similar to the reactions of Steve Krause and Mike Garcia. As I read it, Ed White's recent invoking of Peter Elbow on WPA-L came to mind. White reminded us of Elbow's argument that we shouldn't use revision as punishment, that we shouldn't revise our "bad" writing, but, rather, that we should use revision to make our good writing better.

As much as I agree with that notion, however, we're not always left with the option of revising our best work, or even good work. Sometimes, we're stuck with the crap we've got. And that's the problem Musgrove is trying to solve. As states in the piece, most student errors are the result of not caring about the writing or not noticing the error in that particular instance rather than not knowing how to write.

Musgrove's answer to making students care--the writing ticket--can't be a good solution. While punishment can be a strong motivation to reduce error, the reliance upon a system of negative feedback, of punishment, is going to teach students, especially students who need the most writing instruction, to write as little as possible and to avoid writing whenever possible.

If the problem here is with error, maybe a better solution would be to increase training in editing distinct and separate from writing and revision. Yes, editing is part of the writing process, but editing is also a distinct craft and most professional writers have editors who edit their work because it's understood that even the best writers make and fail to catch errors. Not everyone is cut out to be a good editor--I'm pretty sure I'm not--but we can all learn how to systematically scan a piece for error. Done well, this separates revision from editing, revision from the elimination of error, and it directly addresses editing as a rhetorical act along the lines of Joseph Williams' "The Phenomenology of Error."

composition | composition studies | Laurence Musgrove | teaching writing

Book Meme

2006-05-01T10:25:00.000-05:00

I'm resisting the urge to say that I don't do memes but I'm doing this one because, well, we all say that. I came across this one at blogos

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open it to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Copy it onto your blog/journal along with these instructions

The book is David Farrell Krell's Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge which is on my desk between the keyboard and my iMac. Here's the fifth full sentence:

They allow only particular peridos of stimulus to pass.

Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth

2006-05-01T06:55:00.000-05:00

Back in October, I made a brief reference to Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey, a collection which I'm co-editing with Andrew Wawn and Graham Johnson. While we knew Brepols Publishers was going to pick it up for over a year, we now have a contract. It will be published as part of Brepols' Making the Middle Ages series, and the collection is about the “the Grimmian Revolution," what Shippey calls the development and the results of comparative philology in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the initial contact letter that we sent to potential contributors and in our initial discussions with Brepols, we offered the following possible topics:

-the effects of literary and linguistic discovery on European national self-definitions
-the way in which comparative philology was extended, successfully or not, to comparative mythology
-the creation of folkloristics as a study, including the collecting of folktale and folk-ballad
-the history of the recovery of the old Northern literatures and languages
-the reception of those literatures and languages in general, and the way they have altered modern literary sensibility.

The collection will have 16 essays divided into three topics (nationalism, philology, and mythology) by scholars from 7 countries. It covers such topics the rise of Finnish vernacular literature, Beowulf, Tolkien as philologist and mythologist, Old Norse poetry and myth, the Mabinogi, Macpherson's Ossian and Scottish nationalism, Frisian and Danish "Grimmian" figures, and Anglo-Irish-Icelandic connections. It's on track to be published in October 2007.

What I don't think is going to be made explicit in the collection is how all of this, the whole of Grimmian Revolution, is social memory. Sometime after we finish editing the whole thing -- probably after the collection itself is out -- I plan on writing an essay on the Grimmian Revolution as projects in social memory.

There's something a bit exhilarating and a bit intimidating about signing a book contract.

Cognitive Science News Roundup

2006-04-29T11:16:00.000-05:00

Four interesting pieces from the world of cognitive science caught my attention this week, two of which deal with the always controversial intersection of cognition and genetics and evolution. I found the first three at CogNews and heard the last on NPR's Science Friday.

Evidence of genetic influence over cognitive abilities:

A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study’s primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups. [Read more.]

Weak electrical currents can improve brain function:

A growing body of evidence suggests that passing a small electric current through your head can have a profound effect on the way your brain works. Called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the technique has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills and to improve learning and memory in healthy people - making fully-functioning brains work even better. It is also showing promise as a therapy to cure migraine and speed recovery after a stroke, and may extract more from the withering brains of people with dementia. Some researchers think the technique will eventually yield a commercial device that healthy people could use to boost their brain function at the flick of a switch. [Read more.]

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finds supports smart mob theory when it comes to complex problem solving:

Groups of three, four, or five perform better on complex problem solving than the best of an equivalent number of individuals, says a new study appearing in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). This finding may transfer to scientific research teams and classroom problem solving and offer new ways for students to study and improve academic performance, according to the study authors. [Read more.

Science Friday's interview with Before the Dawn: Recovering The Lost History of Our Ancestors author, Nicholas Wade. New York Times' science reporter Nicholas Wade and NPR's Ira Flatow discuss Wade's new book Before the Dawn, which explains discoveries in recent human evolution. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of the intersections between cognitive development and evolution.

I know that racism, both current and past, is always a concern when we wade into the intersections of evolution/genetics and cognition, but it's interesting and important work nonetheless. It's part of the story of human development.

And, finally, the implications of improving brain function via applying weak electrical currents are fascinating.

New Blog: The Forgotten Canon

2006-04-28T00:21:00.000-05:00

While you might think one could get lonely working at the intersection of medieval memory studies and techrhet, it's never been a lonely place because Kathie Gossett's always been there with me. And now she's blogging too.

digital rhetoric | digital scholarship | medieval rhetoric | memory

Tag Literacy

2006-04-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

Via tengrrl, an article on tag literacy I want to look at soon.

Update: Link fixed.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Futurist Folk Opera

2006-04-27T18:13:00.000-05:00

About two weeks ago, as we were discussing R.U.R. in class, a student asked me if it had ever been performed. I wish I'd known this then. R.U.R., the play by Karel Čapek that gave us the word robot, has been made into an opera and is being performed this week and the next.

This world premiere will blend Rock, Tango, Jazz and Punk music with contemporary dance to re-imagine Karel Čapek's original 1921 classic, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek's play that started it all, introducing the word ROBOT into the world's lexicon and into our fantasies, is reexamined for the 21st Century.

This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC).

Via Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Dennis also has a great R.U.R. resource page

Another Day, Another Proposal (Two, Really)

2006-04-26T14:07:00.000-05:00

Having organized or co-organized three prior "Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom" sessions for the Midwest Modern Language Association convention, I've finally decided to step aside and submit a proposal for the session. M/MLA posts 250 word abstracts, so I've spent part of the morning revising mine to this:

“Memory as Composition: Monastic Rhetoric, Cognitive Science, and Imageword”

In The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, Mary Carruthers argues that the focus of medieval monastic rhetoric was on the creation of compositions for meditation rather than on persuading others. Meditation, Carruthers notes, is “a craft of thinking” used for “making things” (4). This work, both the process and the product, involved cognitive images – imagewords, to borrow Kristie Fleckenstein’s term, used in a recursive process of creating and representing meaning. These imagewords, a mixture of the memoria rerum (memory for things) and memoria verborum (memory for words) best known to contemporary rhetoricians and compositionists as part and parcel of the Ciceronian art of memory, work as metaphor, and it is by understanding them as a metaphor that we can understand how the imageword, how the art of memory itself, works. Current thought in cognitive science argues that metaphor functions through the processes of structure mapping and conceptual integration (also known as conceptual blending or mental binding), and it is through the theory of conceptual integration that we can understand how both classical and medieval ars memoria and contemporary image theory work on the cognitive level. In bringing together the theories and practices of monastic rhetoric, cognitive science, and imagery in composition studies, I will suggest a theoretical and practical framework for developing a contemporary art of memory, one that sees memory as a composition craft.

It might sound a bit familiar to some of you, as it's closely connected to my earlier musing on my cognitive (re)turn and it is, more or less, the third chapter of my dissertation, though I'm not going to talk about MOO-based writing, which I do discuss in the dissertation.

Up next is an abstract for the CCCC 2007 memory roundtable which Kathie Gossett is organizing. I'm going to talk about the role social memory plays in rhetoric and composition. Or, really, as I'll have somewhere around 6-8 minutes, I'll be talking about one of the roles social memory does play. I think, though I'm not sure yet, that I'll discuss my adaptation of Pierre Nora's notion of les lieux des memorie (site or realm of memory) and their function as a form of social commonplaces and how we can use them. While I didn't use the Nora's terminology in my cognitive (re)turn posts, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy functions as an Anglo-Saxon site of memory throughout Beowulf, and in that post I suggested a few ways in which the Beowulf-poet uses this social commonplace mnemonically. In my CCCC presentation, as well as in my chapter on social memory in rhetoric and composition, I'm going to use Jon Stewart's September 20, 2001 monologue, the first new Daily Show after September 11. What most interests me is the last half of the monologue, which reads:

One of my first memories was of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five and if you wonder if this feeling will pass. . . (choked up). . . When I was five and he was shot, this is what I remember about it. I was in school in Trenton and they turned the lights off and we got to sit under our desks. . . and that was really cool. And they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there were riots, but we didn’t know that. We just thought, "My God! We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese!" And that’s what I remember about it. And that was a tremendous test of this country's fabric and this country has had many tests before that and after that.

The reason I don’t despair is that. . . this attack happened. It's not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery, is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King's dream.

Whatever barriers we put up are gone. Even if it's just momentary. We are judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character. (pause) You know, all this talk about "These guys are criminal masterminds. They got together and their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill. . ." It's all a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding. . . that’s extraordinary. And that's why we have already won. . . they can't. . . it's light. It's democracy. They can't shut that down.

They live in chaos. And chaos, it can't sustain itself--it never could. It's too easy and it's too unsatisfying. The view. . . from my apartment. . . (choking up) was the World Trade Center. . .

Now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of. . . of American ingenuity and strength. . . and labor and imagination and commerce and it's gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. . . the view from the south of Manhattan is the Statue of Liberty. . .

You can’t beat that. . .

Note how he uses Martin Luther King, Jr., the World Trade Center, and the Statue of Liberty as commonplaces. Each functions as a social commonplace with a host of meanings. While the whole range of meanings won't all hold for specific individuals, each holds mnemonic value within American society while at the same time serving as symbols of America itself. Rather than just name each of the three sites of memory, Stewart tells us what value we should ascribe to MLK and to the World Trade Center, and in doing so he both calls upon our own store of knowledge and creates for us a cognitive image, an imageword to use Fleckenstein's term, that both makes meaning for us and serves to anchor that meaning in our minds. The Statue of Liberty is used in the same way too, but I think its also interesting that he doesn't believe there's a need to explicate, to define, the statues mnemonic value. While we can all read the meaning of Statue of Liberty against the grain, its symbolic value is deeply rooted in the American psyche, in American social memory.

I could also, and in the dissertation I might, talk about how other elements such as sitting under one's desk at school, firefighters and policemen, democracy, chaos, and even light, function mnemonically in the monologue, but the big three are more than enough.

The Daily Show | medieval rhetoric | memory | rhetoric | social memory

Crime Problem? Hire Gurkhas

2006-04-18T21:36:00.000-05:00

I've long had a fascination with the Gurkhas,, a people from Nepal, ever since I first learned about them in high school. The Gurkhas are famous for the soldiers they produce -- in fact, the British East India Company was so impressed with them, after finally defeating them, Britian hired them as soldiers and Gurkhas have been part of the British army ever since. There are still four Gurkhas regiments in the British Army -- no other former or current members of the Commonwealth outside the UK have this distinction, and the Gurkhas have won more Victoria Crosses than any other troop in the British Army.

I first learned of the Gurkhas because of the khukuri, their traditional knife used for everything from choping wood to skinning animals to combat. There are stories of Gurkhas and their khukuris are legion. The first stories I remember hearing were of Gurkhas running through German trenches in WWI lopping heads off as they went.

Every once in a while, especially since Hong Kong was returned to China (until then, the Gurkhas were based in Hong Kong), you hear of former Gurkhas hiring out their services. The Gurkhas International Group provides services around the world and Claudia Schiffer reportedly hired Gurkhas bodyguards last year. And now, a news report this week states that an IKEA store in Nottingham has hired ex-Gurkhas soldiers to protect their parking lot. I love this quote:

"It's true that there has been no crime in the car park at all since the Gurkhas came in," David Attle, the store's risk controller, told Britain's domestic Press Association news agency amid the busy bank holiday rush.

"Prior to their appointment we had quite a high incident rate and it's a pleasure to say that since we have had the Gurkhas doing the patrols we haven't had a single incident so far."