tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56657711657268074022024-02-19T02:23:44.112-08:00Moby Digitalchasing the white whale of the digital humanitiesGideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-52466609068562732292013-12-03T14:06:00.001-08:002013-12-04T10:44:53.419-08:00A Snapshot of Student Digital Culture Projects UnderwayOur students' final papers and projects are well underway. Here is a snapshot:<br />
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In her project, "<b><a href="http://teamahab.blogspot.com/2013/12/pinterest-project-proposal.html" target="_blank">You Are What You Pin</a></b>," Aleesha is exploring the issue of <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">online identity</span> and how this is mediated through <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">pinterest</span>. Greg is looking a lot at <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">virtual worlds</span> and emergent digital nations, asking how we can <a href="http://teamahab.blogspot.com/2013/12/virtual-nation-civilizing-digital-wilds.html" target="_blank">civilize the digital wild</a>. Meanwhile, Paul is continuing to examine <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">video games</span> in terms of the larger literary tradition, claiming that certain games are "neo-romantic pieces that update the ideals of romanticism to the post-industrial state." Kelsey wants Mormons to pay attention to <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">metadata</span> as a way of optimizing <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-working-post-increased-need-for.html" target="_blank">online proselyting</a> efforts. Kristen also explores contemporary LDS missionary work. She is creating a <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/11/working-post-my-missionary-project.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">blog</span> and set of digital resources for Mormon missionaries who return early</a> from their full-time service. Mele wants to look at <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/12/project-proposal.html" target="_blank">technology and family relationships</a>. Lizy's interest in <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">fandom</span> has led her to studying the <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/12/lizys-project-proposal-about-shield.html" target="_blank">development of a fandom around Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D</a>, while Victoria is <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/11/educational-fandoms.html" target="_blank">connecting <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">fandom</span> with education and the study of literature</a>. Melody is thinking through <a href="http://teamqueequeg.blogspot.com/2013/12/working-post-staying-afloat-in-digital.html" target="_blank">what it means to be human</a> as <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">transhumanism</span> and <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: orange;">the</span> <span style="color: orange;">singularity</span></span> promise and threaten radical change. Brittany sees <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">maker culture</span> and the <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">DIY</span> (do-it-yourself) movement as providing people <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/12/working-post-diy-homemade-to.html" target="_blank">an avenue to entrepreneurialism</a> within our increasingly digital economy. New formats for books and literature are topics being looked at by two of our group: Shelly is looking at how <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">ebooks</span> and <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">e-readers</span> are <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-working-post-literary-effects-of.html" target="_blank">more suitable to today's youth</a> and to changes happening in education, while Amber is reformatting <i>Moby Dick</i> and thinking through <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-working-post-media-changes-literature.html" target="_blank">how new <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">digital formats</span> productively raise new interpretive questions for literature</a>. How <a href="http://teamstarbuck.blogspot.com/2013/12/finding-middle-ground-balancing.html" target="_blank">technology is influencing <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">education</span></a> is Cheri's topic. Ashley is writing on <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">digital natives </span>raising digital natives. Kayla is creating <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-working-post-best-practices-guide-to.html" target="_blank">an ebook guide</a> for those doing <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">citizen journalism</span>, while Danielle is <a href="http://teamqueequeg.blogspot.com/2013/12/working-post-editing-in-digital-world.html" target="_blank">rethinking <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">editing</span> in the digital age</a>. Mary is investigating <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">smartphones</span> linguistically by examining <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/11/final-project-smartphones-and-dialects.html" target="_blank">the problems of speech interfaces to smartphones for those having nonstandard dialects</a> of English. In addition, we have Kylee <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/12/digital-tourism-and-changing.html" target="_blank">investigating <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">travel</span> in the digital age</a>, Sam looking at how local bands in Provo have used <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: orange;">social</span> <span style="color: orange;">media</span></span>, Heidi looking at <a href="http://teamstarbuck.blogspot.com/2013/12/working-post-games-in-workplace-new.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">gamification</span> in the workplace</a>; Derrick examining how producing a <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">podcast</span> <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/11/final-project-smartphones-and-dialects.html" target="_blank">altered his education and developed professional opportunities</a>.Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-75575671156049247172013-11-21T17:35:00.000-08:002013-11-26T13:43:07.645-08:00The Real Reach of Student Research: Four Outlets<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg47Z4xpKF5ptJwDqU4uqloeLBNi8V0j9iZPW0qQbxg17OWPqKYrLplTO8IZkESZitjAmdzeohcAVL0xuttAr6ROQ-slkFBSXf8QanIezfOnYFhKPye_A0_mrsa_dU3E8Oc1KE6D-qcSVY/s1600/real-reach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg47Z4xpKF5ptJwDqU4uqloeLBNi8V0j9iZPW0qQbxg17OWPqKYrLplTO8IZkESZitjAmdzeohcAVL0xuttAr6ROQ-slkFBSXf8QanIezfOnYFhKPye_A0_mrsa_dU3E8Oc1KE6D-qcSVY/s1600/real-reach.jpg" height="497" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">image credit: creative commons 2.0 license by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesper/" style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #0063dc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">Jesper Rønn-Jensen</a></td></tr>
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Undergraduates learning to write and research are handicapped by the artificially isolated environment of the traditional classroom. With two billion humans a few keystrokes away, many audiences are there for students to address. The real reach of student research should be those authentic audiences and not just a teacher.<br />
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Students can find, interact with, and know various interested audiences while researching and writing. Peers, enthusiasts, and experts can and do give feedback to students who seek them out. In the process, students get social proof for their ideas that inspires them to advance and complete their work.<br />
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As students formalize their research findings, there is no reason for them not to take their intellectual work to authentic audiences and online communities. This is why I require my students to do more than submit a completed research paper for grading. If they know that they are actually going to submit their work for permanent archiving and access; for formal presentation at a conference, or for publication of some variety; if they know that their work will be circulating beyond the classroom and beyond the present grading period; if they know their research can in fact be a catalyst for ongoing discussion or that it can be content that others will respond to or act upon -- then they will take their own ideas more seriously; they will research better; and they will turn their academic writing into a form of professionalizing.<br />
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But students need to have some idea of where they can take their academic work. This post is meant to provide four concrete suggestions:<br />
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<li>Academic Archives</li>
<li>Conference Presentations</li>
<li>Scholarly Journals</li>
<li>Guest Blogging</li>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">creative commons 2.0 license by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/" style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #0063dc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">blprnt_van</a></td></tr>
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<h2>
1. Academic Archives</h2>
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Students can submit their academic research to an academic archive. Such archives (sometimes called "institutional repositories") collect academic work, add appropriate metadata so that search engines can find it, and then keep this scholarship permanently and publicly accessible. These archives collect traditional, peer-reviewed scholarship that's been published in academic journals. However, they also collect academic work of value that does not get published in that way. This includes student work. Depending on the policy of the repository, students can submit their research papers so that they can be part of the general record of academic work at their institution. In this way, that research can be kept safe, readily referenced, and available to be built upon in the future.</div>
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Here at Brigham Young University, our repository is called the "ScholarsArchive" and it accepts student research -- not only theses or dissertations, but undergraduate work. For example, here is a paper written by one of my former students, Janelle Frossard, on the topic of using graphic novels in secondary schools to teach Shakespeare. She wrote this for a Shakespeare course I taught in 2012.<br />
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To submit something to the ScholarsArchive, follow <a href="http://scholarsarchive.lib.byu.edu/submit.php?" target="_blank">this link</a>. A<a href="http://net.lib.byu.edu/tutorial/scholarsarchive/" target="_blank"> tutorial video</a> is also available.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Student presenters Jessica Lees, Ellis Dyck, and Joshua McKinney<br />
presenting about digital badges at the Mormon Media Studies 2012 Symposium</td></tr>
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2. Conference Presentations</h2>
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Students can formalize their work by publicly presenting it at various kinds of conferences. I have found that even when students are not accepted (or have been accepted but cannot attend), that going through the experience of submitting a proposal "gets them in the game" -- they begin to see it is possible, and not that difficult, to bring one's ideas into larger circulation. Submitting that very first proposal is the hardest of all. </div>
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There are several types of conferences to which students can submit their work.</div>
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<li>Undergraduate conferences</li>
<li>Academic conferences</li>
<li>Online / Virtual conferences</li>
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<u>Undergraduate Conferences</u></div>
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Many undergrad conferences happen each year. Some of these are of a very general nature, and others are specific to a given field or restricted to a given institution or geographical region.</div>
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<li><a href="http://www.cur.org/conferences_and_events/student_events/ncur/" target="_blank"><b>The National Conference on Undergraduate Research</b></a> occurs annually and welcomes undergraduates from all fields and in a variety of formats. The <a href="http://www.cur.org/ncur_2014/" target="_blank">upcoming NCUR conference</a> will take place in Kentucky on April 3-5, 2014, with abstracts due by December 6, 2013. Submissions are peer-reviewed and application is competitive. </li>
<li><b><a href="http://continue.weber.edu/nulc2014/" target="_blank">The National Undergraduate Literature Conference</a> </b>is sponsored by Weber State University in Utah. Their next conference will take place April 3-5, 2014. </li>
<li>Butler University's <b><a href="http://www.butler.edu/undergrad-research-conference/" target="_blank">Undergraduate Research Conference</a></b> is a multidisciplinary national conference that draws 500 students form over 40 colleges annually. Their next conference will take place April 11, 2014 with submissions open through Feb 12, 2014.</li>
<li><a href="http://blogs.haverford.edu/rehumanities/" target="_blank"><b>Re:Humanities: An Undergraduate Symposium on Digital Media</b></a> is sponsored by the <a href="http://tdh.brynmawr.edu/" target="_blank">Tri-Co Digital Humanities</a> (a group from Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, and Swarthmore College "committed to media change in a liberal arts context, discovering and
promoting digital literacy and sophistication, and innovating through
humanities-based inquiry using new technology"). Their upcoming conference will be held at Haverford College, outside of Philadelphia, April 3-4, 2014, with a submission deadline of December 1, 2013. See their <a href="http://blogs.haverford.edu/rehumanities/" target="_blank">call for papers</a> or browse past years' events at their site.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://college.up.edu/english/default.aspx?cid=1454&pid=655" target="_blank">The Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature</a></b> is sponsored by the University of Portland and takes place next on April 5, 2014 (submissions accepted from Dec 1, 2013 - Jan 20, 2014).</li>
<li><b><a href="http://englishsymposium.byu.edu/?page_id=92" target="_blank">The BYU English Symposium</a></b> is an annual undergraduate conference in which BYU students can showcase their work (though there is no restriction for non-BYU presenters). The next symposium will happen March 28, 2014 (with abstracts due Jan 15, 2014). Follow the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/BYUEnglishSociety/" target="_blank">BYU English Society</a> for general updates.</li>
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<u>General Academic Conferences</u></div>
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Undergraduates don't realize that many academic conferences geared to professionals are open to students. Paul Bills, a BYU undergraduate student, dared to submit his paper about Shakespeare and video games for the 2013 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association's meeting in Vancouver, Washington. Any student who thinks they just are not legit enough to play in the big leagues should read about his experience: his <a href="http://teamshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/04/more-than-fun-where-this-gaming-paper.html" target="_blank">proposal experience</a> and then <a href="http://teamahab.blogspot.com/2013/10/presenting-at-rmmla-my-experience.html" target="_blank">his enthusiastic report</a> about the highly successful event. Here's the video of him giving the paper:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/WK2mmajL1DU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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Now, it is possible that some conferences are closed to undergraduates, or that they require a mentor or faculty sponsor. But it is often the case that the organizers of conference are more interested in serving the topic than they are in restricting access, and if someone has good material and approaches the organizers in the right way (as Paul did), it is likely that an undergraduate can find himself or herself being taken very seriously indeed.</div>
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<u>Searching for Academic Conferences</u></div>
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Rather than listing specific academic conferences (of which there are so many), I will give some recommendations for finding them.</div>
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<li><b>Search Google </b>for "Call for papers" and "conference" or "Call for
submissions" and "conference" plus any other topical search terms. For
example, <a href="https://www.google.com/#q=%28%22call+for+papers%22+OR+%22call+for+submissions%22+OR+%22call+for+proposals%22+OR+%22call+for+abstracts%22%29+conference+2014+%22digital+humanities%22" target="_blank">click here</a> to search for calls for papers or calls for submissions related to "digital humanities" in 2014.</li>
<li><b>Search Twitter </b>for "<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=undergraduate%20conference&src=typd" target="_blank">undergraduate conference</a>" or try a hashtag search like #digitalhumanities #conference. Similarly, search <a href="http://topsy.com/" target="_blank">Topsy</a> for recent Twitter mentions of such conferences (Example, a <a href="http://topsy.com/s?q=%22digital%20humanities%22%2Bconference&type=link" target="_blank">search of links to digital humanities conferences</a>)</li>
<li><b>Check the WikiCFP </b>(call for papers wiki) for <a href="http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=literature" target="_blank">conferences related to literature</a> or <a href="http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=humanities" target="_blank">conferences related to the humanities</a> or browse their various <a href="http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/allcat" target="_blank">categories</a> (Also, use their <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/call-for-papers/id335608149?mt=8" target="_blank">iPhone app</a>)</li>
<li><b>Search the <a href="http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/" target="_blank">Penn English Call-for-papers site</a></b>, or browse one its categories. I searched for "digital 2014" <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+2014&domains=call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu&sitesearch=call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu" target="_blank">here</a>.</li>
<li><b>Search or browse the <a href="https://www.h-net.org/announce/group.cgi?type=CFPs" target="_blank">H-net Calls for Papers</a> site</b>. I came up with a list of 30 current conferences that matched "digital 2014" and "call for papers"</li>
<li><b>Search or browse the <a href="http://www.conferencealerts.com/index" target="_blank">Conference Alerts site</a></b> or sign up to get notifications customized to your interests via email. I tried the topics of <a href="http://www.conferencealerts.com/topic-listing?topic=Literature" target="_blank">Literature</a> and <a href="http://www.conferencealerts.com/topic-listing?topic=English" target="_blank">English</a>.</li>
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<u>Online / Virtual Conferences</u></div>
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Undergraduate students have a harder time traveling to academic conferences, and that is one reason to consider presenting at a conference virtually. Doing so would also make you a digital hipster, and who doesn't want that?</div>
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An online or virtual conference doesn't have to be in an immersive virtual world, as pictured here, but it can be! Check out the <a href="http://avalon-project.ning.com/events/call-for-papers-7th-slanguages-annual-symposium-27-29-sept-2013" target="_blank">SLanguages Annual Symposium</a> (going on its 7th year of being a fully virtual conference being held in Second Life. It's focus is on language teaching and learning in virtual worlds. It offers some very innovative, born-digital kinds of scholarly presentations (such as machinima, or a tour of a virtual space). The upcoming conference will take place in Second Life from Feb 28 - March 2, 2014 with a proposal deadline of Jan 10, 2014. The call for papers asks you to submit your avatar name along with your real one!</div>
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EDUCAUSE, a large national organization dedicated to higher education's use of technology, has for many years conducted virtual conferences synchronously with its live national conferences. In its <a href="http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2014/agenda-and-program/call-proposals" target="_blank">recent call for proposals</a> for its Fall, 2014 event, it offers presenters the option of presenting in person or off-site, virtually. The "virtual" part means using Adobe Connect's webinar technology (using a webcam at one's desk computer). Virtual participants are not avatars or in an immersive environment; they are at a computer somewhere, watching sessions through live streaming and in some cases interacting with the presenters as in a webinar format. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://kennedy.byu.edu/conferences/inquiry/journal.php" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4W-vAh9brQn4kWrDoUJjr9jJGg9dqeJRkJJJMdAl0p4bfBQuYYoaiS7V2iwKhKUj7Lti2HCZcXCU3WR2g09ki05OfSErADPNa9C2Jg2z9BiVUp5IZfzxtSxEuYeFtcmsqaiOIE-y20Vc/s1600/inquiry2.jpg" height="396" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">The journal </span><a href="http://kennedy.byu.edu/conferences/inquiry/journal.php" style="font-size: small; text-align: left;" target="_blank">Inquiry</a><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;"> is an outlet for undergraduate researchers at BYU doing field studies and cross-cultural work.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h2>
3. Scholarly Journals</h2>
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Like academic conferences, scholarly journals are open to student work either via dedicated undergraduate outlets (some local or regional; others national or international); or via traditional scholarly journals (which may require a mentor or co-author). I will highlight examples of all of these, emphasizing journals that are either multidisciplinary, or that focus on the humanities or on digital culture:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Local or regional journals may serve a specific institution, but these are often willing to consider submissions from outsiders. One such journal is <i><a href="https://journals.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/criterion" target="_blank">Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism</a>, </i>hosted by BYU.<i> </i>Its <a href="https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/criterion/index" target="_blank">current call for papers</a> requests manuscripts by January 17, 2014.</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
National or international undergraduate journals: </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.studentpulse.com/" target="_blank">Student Pulse: The International Student Journal</a> is "an online open-access academic journal focused on publishing the
work of university students from around the world in a wide range of
academic disciplines." <a href="http://www.studentpulse.com/submissions" target="_blank">Submissions</a> are ongoing.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.agorajournal.org/" target="_blank">Agora</a></i> is a national journal of undergraduate academic writing whose aim is to integrate classical ideas and issues with contemporary ones. This is an online publication of Lynchburg College with a submission cycle ending December 15th annually.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.digitalamerica.org/" target="_blank"><i>Digital America</i></a> is a new online journal whose philosophy aligns with the digital emphasis of this blog and its accompanying class: "We are a new endeavor interested in pushing the boundaries of online
publishing. We are soliciting critical essays, film, artwork, design,
and process pieces that question, analyze, and/or hack the tools of
digital culture....We believe that Millennials have a unique perspective as they engage
digital culture socially, professionally, creatively, and theoretically.
The tools of digitization and the subsequent culture erupting from
those tools are fueled by young thinkers and creators, and many of their
decisions will impact all of our lives." See their <a href="http://www.digitalamerica.org/submit/" target="_blank">submission guidelines</a>.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.lvc.edu/vhr/index.html" target="_blank">The Valley Humanities Review</a></i>, from Lebanon Valley College, is a peer-reviewed online journal "dedicated to the publication of excellent undergraduate research in the
fields of the humanities. We believe that undergraduates are capable of
exemplary research, so our goal is to showcase the best research in the
humanities going on at colleges across the globe." See their <a href="http://www.lvc.edu/vhr/guidelines.html" target="_blank">submission guidelines</a>. They accept submissions through December 15 annually.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://case.edu/discussions/submissions.html" target="_blank">Discussions</a></i>, from Case Western Reserve University, "accepts research papers written by current
undergraduate students from accredited colleges and universities around
the globe." Research can be on any topic.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.elon.edu/e-web/academics/communications/research/about.xhtml" target="_blank"><i>Elon Journal</i></a>, an attractively produced journal published by The School of Communications at Elon University, North Carolina, has a focus "on undergraduate research in journalism, media and communications." A unique feature is having a short video of each student author introducing and explaining his or her research.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Students should also consult this aggregator, <a href="http://www.webguru.neu.edu/" target="_blank">the WebGURU Guide for Undergraduate Research</a>, for further resources.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Regarding more general scholarly journals, one may search for these following the same pattern described above for searching for conferences. What follows is a short list of a few general journals that cater to the digital humanities:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><i><a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/" target="_blank">Digital Humanities Quarterly</a></i> is an "open-access,
peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities." This journal is open both to "text-centric" and "media-centric" <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/announcements/index.html#submissions" target="_blank">submissions</a>.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/" target="_blank">Literary and Linguistic Computing</a></i> is "an international journal which publishes material on all aspects of
computing and information technology applied to literature and language
research and teaching. Papers include results of research projects,
description and evaluation of techniques and methodologies, and reports
on work in progress." </li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies" target="_blank">Digital Studies / Le champ numérique</a></i> "invites contributions relating to work carried out in the digital humanities, broadly construed." <a href="http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/about/submissions" target="_blank">Submission guidelines</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/" target="_blank"><i>Digital Humanities Now</i></a><br />This is not a journal, but serves as the <a href="http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/about/" target="_blank">gateway for the Journal of Digital Humanities as described here</a>. Editors select digital humanities content to be featured on the Digital Humanities Now website, which in turn qualifies work to be considered for further review in the <i>Journal of Digital Humanities. </i>If you launch a DH project, <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/submit-your-work/" target="_blank">submit your information to DH Now</a> for possible inclusion in the site or submission to the journal. (You should have your own blog or site from which to do this, and should not simply enter the URL of a given post or a group blog).</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/medical-humanities-and-literary-medicine-guest-post-by-brandy-schillace/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ1SvNEoenm-3Ir4E45k3KzzkxEaAPdKZUHqASg2KT1ghkTiY0oXnYn2qFqwif4cuGHOQ95PSjbEu8W_yBX7SRP9BMGpZ_t10KzKKx51DcKfsGStwfnMrT3mYCjWoQQgkUlPRA1N77KzY/s1600/guest-blogging.jpg" height="474" width="640" /></a></div>
<h2>
4. Guest Blogging</h2>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<u>Why Guest Blog?</u></div>
<div>
Writing a guest blog post as a student may be less intimidating than submitting something for formal presentation or publication. It might also be published sooner. Plus, blog posts have the advantage of being connected (often) with online communities. In short, guest posting is a way of bootstrapping one's reputation by getting one's intellectual work broader exposure than one can get through one's personal blog.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>What about Peer Review?</u></div>
<div>
Blogs actually vary considerably on whether or how submitted content is peer reviewed. There may be a less formal layer of review by volunteer editors (as is the case with <i>Digital Humanities Now</i> blog, mentioned above). Or, there may be an editor or editorial board. So, depending on the case, a blog may function a lot more like a casual blog ("You've got some content for me? Great!") or more like an academic journal ("Let's get some good eyeballs on this before it hits the pixels"). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In general, though, blogs are more likely to go through informal levels of review and even active dialogue with an editor. Unlike a formal publication (where it's usually a thumbs up or a thumbs down after a long wait), with a blog post you might get a sign of interest immediately from an editor, who might help you shape your content to get it acceptable and posted soon. This is nicely exemplified in by the blog <i><a href="http://soundstudiesblog.com/sound-studies-blog/mission/" target="_blank">Sound Out!</a></i>, a blog "following an open, developmental model fostered by digital humanities, in which editors and advisors are known to our writers, and provide several rounds of feedback, commentary, and collaboration before publication."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>Finding Appropriate Blogs</u></div>
<div>
Students wishing to guest post should not select blogs written by undergraduates (though many grad students keep very substantial blogs and could be considered). The safest bet are blogs affiliated with some kind of academic institution, organization, or journal, though there are often star academic bloggers (like <a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/" target="_blank">danah boyd</a>) or reputable group blogs (such as <a href="http://www.motleyvision.org/" target="_blank"><i>A Motley Vision: Mormon Literature and Culture</i></a>) without such affiliations. In most cases, one would shy away from commercially-oriented blogs. However, they can be appropriate if they clearly service the education sector and are a genuine destination point for their niche.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/guest-blog-post/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1T-bpSS9Hl8mIkgsKjeIMbq0a94MoeGPJ-8nd87ebvTyfi3voYVr_uraFsYL1la6yAvSlD0feZu4T_J1iHytnRRZLDF9xadTfP4nMAS9tNHMBNkl0E4qhq6iu-naQbjXLCB5fo0SO-P4/s1600/no-sweat-sh2.png" height="316" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Although a commercial website, <a href="http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/" target="_blank">No Sweat Shakespeare</a> has curated substantial<br />
content and become a community hub for educators and students studying Shakespeare</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
In evaluating a prospective blog, a student should look for ones that are established--as evidenced by the presence of a decent history of posts reflecting many months or years of serious treatment of a topic; and often indicated by the presence of solid curated resources embedded within or linked to from the blog. Another good sign is if the blog is connected to an online community or some kind of organization that uses that blog as part of maintaining its community.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
While the most obvious thing to do is to search for blogs that have calls for guest bloggers (in the ways modeled above for searching conferences and publications), you might have luck writing for a blog that never extended an invitation. It is often the case that blog owners or editors will consider guest posts, provided that the content genuinely serves the purpose and audience for that blog. In other words, <i>it doesn't hurt to ask someone who runs a blog whether or not they would consider a guest post</i> -- especially if you've done your homework and made sure that you're offering content that clearly aligns with that blog's content and tone.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>Writing Appropriately for an Academic Blog</u></div>
<div>
Obviously if one is serious about guest posting on someone's academic blog, one ought to read and study the blog in order to adjust one's length, tone, use of media, etc. to what's customary for that blog. That said, there are some good general guidelines for the rhetorical approach to be used in an academic blog post. These ideas have been summarized in standards offered by Dan Cohen in "<a href="http://www.dancohen.org/2012/05/24/the-blessay/" target="_blank">The Blessay</a>" (slightly abbreviated here):</div>
<ol>
<li>Mid-length: more ambitious than a blog post, less comprehensive than an academic article. Around 1,000-3,000 words.</li>
<li>Informed by academic knowledge and analysis, but doesn’t rub your nose in it.</li>
<li>Uses the apparatus of the web more than the apparatus of the journal, e.g., links rather than footnotes. Where helpful, uses supplementary evidence from images, audio, and video—elements that are often missing or flattened in print.</li>
<li>Expresses expertise but also curiosity. Conclusive but also suggestive.</li>
<li>Written for both specialists and an intelligent general audience. Avoids academic jargon—not to be populist, but rather out of a feeling that avoiding jargon is part of writing well.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Students who have already been blogging may have met most of these criteria, though they will of course need to check their writing to be sure they are addressing the new audience, and not a classroom one.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Some examples of guest blogging:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Brandy Schillace, "<a href="http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/medical-humanities-and-literary-medicine-guest-post-by-brandy-schillace/">Medical Humanities and Literary Medicine: Guest Post by Brandy Schillace</a>" on <i><a href="http://medicalhumanities.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Centre for Medical Humanities Blog</a></i>.<br />Schillace exemplifies the very qualities Dan Cohen calls for. Her length is not excessive, there is a more personal tone to the essay, but she backs up what she says with a modest number of academic sources. She also links out to appropriate sources within the essay. This is a solid, informed guest post.</li>
<li>Jacob Heil, "<a href="http://idhmc.tamu.edu/blog/2012/10/08/the-early-modernists-dh/" target="_blank">The Early Modernist's DH</a>" guest post on <a href="http://idhmc.tamu.edu/" target="_blank"><i>IDHMC: Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture </i></a>(Texas A&M). This guest post uses laudable layout, with appropriate hyperlinks, nicely labeled sections, and embedded images.</li>
<li>Amy Ferrer, <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/guest-blogger-amy-ferrer/" target="_blank">series of guests posts</a> on <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/" target="_blank"><i>Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog</i></a>. This is a solo academic blog from University of Chicago professor Brian Leiter, who apparently invites guest bloggers to post for a week on his blog. This is a good example of a topical blog with a single academic sponsor but which accommodates a variety of different writing styles and lengths.</li>
<li>Matt Kubus, "<a href="http://bloggingshakespeare.com/the-isc-a-students-perspective" target="_blank">The ISC: A Student’s Perspective</a>" on <a href="http://bloggingshakespeare.com/" target="_blank"><i>Blogging Shakespeare</i></a> (The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). This student was enlisted to report on a Shakespeare conference, and included an interesting video at the bottom of his guest post.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
A few open calls for guest bloggers:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blogs.elon.edu/purm/call-for-guest-bloggers/" target="_blank">Call for Guest Bloggers</a> - <i>PURM: Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring</i> (asking for a dozen guest posts over the course of a year).</li>
<li><i>Sounding Out!</i> call for guest posts: "<a href="http://soundstudiesblog.com/submit-to-so/to-blog-2/" target="_blank">So you want to be a <i>Sounding Out!</i> Guest Writer?</a>" (asking for those interested only in the topic of sound, but offering lots of specific advice and help)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/guest-blog-post/" target="_blank"><i>No Sweat Shakespeare</i></a> (asking for posts only about Shakespeare and closely related topics).</li>
<li><a href="http://interestingliterature.com/get-involved/" target="_blank">Interesting Literature: A Library of Literary Interestingness</a> "We’re now seeking academics, scholars, and bloggers to contribute to our new ‘guest blog’ section. Is this you? Can you distill the interestingness of your research into a short piece of c. 500-1,000 words, or is there a text or writer you want to wax interesting about? If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact our website’s creator at <a href="mailto:O.M.Tearle@lboro.ac.uk">O.M.Tearle@lboro.ac.uk</a>."</li>
<li><a href="http://learnegg.com/submit/" target="_blank">LearnEgg: Global Education Coverage</a>. "Want to share your education ideas, news, products, and opinions with the world? We’re building an online education community and this is your chance to reach a growing audience of educators, innovators, and many others. Just use the form below and we’ll review your post for potential publication" (See also a similar call for posts on <a href="http://edubloggery.com/submit/" target="_blank">EduBloggery</a>).</li>
</ul>
<div>
<u>Other possibilities</u></div>
<div>
The reach of student research is being extended by the diversity of media through which academic work can be channeled, and these are not limited to traditional formats and publications, or even to blogging. Students might formalize their academic research in a number of ways. Past students of mine have furthered the reach of their research by doing the following:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>producing an <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com/2010/12/watch-digital-revolution.html" target="_blank">event</a></span> (live and simulcast over the internet via a service like Justin.TV)</li>
<li>conducting a <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/notes-for-webinar-literature-and.html" target="_blank">webinar</a></span> (live or recorded, with fellow students or invited guests)</li>
<li>creating an <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/p/ebook.html" target="_blank">ebook</a></span></li>
<li>curating an academic <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://backpack2.wikispaces.com/" target="_blank">wiki</a></span> </li>
<li>creating <span style="font-size: large;">a <a href="http://vimeo.com/38545151" target="_blank">film adaptation</a> </span>of an essay</li>
<li>curating <span style="font-size: large;">a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2k1qvga4Ak&list=PLX335oPOd4ReKNClGvPoXPmv52tMo9THv" target="_blank">playlist of videos</a></span>, either expository or creative, to get one's academic ideas communicated to new audiences </li>
</ul>
<div>
The possibilities for teaching media are especially rich. One could also try:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>making a <span style="font-size: large;">mini-course</span> and publishing this on YouTube or a teaching platform like <a href="http://udemy.com/" target="_blank">Udemy</a></li>
<li>creating and sharing <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.oercommons.org/" target="_blank">open educational resources</a></span>, such as a teaching module contributed to Rice's <a href="http://cnx.org/" target="_blank">Connexions</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<u>It works!</u></div>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I realize this post has gotten long, and all the detail may actually seem to intimidate students rather than give them hope that they could succeed. So I thought I'd close with a brief testimonial from a student who did nothing more than send a query letter to a blog. This isn't that hard. Once students have done the heavy lifting of some serious research and writing, there's a world of ways to further the reach of their work.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://teamshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/03/guys-potential-venue-for-papers.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV-w2v5ygzDThhvI762YumJDULyIUw8edlbIpwv0jJUKyRSUcfNstAtt2Z4Tdizpp83TgvhtaLR5RtiVlCE2EK2MLNB8BQEtzJrtrH_VIrZmF59tB8m4f7WEbSk_IjX3ayMcJhj6u8XTo/s1600/it-works.png" height="312" width="640" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-1099008233329364022013-11-13T10:55:00.005-08:002013-11-13T10:55:52.753-08:00The Moby Dick Model for Deeper Blogging<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Cmzh0lZRAeDZKVtP8BWQFQ_t00NMyQNPEyV7rWD9GB6IerMgbhtfXTEUEAw5vZ5IHIjS7zfrYmu1tITB2o5UYreRYT1FSBSk70qtaoX-H7D9uEGtBcMh7js3wiOeKwWUOqHp2fjuZ74/s1600/moby_dick_by_palmovish-d3bn7ed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Cmzh0lZRAeDZKVtP8BWQFQ_t00NMyQNPEyV7rWD9GB6IerMgbhtfXTEUEAw5vZ5IHIjS7zfrYmu1tITB2o5UYreRYT1FSBSk70qtaoX-H7D9uEGtBcMh7js3wiOeKwWUOqHp2fjuZ74/s400/moby_dick_by_palmovish-d3bn7ed.jpg" width="282" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by Palmovish from <a href="http://palmovish.deviantart.com/art/Moby-Dick-200956981" target="_blank">DeviantArt</a><br />(creative commons license 3.0)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When blogging, getting beyond the superficial to the substantial takes conscious effort. After all, as a casual and social medium, a blog can trap us in the tidepools of everyday novelties and low-level commentary. <div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But a blog can be used to sound a subject, to go deep. Derrick Clements has already used <i>Moby Dick</i> as a model for better engagement of topics in his "<a href="http://teamqueequeg.blogspot.com/2013/10/going-deep-in-digital-culture.html" target="_blank">Going Deep in Digital Culture</a>" post. He says Melville's novel is an example of "the type of profound commitment and thoroughness to a subject that twenty-first-century bloggers may employ" and that "just as Moby Dick stands as a testament to the human ability to commit to a single subject for more than a few minutes, blogs can, if one so chooses, be a great way to dive deep – as long as community-minded creators can budget their attention..."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Profound commitment to subject via blogging? Thoroughness? Can these really go together with blogging? Yes they can, but not usually without some conscious effort. Earlier I discussed <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-three-phases-of-academic-blogging.html" target="_blank">three phases of academic blogging</a>. A lot of the magic happens in that second stage where one shows diligence and discipline in honing a topic. One can move from the superficial to the substantial (to paraphrase my prior post) by including these four things:</div>
<ol>
<li>Analysis of primary texts</li>
<li>Use of secondary texts</li>
<li>Curation of content </li>
<li>Social proof</li>
</ol>
<div>
I would like to use the novel, <i>Moby Dick</i>, to teach each of these four components, on the way to asking my students to follow this algorithm for deepened blogging.<a name='more'></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>1. Ishmael Analyzes Primary Texts</u></div>
<div>
Students of literature are expected to have first-hand experiences with the works they are studying. Real literary critics do not rely exclusively or even principally on secondary texts -- analysis and commentary by others. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ishmael models this very sort of wrestling with a primary text in Chapter 3, "The Spouter Inn." There, he discusses a large oil painting in that inn which requires "diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it" to make sense of. At first, the "<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">unaccountable masses of shades and shadows" suggest "chaos bewitched." This was a working interpretation, a first pass at understanding the painting in question. And </span>"by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings" he decides this is not a bad interpretation.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But Ishmael is not content with a first pass. He looks closer, and knows that he can't draw his conclusions without taking into account the "black mass" centered in the picture. He gives a vivid description of it, which leads to further speculations -- this might be a midnight gale, a depiction of the four primal elements, a blasted heath, some winter scene. At last he decides this is a painting of a whale being impaled on the broken masts of a wrecked ship. And while he appropriately acknowledges input from "the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject," he sets this interpretation forth as "a final theory of my own."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Whether we are analyzing a literary text or a digital phenomenon, we must show ourselves actively analyzing and interpreting. But this goes beyond merely expressing a personal point of view or responding with more emotion than thought -- an all too common component of contemporary blogging. This isn't Ishmael freaking out about Queequeg's appearance. No, in this chapter we see Ishmael studying, looking carefully and repeatedly, and then offering interpretations backed up by reference to specific features of the painting he examined.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ishmael demonstrates this same careful, personal analysis of his topic within chapters that reflect his own experience with and reasoned reflections about various aspects of whales or whaling, such as in Chapter 86, "The Tail" or Chapter 92, "Ambergris" or the more famous chapter showing off Ishmael's interpretive prowess, Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale." Even when Ishmael fails to arrive at secure interpretations, what is always clear is that we are experiencing Ishmael's close reading of the phenomena, and this carries with it a clarity and authority of its own.</div>
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<div>
<u>2. Captain Ahab Consults Secondary Texts</u></div>
<div>
Setting aside the inherent moral problems in Ahab's quest, let's admire the captain as someone who accomplished his task -- of finding, if not defeating, Moby Dick. He did this by being an able analyst, bringing to bear not only his own experience but drawing upon that of others. Ahab didn't keep a captain's blog, but through Ishmael we see him as a careful and conscientious student who gathered and attended to the relevant secondary materials in his quest. </div>
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<div>
In chapter 44, “The Chart,” Captain Ahab is shown pondering over ocean maps. “Almost every </div>
<div>
night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies.” He surveyed the pertinent landscape (the oceans) and consulted available information (the maps) and engaged these sources through annotation.</div>
<div>
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<div>
In blogging on a certain topic, I might ask myself whether I have analyzed the pertinent landscapes of my topic or consulted the available "maps" that have charted the way. <i>Am I being blown by every wind on this topic, or am I 'threading the maze of currents and eddies' to bring some discipline and coherence to my topic? </i></div>
<div>
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<div>
If I begin to get serious about a topic, that seriousness shows up in how I have been willing to find, consult, quote, and refer to the secondary texts that complement my personal analysis.</div>
<div>
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<div>
<u>3. Ishmael Curates</u></div>
</div>
<div>
There comes a point when you aren't taking a topic seriously until you are curating content about it -- gathering and organizing the relevant material in order to make sense of it. One can view the entirety of Moby Dick as Ishmael's curation of whaling lore, but there are component sections that manifest curation more clearly.</div>
<div>
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<div>
In the "Extracts" section that begins the novel, Ishmael (or perhaps more accurately, Melville) has culled a wide variety of sources for quotations about whaling. Whatever we might think of this section in terms of the story (a tough way to get people interested), there is an authority that accrues to the writer or the narrator by manifesting so many pertinent passages. Consider what this did to Ishmael / Melville in constructing the larger tale. That's right, in the act of curating content, the choices made to include something -- and where and how to do so -- are interpretive acts that pave the way for interpretations to follow.</div>
<div>
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<div>
That kind of intelligent organizing of relevant content is the main activity of Chapter 32, "Cetology." There, Ishmael analyzes “what the best and latest authorities have laid down” about whales in an effort to create “some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera." This takes things a step further than the Extracts section, which has no clear ordering principle. Ishmael applies the categories of book formats to make sense of whale species, identifying the “folio” whale, the “octavo” whale, the <br />“dudecimo” whale, etc. Ultimately this classification system breaks down -- "Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” he complains. But this is not wasted effort. New knowledge is acquired at the very points at which existing schema prove inadequate. In short, curation -- upon almost any principle -- not only makes sources easier to draw upon, but conclusions easier to draw. Curation is interpretation.</div>
<div>
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<div>
With online writing and digital tools, curation is a pleasurable and purposeful activity. I might ask myself if I have curated the appropriate content for the topic I'm studying, or if I have used the appropriate curating tool. At the very least, one should gather textual sources and scholarly authorities. But curation can include the organization of images, videos, animations, bookmarks, social media posts, etc. One might even curate people, organizing a network of specialists or interested parties who care about the topic.</div>
<div>
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<div>
<u>4. Ahab Seeks Social Proof</u></div>
<div>
Now, Ahab had some social issues. One might even call him anti-social. I'm not calling Ahab a paragon of personal relationships, nor would I call him a model leader. But if we can look past the devil in the dude, we can see how well Ahab worked his social network to get what he was after. Not sure I would friend him on Facebook if I had the chance, but Ahab knew the power of people to help him reach his goal. Above, I praised Ahab as a diligent student who used others' secondary texts to help him. But Ahab did not merely consult the writings or records of others; he directly communicated with others who could help him. In today's parlance, Ahab used a PLN (a personal or a professional learning network). There was actionable knowledge to be tapped from within the community of fellow whalers, and tap it he did.</div>
<div>
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<div>
Whenever the <i>Pequod</i> encounter another ship, Ahab suddenly became very social (in a limited but effective way). In encountering the <i>Albatross</i> in Chapter 52: "Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?" shouts Ahab. When encountering the <i>Jeroboam</i> in Chapter 71: "'Hast thou seen the White Whale?' demanded Ahab." In Chapter 100, it's a ship from London that Ahab addresses in the same vein: "Ship ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?" And again with the ship <i>Bachelor</i> in Chapter 115: "Hast seen the White Whale?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
You start to get the idea that Ahab has a singular purpose, and it has to do with finding this white whale. Each ship that Ahab encountered gave him either positive or negative knowledge about his quest, and he used this to adjust his plans. There is an authority to the present, lived experience of people who are involved in comparable if not identical occupations. Ahab worked his social network, and he got social proof for his quest. At last, in Chapter 128, when <i>The Pequod</i> meets the Rachel, Ahab gets the positive reply he sought.</div>
<div>
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<div>
Ahab succeeds in using his network to crowdsource for information, but he doesn't follow up so well in acting upon the feedback he receives. When in Chapter 131 he asks <i>The Delight</i> about their encounter with Moby Dick, he is told "the harpoon is not yet forged that will [kill the white whale]." This statement is punctuated by the corpse of a sailor from <i>The Delight</i>, killed in the pursuit of Moby Dick, dropping into the water during their conversation. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One result of making clear what you are looking for by communicating this frequently to your social network is that others start to carry forward your quest for you. In Chapter 91, when the <i>Pequod</i> meets the <i>Rose-Bud</i>, it is not Ahab who asks them about the white whale; it is Stubb. Now, one might say he was under orders or that he had been formally deputized to continue Ahab's quest. But the fact of the matter is that it is human nature to want to assist others in finding what they clearly wish to find. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In today's world of highly socialized media, where sharing is common, we are constantly forwarding to others others' interests and quests. This may be as formal as inviting someone to contribute to your friend's Kickstarter campaign. But it can be as casual, and as influential, as forwarding to someone the link to a document or article that one knows pertains to that person's line of inquiry. This is something that I've written more about in a post called "<a href="http://teamshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-altruistic-scholar.html" target="_blank">The Altruistic Scholar</a>."</div>
<div>
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<div>
Bloggers can blog in isolation from the rest of the world, or in isolation from the many relevant people and communities who might care about their ideas if they knew of them. In deepening the academic quality of our blogging, we need to actively seek out communities of interest and connect with individual enthusiasts and experts (beyond just our peers). (See my prior posts about <a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/ignite-your-ideas-with-social-proof.html" target="_blank">social proof</a>).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When we alert others to our quest, and when we show that we've done the kind of homework that gives our quest some weight and authority -- other people are likely to assist us in our own quests -- which, hopefully, will be less fatal and more productive than Ahab's.</div>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-27758440037764644832013-11-11T20:59:00.003-08:002013-11-11T20:59:55.924-08:00Digitally Mediating Literary Texts<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVSZ0Q9IRDR9Ec4J31M4IrPM4QahX1ceVQf9e9TkpLLL3vmyvKkvAWiDppVNypNq_Dk18QQwNwC7s1Lw_tMOOsB05ATaHcTnGJGH7iMyduJhcT3H7_-Fbg0d0OrLHrXU6Atg7Z_XAo0qw/s1600/gifpal-20131108090946.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVSZ0Q9IRDR9Ec4J31M4IrPM4QahX1ceVQf9e9TkpLLL3vmyvKkvAWiDppVNypNq_Dk18QQwNwC7s1Lw_tMOOsB05ATaHcTnGJGH7iMyduJhcT3H7_-Fbg0d0OrLHrXU6Atg7Z_XAo0qw/s1600/gifpal-20131108090946.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">adapted from <a href="http://ghiro3.deviantart.com/art/Magic-Book-GDM-Theme-80449457" target="_blank">gHiRo3</a>, DeviantArt<br />
(creative commons 3.0 license)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
One of the great changes to literary study in the digital age is the ability to do things with texts previously not possible, or possible only to few. While literature's new digital life has entailed some disorder, it has has generally proven an enormous benefit, expanding the reach and role of literature as never before: providing <u>access to and exposure of literary texts</u> otherwise unknown or unavailable; adding a variety of <u>aids for interpreting and exploring texts</u>; opening <u>new methods and theories of analysis</u>; putting literature to new <u>creative and educational uses</u>; and generally giving new life to old texts. By multiplying the media through which texts are experienced, it has benefited both the creators and consumers of literary works.<br />
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What can be learned by playing with literary texts through various new media? Plenty. Using <i>Moby Dick</i> as a test case, I'd like my students to explore various ways of mediating literature digitally. As they do so, I want them to pay attention to how these electronic ways of dealing with literary texts open up the texts to new audiences, new meanings, and new uses. I hope that they will see that meaningful mediations do not require highly sophisticated tools in every case.<br />
<a name='more'></a><u>Directions</u>:<br />
<ol>
<li>Review the various ways to digitally mediate literature that are explained below. </li>
<li>Select one of these methods and try it out with a section of <i>Moby Dick </i>(or explore another way not listed here).</li>
<li>Report on these efforts in a blog post, being sure to embed or link to whatever it is that you experimented with.</li>
<li>Look at the blog posts of two or three other students reporting on their efforts and comment on these.</li>
</ol>
<u><span style="font-size: x-small;">Text Source and Copyright Concerns</span></u><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">An important parameter for digitally mediating literature is its copyrighted status. For works that are in copyright or which do not have a creative commons license allowing for reuse and modification, there are only a few things that one can do under fair use (such as quoting from a copyrighted work for the purpose of a review). However, texts that are in the public domain, such as <i>Moby Dick</i>, can be dealt with in unlimited ways.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">For our purposes, we can use the <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2701/pg2701.txt" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg electronic text</a> of <i>Moby Dick</i>. According to the <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_License" target="_blank">license</a> for that project, Project Gutenberg books that are in the public domain can be used in any way one wishes, provided that all references to Project Gutenberg in their electronic text are stripped away.</span><br />
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<u>1. Search the Text</u><br />
This sounds so elementary, but that is part of my point: we can open up literature in fresh and important ways through some very basic digital methods. Using the plain vanilla text of Moby Dick, try a few search terms using Cntrl-F on your computer. It doesn't take long to start eliciting some starting points for serious analysis and arguments.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmxh0JJ4UeHLNvGKgPoul6j7eUIrGE4S-2QJDwD6LMlLafnYFA1h4God5HKpE4ojRoLGpNGXQy4KbltbEFmKNfD8gUHm0AIY__N5MNvcJafFqknoF8v6xEy8btVVtdzDQtMT5P89pSmk/s1600/searchMD1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmxh0JJ4UeHLNvGKgPoul6j7eUIrGE4S-2QJDwD6LMlLafnYFA1h4God5HKpE4ojRoLGpNGXQy4KbltbEFmKNfD8gUHm0AIY__N5MNvcJafFqknoF8v6xEy8btVVtdzDQtMT5P89pSmk/s400/searchMD1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In this case, I searched for "man " (404 instances) and then "woman" (10 instances). How much reference is there to females in Moby Dick? I began to wonder. "Girl"= 17 instances; "lady"= 16 instances; "mother = 12 instances"; "wife"= 13 instances; "aunt" = 10 instances. The possessive pronoun "her" = 240 instances (vs. "his"= 2124 instances). Can you see where this is going? If I started through the various instances I could also find patterns about gender in the text that are very informative.<br />
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Through a simple search of the etext I might also be able to draw some interesting conclusions based upon the location within the text where certain terms occur, or upon the presence or absence of certain terms. For example, when I searched "light" (282 instances), the visual pattern on the right indicated to me a steady use of the term across the novel, with some glaring omissions at certain chapters, such as Chapter 18 ("His Mark"); Chapter 45 ("The Affidavit"). What could this mean?<br />
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Searches of electronic texts can also be done within ebook versions of a text. Simply by how those search results appear, this can bring to mind other issues. When I searched "woman" via my Kindle app on my iPad, I noticed a pattern of invoking stereotypes about women. I could look through all of the words referencing women listed above and see if my hypothesis bears out.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy5S7kTpuBG9aFVzDKJhMyNZMkhvGMOOt83YCscCY7PXYaN_a_C7DXY1suId2bhgX3lWu1FEcSDBZqFjwa6mRI6uNxdLeVWC7EjQ-_1G7TxQ_XIyc-4UGCNyjPWPo3lrwGKDKz9PyfzN4/s1600/md-2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy5S7kTpuBG9aFVzDKJhMyNZMkhvGMOOt83YCscCY7PXYaN_a_C7DXY1suId2bhgX3lWu1FEcSDBZqFjwa6mRI6uNxdLeVWC7EjQ-_1G7TxQ_XIyc-4UGCNyjPWPo3lrwGKDKz9PyfzN4/s400/md-2b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<u>2. Wordcrunch the Text</u><br />
A more sophisticated kind of search and analysis of a literary text can be done through WordCruncher software. This free tool for Windows machines (developed at Brigham Young University) allows one to input any text and generate an array of interesting reports, such as<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>vocabulary dispersion (visual overview of each word's occurrence patters)</li>
<li>vocabulary frequency distribution (frequency counts for words across an entire work or any section of it).</li>
<li>neighborhood report (lists of words that collocate with a word or a phrase; families of words)</li>
</ul>
<div>
While I have not been able to download and use this tool (unavailable for Mac), I did use this tool years ago and was dumbfounded at what it could reveal about texts--especially user-provided texts. You can try this with a public domain literary work, or (if in digital form) you could upload your own journal or creative writing and wordcrunch away!</div>
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<u>3. Reformat the Text</u><br />
Take a section of <i>Moby Dick</i> and format this in a new way, either in imitation of a traditional book format, or in a way that relies upon electronic form. This can be done with a word processor or with any tool that allows the manipulation of text. The output could be an electronic text document, a wiki, an ebook, a presentation, a graphic image -- anything that takes the original text and plays with it in electronic form.<br />
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One reason for reformatting a text is to make its inherent structure more visible. For example, Mary Shelley's novel, <i>Frankenstein</i>, is structured as a frame story. A sea captain discovers Dr. Frankenstein near the North Pole and reports the doctor's incredible account, which includes other first-person accounts by narrators such as the monster. It can get confusing. Each narrator could be indicated by a different font or color in order to keep them straight. A series of indents could also signal which level of narration one was currently reading.<br />
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In Milton's Paradise Lost, there is an inherent dramatic structure to many sections. In Book II of the work, the different devils debate what hell's inhabitants should do next. One might add the speaker's name next to his speech, reconfiguring the poem as a theatrical script.<br />
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When Grant Hardy created a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Book-Mormon-Grant-Hardy-ebook/dp/B009RC21RM/" target="_blank"><i>Reader's Edition of the Book of Mormon</i></a>, he recast many passages into poetry-- such as the quotations from Isaiah.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Book-Mormon-Grant-Hardy-ebook/dp/B009RC21RM/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDX0AUtb6r3zJmGj5gnk2ltE-uChiFe5MV8L57s6Z1gPetoIqYc64wqD4aaJ8Fb4KRb-FxizukJi4acVtGCV7NE7OxEf85UZjID5jq30oXDhEkwZhgq_lF6TFNfQFJs9_jT24VwEG0tXQ/s400/hardy-isaiah.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Grant Hardy's <i>Reader's Edition of the Book of Mormon</i><br />
reformatted poetical passages as poetry</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The rhythms and images when viewed as poetical structures are understood differently (and perhaps more clearly) than if those poetical traits are effaced when the poetry is homogenized with the prose.<br />
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Hardy also inserted various subheadings to clarify logical sections of the Book of Mormon (which do not always coincide with the chapter and verse divisions that are made for reference purposes). Subheadings are a useful way to guide readers through a long or difficult text.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTwVQi7_2zqCpeNRqW1lT_pH7IPE2sDhkOGd8BU5DRbMEAM4jYeOz9wIg7-e05gx20wzUvqnlw0KBc6gUxNmKXzED9mxh7LFRFnRBAu9huPzvMCKzkHsD8pqtAZ8GgGSA_Xde1YK3Zd3M/s1600/zenos.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTwVQi7_2zqCpeNRqW1lT_pH7IPE2sDhkOGd8BU5DRbMEAM4jYeOz9wIg7-e05gx20wzUvqnlw0KBc6gUxNmKXzED9mxh7LFRFnRBAu9huPzvMCKzkHsD8pqtAZ8GgGSA_Xde1YK3Zd3M/s400/zenos.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Subheadings added to a text by an editor</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<u>4. Add Hypertext</u><br />
HTML is a simple way of formatting texts for the web, and can bring to a literary text the advantages of a hypertext arrangement if links are inserted. Project Gutenberg usually provides a very simple HTML version of its free texts, such as this <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22120/22120-h/22120-h.htm" target="_blank">hypertext version of Chaucer's <i>Canterbury Tales</i></a>. The table of contents is linked to the various chapters or sections of the work. More sophisticated uses of HTML can be applied to literary texts, such as in the <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_7/index.shtml" target="_blank">Dartmouth online edition of Milton's works</a>. There, scholarly notes are linked to from words within the text, appearing in a separate frame below the main text devoted to those notes:<br />
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<a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_7/index.shtml" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lI3kuR2P-L11YfBNQrOrr1RI9DjYPvIHEeKolBla6WdZv6nKlOaVEo0mFLwiLstXkx0mZRG-u0PKIyDP3mfJlkP9sTpCiUu8hK-BsaS9RpHFlP_PdRX7vz7uHiZqb1nDgTzDV6aNA3w/s400/dartmouth.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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One can create a simple hypertext document within Google Docs using the bookmark feature (for destination text, such as notes at the end of a document) and then linking to a bookmark from highlighted text. Here is a <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z-wOurjK7QEKdci5HONvlkohPeVeZQ6SbhzHfnbfgBU/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">template</a> to use if you wish to do that. The same kind of thing can be done with a wiki format, using <a href="http://sites.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Sites</a> or a comparable service.<br />
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<u>5. Remix the Text</u><br />
In the spirit of open content and remix culture, one could take the text of <i>Moby Dick</i> and revise it, reduce it, or adapt it however one wanted. What if chapters were combined or reordered? What if it were redone as a series of tweets? Marc Olivier has done with <i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (See his <i><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/dangerous-tweets/id678085690?mt=11" target="_blank">Dangerous Tweets</a></i>).<br />
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<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/dangerous-tweets/id678085690?mt=11" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVRSE0XB_ZOfQd5iEnB-nr6Z25q4KIX7m5dAQZgOMfux444cN8ENcw2y7mPIkG-dVNCoQ4IeErikaaEzf2salsJ-AHLRyratNVUrmVjXhnNLsEwjM-lEnrohM1KcSXCP4MSkAnl4YOLtM/s400/dtweets.jpg" width="301" /></a></div>
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<u>6. Create an eBook edition</u><br />
Why not create your own eBook edition of Moby Dick? With tools like <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php" target="_blank">Scrivener</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/" target="_blank">iBooks Author</a>, etc., it is not impossible to do.<br />
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<u>7. Illustrate the text</u><br />
One artist that I know of illustrated Moby Dick by doing one drawing for each page of his edition of the text. He did it for fun as an exercise, posting the drawings on his blog. Then, it caught people's attention and he ended up creating a book from his work. Why not do the same?<br />
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<a href="http://www.pw.org/content/mobydick_in_pictures" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi__1TViqIfCUayYqSjDXZWEP98-KjQGXJ-TQw1kBw_SrVHkemu9Aerglbf3s2Q0ov3TKMnNAAQFlHxUtLvMDqiMFBkzny2Xb3NdmKa4iFuvuB3MZnNwuAJeZ4Ll84DIE_e80kfhpYDXKI/s400/kish.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Prior students of mine have created visual art in response to Shakespeare's works and posted these on <a href="http://shakespeareart.deviantart.com/" target="_blank">DeviantArt</a><br />
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<u>8. Make Typography Art</u><br />
Images and illustrations have always been a powerful complement to written or printed texts. Nowadays, one can use words themselves to create images: typography art. This can be static in nature, or take the form of kinetic typography.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeVVujOnh9oyOqHRyACM6D15EVGtEMNvW529u0eafe8UZAG0I4uQGtTD3yG6F5E2skgVBj7lpgGFGqcFtpHuuA9xKBPrH-e5oNBrtlqaootIwFG7JI7Jp2GWfD7ubLl7EzLjXtM3omm6Y/s1600/He_Is_Risen.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeVVujOnh9oyOqHRyACM6D15EVGtEMNvW529u0eafe8UZAG0I4uQGtTD3yG6F5E2skgVBj7lpgGFGqcFtpHuuA9xKBPrH-e5oNBrtlqaootIwFG7JI7Jp2GWfD7ubLl7EzLjXtM3omm6Y/s320/He_Is_Risen.JPG" width="311" /></a></div>
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<u>9. Create an Audio Edition</u><br />
Why not make your own audio edition of <i>Moby Dick</i>? This has been done in wonderful ways, including a celebrity reading with different narrators for every chapter of <i>Moby Dick:</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.mobydickbigread.com/chapter-8-the-pulpit/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8olMs4P40TWGoqEVMrSpAwPfVe2-324phDg2HlLgQNeZB-bd_k5wK6azfv88XmYTaplE2UYVWPQXOfG_s7Xi1CHvoUxPrezAeMtfw9uLB7JtHtRET2_09LYwJ7tMTpI48AYYJmXkRsk0/s400/big-read.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Make your own audio version public domain and distribute it through <a href="http://librivox.org/pages/volunteer-for-librivox/" target="_blank">LibriVox</a> to go alongside others' audio versions of great literary works.</div>
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<u>10. Translate the Text</u><br />
You can translate / adapt a text into everyday English, or into some kind of regional or cultural dialect, or into a standard foreign language. You might even use a tool like Google Translate to translate and retranslate a passage to see what becomes of it, as a way simply of exploring a text through its linguistic. Here's an example, using a paragraph describing the painting at the entrance of the Spouter Inn (in Chapter 3)<br />
<br />
The unadulterated original from Melville:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.</blockquote>
Translated first into French:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mais ce que la plupart perplexe et confus vous a été longue, souple, de mauvais augure,<br />masse noire de quelque chose de planant dans le centre de l'image sur trois bleu, Dim, lignes perpendiculaires flottant dans une levure sans nom. A marécageux, détrempé, image Squitchy vraiment, assez pour conduire un homme nerveux distrait.</blockquote>
From French into German:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Aber was die meisten ratlos und verwirrt Sie war lang, weich, unheilvolle, schwarze Masse von etwas schwebt in der Mitte des Bildes in drei Blue Sun, senkrechten Linien schweben in einer namenlosen Hefe. Eine sumpfige Bild matschig Squitchy wirklich genug, um einen nervösen Mann abgelenkt fahren. </blockquote>
From German to Japanese:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
しかし、最も困惑と混乱するとそれは3つの画像の中央に浮かぶ何かの長い、柔らかい、不吉、黒マスだったブルーサン、無名の酵母に浮かぶ垂線。湿地の<br />散漫神経男性を駆動するのに十分な本当にどろどろSquitchy画像。</blockquote>
And back to English...<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
However, some long, soft, sinister, it was a black mass floating in the center of the image of three and embarrassment and confusion most Vertical line that comes to yeast Blue Sun, anonymous. Marshy Enough mushy Squitchy image really to drive the diffuse nerve man.</blockquote>
vs. the original again:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.</blockquote>
I think the Japanese version took over in terms of tone. The passage about an impressionistic painting became more impressionistic and poetical. It's interesting to see what comes through unscathed ("squitchy") and what changes more (like the syntax).<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
Whatever you do, actively work with the text within words, design or media that differ from the original, and then think about how this freshens your perspective on the original story and text.<br />
<br />
What other ways could we digitally mediate <i>Moby Dick</i> or any public domain literary text?Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-28541817637375301052013-11-08T18:46:00.004-08:002013-11-08T22:14:37.208-08:00Literary Study in the Digital Age: 17 Comparisons and a Provocation<a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/p/ebook.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglS8ikJP7QsIYv2wBVfLtmZ9YPCwqZyOk5Q1tFWgPBeAItlLShVd_IFwoOEC1FssCDCJRbDP_HGimkF5wREzu-z33-jX7MR39Wr37CJdqdQz4I3sXIF8LNfFIH-SsJAwAzimJ-YyJlRWA/s200/eBook-Cover.jpg" width="154" /></a>How is the study of literature evolving today? This is a crucial question for the digital humanities. It is a topic that prior students and I explored in our eBook, <i>Writing About Literature in the Digital Age</i>. I invite you to <a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/p/ebook.html" target="_blank">browse its table of contents or download it for free</a>.<br />
<br />
I'm taking our thinking from there a bit further. Below, I list 17 specific comparisons between traditional literary study from the print period and the ways by which it is transforming in our digital age.<br />
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We who study literature need to come to terms with the new conditions for communication that are operative in our digital culture. I offer these starting points. For good measure (and to invite response), I conclude this post with a spirited challenge to the future of literary study as we know it. <br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<div>
<ol>
<li><b>Awareness</b> </li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, learning of the existence and importance of literature happened mostly in school settings (where books would be chosen and assigned by a teacher), or in libraries (by librarian suggestions and through book lists and printed subject indexes), or in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Some knowledge of literature might come through broadcast media or popular culture and word of mouth.</li>
<li><b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Within the digital age, becoming aware of literature still comes about through word of mouth and in school settings, but also through commercial sites (like Amazon); book-based social networks (like Goodreads and Shelfari); book-related blogs; and incidentally within major social media (as when one's favorite books are listed on a Facebook profile or one hears about what friends are reading in a news feed or tweet stream). One also finds out about classic literary works by way of a broad range of available adaptations or remixes of the text. Those might include professional or amateur film adaptations, adaptations to video games, etc. The algorithms of recommendation systems now also bring to our attention classic literary works as we are told that "customers who purchased _______ have also purchased _________." The <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-power-of-long-tail-in-digital.html" target="_blank">long tail</a> of content resurfaces well known (and less known) literary works. More people are aware of more literary works than ever before -- including the proliferation of new and independently published works of fiction, poetry, etc.</span></b></li>
</ul>
<li><b>Access</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, accessing a literary work meant obtaining a print copy of the book. This might come from a school, a library, or a bookstore. It would require paying for the book, or borrowing it. In the 20th century a small percentage of readers got access to books through cassette tape audio recordings.</li>
<li>In the digital age, accessing a literary work might still mean obtaining a printed book. But this will be mediated by a database or web service. You might find a cheaper source for purchasing a printed book online, or at the least you will use a library's database to locate a book or see if it is checked out. The idea of a book being unavailable because it is in use by someone else grows increasingly antiquated as access is now becoming digital access to the full text of a literary work. This is readily done through various ebook services, or (if a work is in the public domain) through a free service like Project Gutenberg or Google Books. As readers begin obtaining many ebooks, these become accessible through the cloud and across different platforms and devices. I can access my Kindle version of <i>Moby Dick</i> on any desktop computer via a web browser, as well as on my tablet computer or my smartphone. </li>
</ul>
<li><b>Editions</b> </li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, available editions for a classic work like <i>Moby Dick</i> might include a popular trade paperback edition, a hardbound (perhaps illustrated) edition, and maybe a scholarly edition. These would all most likely be in English, and would have been published for at least a year (and possibly decades).</li>
<li>In the digital age, available editions for a classic work like <i>Moby Dick</i> multiply. Discovery tools and the long tail of commerce make it possible not only to quickly find mass market or scholarly editions, but to learn of and obtain children's editions, foreign language editions, audio versions, illustrated editions, etc. Digital editions are also diverse, including free ebook versions, or more sophisticated editions that include scholarship or that are in an enhanced ebook or app format.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Reading</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, reading the text of a literary work would mean carrying about a printed book of many pages and mostly reading silently and privately. In some settings a teacher might read aloud portions. In rare settings, a book on tape might be available to listen to.</li>
<li>In the digital age, reading a classic novel can still take place with the printed text, but especially with longer works like <i>Moby Dick</i>, readers are choosing to keep and access their libraries in the cloud or on their devices. This changes where and how one reads a text (as does the possibility of getting a text in an alternate format such as an audiobook or an app). I might not have taken <i>Moby Dick</i> with me as a printed text in numerous settings. But I can read classic literary works any time I want to on my smartphone that's always with me. The multiple media and portability of various digital editions change not only the locations but the social configurations for reading. </li>
</ul>
<li><b>Annotating</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, annotating a literary work for study purposes would mean either underlining and writing notes in the margins of a personal copy of the book, or else taking notes separately with pen and paper. </li>
<li>In the digital age, annotating the text of a literary work can still mean using print books or paper and a pen or pencil. However, it is increasingly common to use highlighting and notation tools built into e-reading software. The annotations I make to my ebook version of <i>Moby Dick</i> are synchronized. What I highlight or write a note about from my desktop shows up on my other devices where I access the book. What is more, services like Amazon or Kobo are introducing socialized annotations. One can be taken to the most highlighted passages of a book and find out what many other readers of the same book have felt is noteworthy. Annotation is increasingly becoming connected to a social experience of literary works. The Amigo Reader or Kobo software allow for live chat with other readers while one is reading the book. Annotation becomes communication.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Analysis</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, analysis of a literary work would depend upon current literary theories, available scholarship, and the setting in which one read the book. A good edition of a text would include an introduction and notes to assist one in analyzing themes, etc. In a classroom, a teacher might bring to the text various literary theories. Students might consult summaries and analysis found in Cliffs Notes or Monarch Notes.</li>
<li>In the digital age, analysis of literary works can still include applying various literary theories to the text, but it is now less possible to study a text in isolation from the many contexts (historical or contemporary) that are accessible online. The very concept of "a text" has broadened to include various iterations or adaptations of a work. And while historical or cultural studies have always looked at the context for literary works, access to context is so simple today that it is <i>de rigeur</i>. For example, online archives and available digitized editions or artifacts from when a book was originally written or published beg to be applied to analysis. And given the proliferation of various adaptations of classic literary texts, it becomes impossible to study the text of a work like <i>Moby Dick</i> without also attending to the web of ways it has been adapted and put to use in modern and popular culture. In addition, the analysis of a literary text in the digital age can include direct manipulation of a text for analytical purposes. What if a rich descriptive passage of prose were recast as lines of poetry? What if the literary work were broken up into different sections or chapters? One may download, copy and paste, reformat, and redesign a book (or create one's own adaptation or multi-media version). As user-generated content increasingly borrows from public domain content like classic literary texts, we can begin to see a kind of analysis of the text taking place by way of choices made by amateurs in remixing that text. Analysis of the text today may involve curating a set of resources about a given text. Curation is done through criteria, and the application of that criteria makes curated content a new genre of textual analysis.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Quotation</b></li>
<ol>
<li>Prior to the digital age, the quotation of literary texts happened within literary criticism and in teaching settings. Literary quotations have often been anthologized in quote books, such as Bartlett's famous compilation. Some people memorize literary passages and quote these in various speaking and social settings.</li>
<li>In the digital age, quotation occurs as before, but has also become a different animal. This is because of the ease with which it is possible to find literary texts in electronic form, then cut and paste passages of text. Quotations have become a kind of derivative commodity in the digital economy, having their own life in a vast array of outlets, including blogs, tweets, song lyrics, memes, and imitations or remixes. Borrowing and adapting literary texts is simple to do now, and so it is done more.</li>
</ol>
<li><b>Instruction </b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, obtaining instruction about a literary work was limited to school settings in which a teacher or lecturer was physically present before students. Some correspondence courses or taped lectures circulated before the internet, but these were highly limited. You want to be taught about <i>Moby Dick</i>? Enroll in a class or attend a lecture.</li>
<li>In the digital age, instruction about literary works still happens in face-to-face school settings through direct instruction and lectures. However, increasingly literary instruction is occurring through distance education, either through established institutions for credit (and costing money) or for free and not for certification. The latter occurs through open educational resources, such as MIT's open courseware, or through massive open online courses (MOOCs) like those offered by Coursera. Instruction about literature is readily available online through ebooks, podcasts, and videos either for free or paid. Both professionals and amateur enthusiasts are also freely teaching the world about literature through their personal blogs or in high-traffic online sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Platforms such as iTunesU offer the prospect of covering a complete college curriculum (including literary study) through a variety of vetted content suppliers offering free downloads of texts, audio, and video. One no longer need attend a class in person, or officially matriculate as a student, to have access to instruction about literature. </li>
</ul>
<li><b>Research</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, literary research would require using a physical library, searching through printed (and usually dated) periodical indexes and using a card catalogue with its Dewey Decimal and later Library of Congress subject headings to discover scholarship about the book.</li>
<li>Digital age literary research still involves finding scholarly journals and books, but the finding tools are faster and more sophisticated. Not only are there federated searching tools that look across a host of databases and services, but there are also networks of scholars that can be discovered (such as through Academia.edu). This makes it possible for even the most amateur students of literature to find out the most current scholarship by experts. At the same time, given high expectations for full text access, important critical studies of classic literary works go unread because they are only available in print or behind pay walls. Today sophisticated tools are available for searching scholarly criticism of classic literature (such as Google Scholar), but some of the best such tools (like JSTOR or Project Muse) are expensive subscription databases only available to students or faculty at large institutions. Researching the text will increasingly include the step of researching the events, organizations, and social networks where such texts are valued and discussed, and may also include directly contacting active scholars.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Adaptations</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, examining various adaptations of literary works would be difficult to manage without knowledge of and access to spinoffs or adaptations in other media. In the 20th century, film adaptations of literary texts began to be increasingly known about and circulated. Viewing of such films would be limited. It would be impractical to look at how other cultures or languages might have adapted the text (unless one were an academic with know-how and resources to access alternate versions). </li>
<li>In the digital age, studying adaptations of a literary work is now almost easier than studying the original literary text itself. One can find audio versions, film versions, graphic novel versions, children versions, foreign language editions, etc. The ease of finding (and creating) adaptations gives the avatars of literary works increasingly centrality in literary study.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Discussion</b> </li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, discussing a literary work would happen in a classroom, in a book club, at a lecture, or in personal, informal settings among a small set of people.</li>
<li>In the digital age, discussing a literary work is no longer limited to informal personal contact, a class, or a scholarly setting. Discussing literary texts is now a worldwide phenomenon that reaches as widely as do the social media or the circulation of ebooks. As mentioned above, some ebook platforms make possible live chat about a book from within the ebook itself. In addition, there are specialty blogs and niche literary communities online where reviews and discussions generate more words about literature than in the more traditional scholarly outlets. And while that discussion is of a different quality, its quantity is substantial and influences the reception and understanding of texts. Discussions of texts are often conjoined with discussions of adaptations of classic literature (such as happens within fanfiction or discussions of film adaptations). One can broadcast to others what one is currently reading (such as using the hashtag #amreading on Twitter). Informal reviews appear on blogs or in video book reviews. There is a shortage of quality control, but no shortage of discussion about classic literary works online. </li>
</ul>
<li><b>Presentation</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, presenting about literature would happen orally and locally, with limited (if any) visuals, either informally (in a book club) or in a school setting. There would be no thought as to preserving or making a presentation more broadly available, as this was impractical. Limited media, limited life, limited reach. </li>
<li>Today, creating and giving presentations about literature can involve a variety of available digital media, compiled within presentation software such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi. Moreover, such presentations are often distributed online through services such as Slideshare.net where they are consulted and often reused and adapted (when accompanied with a creative commons license). Screencasting tools make it possible to demonstrate and narrate whatever one is doing on a computer, and video creation and sharing tools extend the reach of presentations as wide as the internet. Presentations at conferences are often videotaped and redistributed online. Sometimes presenters appear virtually at a live conference by way of a Skype connection. Readers are also hosting or attending webinars or otherwise using widely available video tools to tutor or otherwise present about their views of literary texts.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Criticism</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, writing about literature would be limited to very informal writing (such as mentioning one's reading in one's diary or in a paper letter) or to more formal academic writing (which would be read by one's teacher, if one were a student, or by one's scholarly peers, if one were a professor).</li>
<li>In the digital age, writing about literature can still take the form of formal academic essays, but it is increasingly the case that writing about literature happens informally on blogs and other social media. Also, responding to a text today does not always mean responding with paragraphs or pages of text. It may mean very short form writing like tweets or microblogging posts. Or, it may mean composing "response content" that can be of many different media: a video book review, an Instagram photo, a Pinterest board, etc. Curation, as mentioned above, is a kind of criticism that takes many forms today.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Publication</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, any publishing about literature would require submitting a scholarly analysis to a print journal, waiting through a reviewing period, and, upon acceptance, waiting for the print publication to come out. With rare exception, that publication would go to a few hundred libraries and scholars.</li>
<li>In the digital age, publishing literary criticism continues within traditional scholarly outlets of academic journals and monographs. These are increasingly available online. Such outlets have cut costs and turnaround time required for vetting and editing, often by using tools like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System. They still are at risk of going unread, however, given the lack of adoption of open access scholarly publishing practices. Consequently, especially for students and amateurs, publishing literary criticism is not done as much through such formal routes with their long delays and highly limited audiences. It is easier simply to post an essay on a blog, or put up a review on a site like Goodreads.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Scholarly "conversation"</b> </li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, the scholarly conversation about literary works would take place slowly, as those responding to one's scholarship did so with other scholarship, going through the reviewing and publishing process over the course of many years. </li>
<li>In the digital age, the scholarly conversation about literary texts continues at its print-era speed, more or less, due to the inefficiencies of formal peer review and of the publishing process. The more robust conversation about literary texts has moved its gravitational center away from formal scholarship to the social media where opinions are rapidly exchanged through media that are less sluggish. In a day when readers are quickly and ably analyzing and discussing literary texts in a lively public arena, the more authoritative scholarly discussions become less visible and influential due to the length of their analyses, their slowness of getting to the public, the lack of public access to scholarship, the lack of media besides text, and their existence far to the side of the most active online conversations.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Editing</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, the editing of literature was always tied to formal scholarly or publishing efforts and was seen as a kind of handmaid to the more serious enterprise of literary interpretation. One obtained various source texts, compared these by hand, then established one's own version of the text, which meant the physical format as well as whatever scholarly helps (footnotes, etc.) that might aid readers. This was a slow process completed by experts and it took a lot of time.</li>
<li>In the digital age, professional editing of literary works continues as before, but ever since easy tools for creating and selling books have emerged, editions of literary works (especially those in the public domain) are appearing without professional oversight. This has greatly reduced the quality control of literature. At the same time, the circulation of so many poorly edited versions of texts has highlighted the need for editing. In addition, editing is becoming a kind of analysis or a mode of literary creativity (for example, as someone prepares a hypertext or multimedia edition).</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Authoring</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Prior to the digital age, authoring a literary work was something many might attempt but few would see through to publication. Authors who succeeded in publishing might interact with their readers through letters or reviews, but the author-reader relationship was at a distance. Moreover, it was the literary work itself, not other information, that most spoke about the author. Biographical information about authors was limited, as was meaningful relationships between authors and readers. </li>
<li>In the digital age, authoring a literary work has been reinvented through desktop publishing and now through online publishing platforms that cater to self publishers (like <a href="http://www.bookbaby.com/" target="_blank">BookBaby</a>, <a href="http://www.lulu.com/" target="_blank">Lulu</a>, <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/" target="_blank">Smashwords</a>, and <a href="https://www.createspace.com/" target="_blank">CreateSpace</a>) and to online bookstores that carry both print books and ebooks (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.). Authorship itself has evolved in the digital age, as information about authors and direct connection with them is increasingly possible and desirable. One can follow the social media of an author or interact with him or her through Google Hangouts, through a Goodreads author page, the author's blog, or other social media. Consequently, studying literature nowadays really means bringing the author's life more into the picture, since his or her personality will have a presence (usually) as much as his or her published work.</li>
</ul>
</ol>
<div>
<u>The Future of Literary Study</u><br />
In making these comparisons, I have begun from the point of view of print-based literary study, examining its core practices and then looking for how these are evolving digitally. I point this out because had I started from the other way around, the comparison might have come out differently.<br />
<br />
For example, we are quickly reaching the point at which <b><i>literary study cannot be isolated from the study of media more generally</i></b>. As educators currently debate what should constitute 21st-century literacy, what is never up for debate is the need to broaden literacy to include communication technologies beyond the printed word. Won't literary study follow literacy?<br />
<br />
Another factor requires radical rethinking of literary study: the profoundly social and generative nature of the new media. For centuries, learners have been in a subordinate position to authors (who were seen as more knowledgeable and professional, more artistic, or more intellectually advanced). Today, learning both to read and to write is becoming so integrated with creating and sharing content that we are all becoming authors (or perhaps, "content creators" or "media designers") with a lively sense of audiences that we are intent upon reaching with our words and content. Won't this influence our relationship to literature?<br />
<br />
If I am a creator, my stance toward literary texts or art generally changes. And while that may not become a peer relationship, the way I understand created things is now in terms of being in the game, not on the sidelines. I appropriate, I imitate, and I remix any available content streams, with traditional literature being just one tributary. What does it do to literary study when reading and interpreting texts is seen as something one does on the way to creating and sharing one's own stuff? How will authors of the past be understood differently as we all become authors in the present?<br />
<br />
<u>A Provocation</u><br />
Try this one on for size: "Literary study" will soon label a kind of vestigial mindset and set of practices that (for reasons increasingly difficult for people to understand) is intent upon keeping consumers of this content isolated from one another, away from the interactive and collaborative modes that are now most native to us. Maybe "literary study" will become a derogatory term, a faux elitism that labels a type of engagement with ideas and content that oddly stays committed to a single-medium experience. Literary study has always bordered on elitism; today's medium reveals traditional literary study as fundamentally anti-social.<br />
<br />
Why would anyone devote themselves seriously to literary study if being an English major or a professor of literature means acquiring the habit of restricting oneself from communicating with available audiences? If it means not creating but merely interpreting? Or if it means creating, but only kinds of private writing -- not producing and sharing content for authentic audiences using pictures and appropriate connecting skills? If it means not collaborating and interacting but generating "papers" whose life ends when read by the intended audience of one? Maybe literary study is a hallmark -- a mark of shame, even -- that commemorates a passive, consumption approach to knowledge. We may understand this historically as an accident of the available intellectual media. However, <b><i>if we retain the privacy and passivity of traditional literary study, then the function of such study is effectively to deny and incapacitate the very liberalism of mind for which literature is supposedly an ideal vehicle</i></b>.<br />
<br />
What do you think? Is literary study being revived and given new legs? Or is it undergoing a kind of last gasp, its dark underbelly exposed and vulnerable? Will literary study flourish in the new medium, or will it soon be eclipsed by larger categories and customs that are less dependent on print culture's limiting ways of thinking and communicating?</div>
</div>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-82047452380776226552013-11-04T10:02:00.000-08:002013-11-04T10:02:16.894-08:00The Evolution of the Book Review (part two)In my <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-evolution-of-book-review-part-one.html" target="_blank">last post</a> I discussed how the traditional book review is being updated in the digital age. Here, I would like to look at the way the book review is evolving from a text medium into a multimedia genre with a strong social component. Once again, there are new contexts to apply to this evolution of the book review.<br />
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<u>Reviewing in Digital Culture</u><br />
Those reviewing books online are doing so in a context in which many other things are being rated and reviewed: consumer goods and digital content of every variety, as well as services, sellers, suppliers, and companies. Contributing one's opinion about something viewed or purchased online has become a primary kind of online activity. We "like" things on Facebook, +1 them on Google+, and we assign star ratings to movies on Netflix or to books on Goodreads. We are even reviewing things indirectly simply by expressing our feelings about things. A good deal of time is spent on "sentiment analysis" of consumers as they discuss various brands or products through the various social media (such as Twitter):<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCuIctciuCNmx3GQm-zvEvYi6JkAMNoQBUn3faEOaMfAlvRF7IaaJEQRsH8KA7Yn2sFTk7TbpuEqk5r_MpO_WVSWM-MkanSv1ys8ry6eceQS9y0jIoLPCn3ZkKqz5Lk2rrmT3v52c5D_E/s1600/sentiment140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCuIctciuCNmx3GQm-zvEvYi6JkAMNoQBUn3faEOaMfAlvRF7IaaJEQRsH8KA7Yn2sFTk7TbpuEqk5r_MpO_WVSWM-MkanSv1ys8ry6eceQS9y0jIoLPCn3ZkKqz5Lk2rrmT3v52c5D_E/s640/sentiment140.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Sentiment 140 service searches Twitter and returns sentiment analysis on tweets for a given brand.<br />
Note how the red-coded negative review is inaccurate. <br />
Note that one can rate the accuracy of the rating (in grey)</td></tr>
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<a name='more'></a>But we are not simply clicking on ratings or indirectly reviewing. A lot of user-generated content is in fact some kind of evaluation or opinion. In the following review from Amazon (of an alarm clock on wheels that you must chase across your bedroom to turn off), a customer contributed both a text review and a brief video review. This is an example of a hybrid review. It carries the ease and quickness of brief text, with the immediacy and emotional appeal of a video that conveys both a clear sense of how the thing works and how the customer felt about it.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clocky-Alarm-Clock-Wheels-Aqua/dp/B000TAS9XQ/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtnQcpInwvspsdjP0LOHP4iyqVZxX3zbhhAbV-gu-_oiJeEp4OxSlo1IX5qmcyhwrN4dlR6khWrtxryVboDQpzgqxmmDbDjj7bU0M3p66TguULF7cjm-F0XdRXnEsg-bi2binVuewGcsU/s640/clocky-review.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A customer review (text + video) for "Clocky Alarm Clock on Wheels" - Amazon</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Entire networks are devoted to reviewing, such as <a href="http://www.epinions.com/" target="_blank">epinions</a>, <a href="http://www.productwiki.com/" target="_blank">ProductWiki</a> and <a href="http://www.buzzillions.com/" target="_blank">Buzzillions</a>. <a href="http://www.angieslist.com/" target="_blank">Angie's List</a> is a service that reviews local service providers (plumbers, handymen, etc.). Some of these services or networks encourage community building, some use systems that rate the raters ("Was this helpful?"). Reviewing, it turns out, can be a way of building one's personal brand or online presence. A good reviewer can achieve enormous clout within a given niche community online.<br />
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<u>Use of Images</u></div>
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We are increasingly becoming primarily visual in our literacy. A good review will use images and not just text.</div>
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<a href="http://youtu.be/Ov06c0zx8IY" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJakWmApa627Hpmj80ZsspWV-ef-UoKhBhqTVENeHe1a7haHXuCRufZi8QAZ-FuBonTGKRY7Y_vaiwwO2-iGUWwVYH7kp3wjQ8voCK7FVaJAuA1dE6fSOUAl1OT24bWtRWlq3Vk9W3UX0/s400/Kotaku.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The above review used screen shots, intermixed with brief text, to walk through a review of a Japanese anime show being recommended. </div>
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Even if one is not reviewing something visual, one can still include images to bring interest into the review. If nothing more, a book review today should include an image of the book cover. The following is a review section of a blog (<a href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">bldgblog</a>) recommended by Kevin Kelly on Google+ that focuses on reviewing non-fiction books.</div>
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<a href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/books-received.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxp0aewNhoJxMqW56xtnfR6GH-_qcvbor850gZwklOkPMAydvy3pHyRuo48hMdoPIUYdA5gQSfw-lUkgxS3YofED7KJch3-geb7jWhSCg5Id10vx6LyKh-bqGlI_qQ-6y9Z0mi4WRpt24/s400/bldgblog.jpg" width="331" /></a></div>
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<u>Video Reviewing</u></div>
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Video-based reviewing is increasingly common online, and it carries with it the emotional appeal of audio and video, and of connection with real human beings. <a href="http://www.expotv.com/" target="_blank">ExpoTV</a> is built around video reviews of consumer products (and has a point system to earn rewards through reviewing). Amazon, as indicated above, has been doing video reviews for many years. And YouTube is littered with reviews of everything from video games to diet systems.</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp5hKcwf4O4" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij3cT5kJT-Wy54EcNUTDgLrIGdxEJzD7IUQVhPjNXy4CW3eCEtV8neISZ6krkf6SClew6qXGYn4oiPPo9n0a6HMlMjmb4nMTQFtXQQksPwqJO2mXXs8P_bfvu6AjmiQIPBVxLsltazt10/s400/creed+review.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In other words, although there are outlets for very traditional kinds of book reviews, <b><i>it's important to think in terms of the types of reviews and reviewing activities that are most common in digital culture</i></b> (and not intellectual or print-based cultures). And therefore, if you want your ideas about books to be heard or to make a difference, play to the ways reviewing works online today.<br />
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As I mentioned <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-evolution-of-book-review-part-one.html" target="_blank">in the last post</a>, we need to calibrate our reviewing to the speed, brevity, and casualness of the dominant cultural medium. This means not overworking our reviews in terms of length or in terms of time and effort to produce them.<br />
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<u><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Review Value vs Production Values</u></div>
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Reviewing online has a primarily pragmatic orientation, often built around helping people make a decision whether to purchase or select something. In other words, the production value of a video review isn't as important as its general value in helping people to make decisions or take actions. In short, you don't have to impress people with mad editing skills. David from Arizona demonstrates how you can do super crunches on a yoga ball, all while a blank TV runs in the background of a messy apartment and while the sound quality of his review is tinny and unprofessional. So what? We get the sense of what one can do with the yoga ball, and that's all we need.</div>
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<a href="http://www.expotv.com/videos/reviews/9/108/Yoga-Accessories-75cm-Anti-Burst-Yoga-B/236760" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTXT_NOSXqE2kBKlfaRuD-C3mRm_WuvCk3U-k8FRJi52bvFExuSd04ISiBsF-H3hAtBcqmFCwSuEJ5fKInFj-5vZnxtmuMQQdeZ1XFfD8lD-kRbfTkJZ7YpyNY3e7ZVgoAMfwJWfl1KCs/s400/expotv.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<u>Brevity</u></div>
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It is possible today (despite criticism of digital culture claiming everything is becoming superficial) to have long form reviews. However, as I have discussed in outlining a <a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-tiered-content-model-for-academic.html" target="_blank">tiered approach to content</a>, one must orient one's reviews toward the rapid exchange of posts available in mainstream social media. Sure, you can make an insightful 30-minute video review of your favorite novel. But the two-minute version is more likely actually to be viewed. You can have both, of course. But expect to get most viewers only to view the very short version, and a few very interested people to click through to longer form content.</div>
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How long should a book review be? This depends on the medium and the location for sharing the review. On a place like Goodreads, reviews are in text form and are from a paragraph to a screen or two in length. In video book reviews, lengths vary a lot. Longer video book reviews tend to take place within channels or communities of book lovers who are willing to indulge longer reviews.</div>
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Here is a Vimeo book reviewing channel called "In the Stacks" that features 15-second videos. What do you think-- is it enough?</div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/76766165" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/76766165">In the Stacks Episode 155: If There's A Heaven Above by Andrew Demcak video book review</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3744416">In the Stacks video book review</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span></div>
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Here is a nearly five-minute review from <a href="http://www.bookreviewersclub.com/" target="_blank">Book Reviewers Club</a>.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ov06c0zx8IY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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I urge my students to stay within the 90-second to two-minute length. Keeping to this amount of time will force them to cut right to the chase on main ideas and their on evaluative claim. Moreover, I don't want them to spend more than a couple of hours altogether in producing and circulating their video book review.<br />
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<u>Creative Possibilities</u><br />
Producing media-rich content can quickly turn into a time suck. This is one reason I have emphasized low production values and brevity. But with those provisos, I also wish to invite my students to be creative with their book reviews. It is possible to do something different than the talking-head-holding-a-book video book review. One can<br />
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<ul>
<li>Make a screencast of a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation about the book</li>
<li>Create an animation (such as through the free online tool, Xtranormal)</li>
<li>Stage a scene from the book with actors, puppets, etc.</li>
<li>Make a video of attempting to explain the book to someone unfamiliar with its contents or importance</li>
</ul>
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I have seen great student videos that use paper and hand-drawn signs effectively. It doesn't have to be about learning Adobe After Effects or getting a crash course in a movie making software program. Creativity isn't always about the tech.</div>
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<u>Socializing Your Video Book Review</u><br />
I would like my students to create a brief video review (90-seconds to two minutes) and to disseminate this through social media. Rather than directly uploading the video to their blog (which has a limited audience), they should create a YouTube account or channel and upload their video with appropriate metadata or labels. In addition to whatever other tags they wish to append to their video, they should include "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=digiculture326&oq=digiculture326" target="_blank">digiculture326</a>" so that when that link is clicked (or when one searches YouTube with that tag), our class videos will appear.<br />
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But that is not all. Students should share the YouTube video they've uploaded to Google+, again adding hashtags as appropriate so that those searching for their book or their topic will come across the Google+ post (which will take them to the YouTube video).<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUqVbk5PlNYynoANs9VeKwq3JgV0Br4YTPx7Q-Al8qv_-_fBT_p6umyfd3hxG8lzbqaIgMe1Twog00XSapNkxVSj5v-WWYTDZGX5SXhatCeaHEEydVk-0kPROmBdZ1ODlxH-n2AhjYwhQ/s1600/jobs+review.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUqVbk5PlNYynoANs9VeKwq3JgV0Br4YTPx7Q-Al8qv_-_fBT_p6umyfd3hxG8lzbqaIgMe1Twog00XSapNkxVSj5v-WWYTDZGX5SXhatCeaHEEydVk-0kPROmBdZ1ODlxH-n2AhjYwhQ/s400/jobs+review.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Someone sharing on Google+ a link to their video review on YouTube<br />Note how he combines a PowerPoint with video of himself talking</td></tr>
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I want students to search for existing reviews (video or otherwise) of the book they have just reviewed, and within comments (or wherever appropriate) to provide a link to their video review on YouTube ("I've also reviewed this book. Check out my video review [URL]").<br />
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<u>Books as Bridges</u><br />
Books have always been gathering points for people of similar interests. But as we are able to use today's social media to expose to broader publics what are reading has been, we are able to bridge in ways and to groups or individuals we might never have known of or realized the value of connecting with.<br />
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Books provide common content around which people can build contacts and community. By connecting one's review to one's social graph online, this opens opportunities to create academic, professional, or personal relationships with other people who care about the same ideas. And perhaps this is the most interesting evolution of the book review. It isn't that books are now reviewed in multimedia formats; it's that they more effectively become points of connection among people.<br />
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-40529961208910570392013-10-30T13:19:00.000-07:002013-10-30T13:19:02.971-07:00The Evolution of the Book Review (part one)The book review's evolution reveals key changes to literacy in the digital age. <b><i>What has the book review been? How is it being adapted to the new media? What is its future?</i></b> I want my students to wrestle with these questions by writing a conventional book review (about an individually assigned book in the field of digital culture) and by producing a video book review. I will give some explanation and guidelines for how they should think about and carry out those assignments. But first, some contexts.<br />
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<u>Context #1: The Digital Humanities</u><br />
A central concern to the emerging field of Digital Humanities is reconsidering the basic objects of study that are the subject of humanistic inquiry: the book or manuscript, the work of art, the musical performance, etc. These components must be reconsidered because they are newly mediated: the eBook is not the book; the virtual tour of the Louvre is not the same as visiting the Paris museum; the musical performance is a creature quite different than ever before when one can capture, sample, and remix various recordings. Even so late a comer to the humanities as the motion picture is no longer the same cultural artifact or experience it was in the 20th century -- not when one can experience films on a mobile device, on demand, and in computing contexts where audiences are as much creators as viewers.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5aBgrCC94chXg0CMidMg8O6IYsr3IS5DlQtg6UiW5iZ3eohpmDRr5jHpAaF4yUX21KQAz64ekOFqpR8RB6PYMxgYZRAzY8xYZscBfktlk5HPi2XEQ5B3ht8RRHV-qw2N4x6jZZKdRz8o/s1600/louvre-mosaic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5aBgrCC94chXg0CMidMg8O6IYsr3IS5DlQtg6UiW5iZ3eohpmDRr5jHpAaF4yUX21KQAz64ekOFqpR8RB6PYMxgYZRAzY8xYZscBfktlk5HPi2XEQ5B3ht8RRHV-qw2N4x6jZZKdRz8o/s400/louvre-mosaic.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Is this the Mona Lisa? This is the way it appears on the<br />official website of the Louvre. Studying a painting becomes<br />studying digital ways of manipulating its presentation.<br />(Image credit: <span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18.15625px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/mona-lisa-%E2%80%93-portrait-lisa-gherardini-wife-francesco-del-giocondo" target="_blank">Musée du Louvre</a>, used by <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/en/conditions-use-images" target="_blank">permission</a>)</span></span></td></tr>
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What is more, the sense-making frameworks that have been the staples of humanistic study are equally at risk. By such frameworks I mean physical locations (the museum, the classroom); methods of publication; methods of inquiry and expertise; theoretical premises; and finally, the very rhetoric of critique. People discover, learn about, make use of, comment upon, disseminate, and build upon art and literature in far different ways than they did back when we had fixed institutions and clear lines of expertise.<br />
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<u>Context #2: A New Abundance</u><br />
We have abundant access to traditional works of art and literature. We have abundant production of independently produced books, movies, and works of art, and in an abundance of new forms and formats (such as hypertext fiction, fanfiction, twitterature, book apps, etc.). We are also aswim in the abundance of data now available about content -- data that includes reviews.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0K6JEbmFNzAH8kGqLJu15mo35pM0Gqx7NnSWtnTAlPaqx1_-shYYmDYGP-CgYnf1rtyXrSoJFXD9jbKZHVddcwK72DrtPJzAFOIcsvAdjnROelTruG4eLs2UvurghGiu-d4yCfiKEDM/s1600/amazon-review-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0K6JEbmFNzAH8kGqLJu15mo35pM0Gqx7NnSWtnTAlPaqx1_-shYYmDYGP-CgYnf1rtyXrSoJFXD9jbKZHVddcwK72DrtPJzAFOIcsvAdjnROelTruG4eLs2UvurghGiu-d4yCfiKEDM/s400/amazon-review-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In addition to all kinds of data about a book, Amazon<br />provides a system to review books and rank others' reviews.</td></tr>
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There are abundant responses (and types of responses) to both traditional and new genres of art and literature. The <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-power-of-long-tail-in-digital.html" target="_blank">long tail</a> applies to types of works, to types of ways of encountering or experiencing those works, and to types of ways that such works are produced, consumed, analyzed, and discussed.<br />
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As "the people formerly known as the audience" begin interacting with media rather than passively consuming it, all of this Web 2.0 "user-generated content" becomes both a cavalcade of new content to be studied, and a torrent of secondary commentary in which people respond to the maelstrom of media in which we are inundated.<br />
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In short,<b><i> there are more things to be studied than ever before; and this superabundance has called forth the need for critical response</i></b>, a stopping of the flux and a sorting of the flow. How do we find and experience what is most worthwhile? Critical discernment is needed more than ever. Rhetorical skills are needed as never before so that we can mediate the media meaningfully. We need more than machines to help us to filter, to curate, and to critique. There is a critical need for critical voices.<br />
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<u>Context #3: A Changed Rhetorical Approach</u><br />
However, there is criticism and there is criticism. If we put the new wine of new media into the old bottles of traditional literary criticism, they will burst. Our rhetoric must change -- the way we form our responses, how we connect with audiences, the media through which we communicate criticism. Online one finds much of traditional literary criticism, but much more of a less formal variety. If we want to join the conversation, that's the conversation of consequence today.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIpX3yK0EA4diXHOPj7Wdt5Dl1XpLaqL91rnGXG1YqLplz54-Nk6IKOk8Sk15zHx9C9-qTmjNmC7aE6VxXAlani3nQAnmtpqiZ2JmBfedON_13KmFNK7fAHZxmPBE44XckqVKJSyntLxA/s1600/swift-commenting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIpX3yK0EA4diXHOPj7Wdt5Dl1XpLaqL91rnGXG1YqLplz54-Nk6IKOk8Sk15zHx9C9-qTmjNmC7aE6VxXAlani3nQAnmtpqiZ2JmBfedON_13KmFNK7fAHZxmPBE44XckqVKJSyntLxA/s400/swift-commenting.jpg" width="335" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jeff Swift analyzes digital rhetoric, as in <a href="http://deliberhetor.com/2013/10/29/internet-comments-terrible-sometimes/" target="_blank">this post</a><br />discussing commenting genres and various commenting platforms</td></tr>
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We are no longer in a world of fixed and finished knowledge, the sort of knowledge a printed book symbolized (and which print culture naturalized over several centuries). What is new outpaces our existing tools for even naming the novelties, let alone grappling with them critically as we have been accustomed to through long, studied, textually discursive means.<br />
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In other words, as much as we might admire the level of studied attention provided by a traditional book review, that sort of thing isn't calibrated very closely to the speed with which content is produced and the breadth of its dissemination. If we take months and several thousand words to evaluate a given work, we have let pass by the larger part of the conversation. Responses today happen in minutes or days, not weeks or months. They are often textual but rarely highly developed or edited; moreover, they are increasingly accompanied by images or they take place in video format.<br />
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In short, <i><b>if we are to make meaningful critical contributions in today's fast and abundant flow of culture, we have to make our criticism match the medium: we must be more brief, more casual, more social, and more visual. </b></i><br />
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This does not mean that critical discourse is being dumbed down, or that we must lower ourselves to the shallow attention spans of a hypermediated culture. Not at all. What it means is that we have to marry old and new, finding ways to bridge the immediacy and the hypermediated nature of online content with the more traditional kinds of reflective thought and accompanying discussion that has been valued in traditional book reviewing or analysis.<br />
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And so, a starting point in the evolution of the book review is to adapt it to the new media, adding to a traditional review the power and immediacy of social media.<br />
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<u>The Traditional Book Review, Socially Mediated</u><br />
I am asking my students first to write a traditional book review, though they are to circulate this through social platforms that transcend traditional publication of reviews. A traditional book review follows a formula:<br />
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<ol>
<li>introducing the book</li>
<li>outlining its plot or contents</li>
<li>quoting and analyzing segments of the work</li>
<li>providing an evaluation by applying criteria</li>
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In this traditional review, the reviewer uses nothing but text -- no images or video. That review is then submitted for approval or editing to an editor at a publication, and the review comes out many weeks or months later.<br />
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My students will follow this same rhetorical approach for their book review as enumerated above, though they will write more succinctly -- from 200 to 500 words instead of 1,000 or more. Another key difference is that they will circulate their reviews immediately over social media, with no delay (and with no editorial oversight, for better or worse). <br />
<br />
<u>Example</u><br />
Here is an example from a past student, <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/115463116779560939114" target="_blank">+Allie Crafton</a>. She read <i>The Wisdom of Crowds</i> and circulated her review in three different ways: 1) On Goodreads; 2) on her blog; and 3) on Google+. Note how in each instance her review reached a different social graph and invited different kinds of response.<br />
<br />
First, she set up an account on Goodreads. The process of doing invites you to become friends on Goodreads with any existing friends who have accounts, or to invite friends not on Goodreads to join you there. This is a good idea to take advantage of. This service gains value for you personally the more you can connect with others. Another way to think of this is that <i>friends are more likely to pay close attention to your book reviews than the general public</i> (though the public will also be able to see and comment on your Goodreads reviews).<br />
<br />
Once Allie signed up, she rated and reviewed the book and posted this review. (By the way, there is an option to simultaneously publish notice of the review to one's Facebook page. A good idea to involve another part of your social graph in your reading life).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilT_S-mo_XyvtktasbF7kncUa4dJ8sCszD9PkOfarV9JyXUEHxb1dPsEbLPmyY5v0GHgQmRXHQ6khN_MFMu22Fock1Y9RCrCHqy9ECt9SrPIih9sGSalpRob8kx1ukXsmN6jLwcQskNog/s1600/crafton+review+goodreads.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilT_S-mo_XyvtktasbF7kncUa4dJ8sCszD9PkOfarV9JyXUEHxb1dPsEbLPmyY5v0GHgQmRXHQ6khN_MFMu22Fock1Y9RCrCHqy9ECt9SrPIih9sGSalpRob8kx1ukXsmN6jLwcQskNog/s400/crafton+review+goodreads.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Allie Crafton posted this review on <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/407157258" target="_blank">Goodreads</a><br />and a longer version on <a href="http://craftonallie326.blogspot.com/2012/09/review-wisdom-of-crowds.html" target="_blank">her student blog</a>.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Below is a screenshot from my Goodreads account. It shows Allie's review next to my review of the book and alongside reviews by some of my other Goodreads friends. Her review is more powerful in this social context. I see her review as part of a set of reviews by people whose opinions I value:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyfIiWwX5D4M3MeA0AkOLzfbsI2Gd4AHYqnxC9DJ41Ixxk2Di1VSh8KCu2GxEukwAaVI6cWCz1kESEAfyvCw4c-pT8F8LLKX9R87mFSVIcIHBxvyOWcFkoKISbTvfqtFdx2KVPgDT2O-Q/s1600/mygoodreads.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyfIiWwX5D4M3MeA0AkOLzfbsI2Gd4AHYqnxC9DJ41Ixxk2Di1VSh8KCu2GxEukwAaVI6cWCz1kESEAfyvCw4c-pT8F8LLKX9R87mFSVIcIHBxvyOWcFkoKISbTvfqtFdx2KVPgDT2O-Q/s400/mygoodreads.jpg" width="341" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Posting it on her blog led to some good back and forth with a fellow student:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSdTVnqnulwDjpZadjnWcBQOrDj5D-_nGA5Dnsf2QQkWF8rbKRP9DgSxu_EEBCU4hpQxils0YK1VxJRDnmAa9E73Kal4wfwfG04TUDhG353l85mVbs1tftgoilqKAcurMfwTjr_Nb5Ll0/s1600/allie-blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSdTVnqnulwDjpZadjnWcBQOrDj5D-_nGA5Dnsf2QQkWF8rbKRP9DgSxu_EEBCU4hpQxils0YK1VxJRDnmAa9E73Kal4wfwfG04TUDhG353l85mVbs1tftgoilqKAcurMfwTjr_Nb5Ll0/s400/allie-blog.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Next, note how on Google+ Allie got some conversation going by naming specific people. On Google+, this means those people would get notified that they were mentioned in her post (just as Allie is going to get a notice that I mentioned her in this Blogger post because I used the + sign in front of her name, a feature of Google integration):</span></div>
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<u>Conclusion</u></div>
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Book reviewing is alive and well in the digital age. But it has evolved, importantly, to be integrated with the social media. In this way, books become a way of confirming and creating human connections. The socially mediated book review gives attention and authority to one's writing. Friends may like or share one's reviews, and then books become woven into your social and online identity. Not a bad thing.</div>
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I have seen some students really take to Goodreads, and I've learned a lot from them and appreciated the books they recommend. One student, <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/117428857818613076408" target="_blank">+Emily Coleman</a>, keeps a book blog, "<a href="http://classicsandbeyond.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Classics and Beyond</a>" where she has over 100 posts (mostly book reviews). She's smart to post links to each review by way of <a href="https://plus.google.com/117428857818613076408/posts" target="_blank">her Google+ profile</a>.</div>
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In the second part of "Evolution of the Book Review" I will discuss the video book review as an important alternative format for literary criticism today.</div>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-69349370682354344082013-10-21T11:02:00.000-07:002013-10-21T11:02:06.254-07:00An Algorithm for Reading a Book in the Digital AgeBooks are changing. Reading is changing. Research is changing. It's time to think about how to read a book in the digital age. Serious students and the academic of the 21st century need new strategies for dealing with books. I'm going to propose an algorithm -- a recipe for reading and research, if you will. It is not suitable for all genres or purposes. Consider it a way of exploring the alternatives of how books can be experienced in today's information environment.<br />
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<ol>
<li>Use social media to <b>announce your intention</b> of researching a topic by way of reading a book.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: On Twitter, Facebook, and/or Google+, I could post something like "What's going on with copyright today? Starting James Boyle's The Public Domain to figure it out. #amreading #copyright</span><br />Note the use of hashtags (metadata) that identify both what I'm doing and what topic I'm researching.</li>
<li><b>Start a blog post</b> even before reading your book. In the title, identify that book as an anchor point for researching your topic. Write just a sentence or two in which you introduce why you are reading this and where you hope it will take you.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example title: "Exploring Copyright's Confusion with Jame's Boyle's The Public Domain."<br />Example first paragraph: "I'm told Boyle is the expert in copyright. I'm also told his book is both very important and somewhat dry. I'm going to see for myself because I am not happy that <a href="http://kazzysponderings.blogspot.com/2012/12/silenced.html" target="_blank">my wife got one of those take-down notices</a> for singing a cover of a K.T. Tunstall song on her blog. What's the world coming to?</span><br />This post will not be a book review. It will be an in-process post recording early discoveries about your chosen topic by way of a book addressing that topic. You will add to this blog post during the next few steps.</li>
<li><b>Preview the book</b>. Do this by browsing its table of contents, index, bibliography, and skimming its contents for illustrations, headings, or other clues to the general ideas and approach to the topic. This can be done electronically using Google Books or Amazon. Make a heading in your blog post: "Preview" and compose a very short paragraph.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: After spending 10 minutes previewing Boyle's book, I see that he's going to be taking both an historical and a legal approach to intellectual property. I'm intrigued by his metaphor of the commons and how he's going to be using the idea of the enclosure movement (which I learned about in a history course). Also, he pretty much gives snapshot summaries of each chapter in his Notes/Further reading section at the end. Bonus!</span><br />Note the brevity of this preview, both in doing it and writing it up.</li>
<li><b>Get early social proof.</b> Check to see if anyone responded to your announcement over social media about intending to read the book or explore the topic. If no one has, coerce one of your homies into listening to you explain the topic you're exploring and the book you've just previewed. Don't drive away your friends with this. Give it to them very briefly and see what they have to say. Make another heading in your blog post: "Early Social Proof" and write a couple of sentences.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: "Nobody seemed to care among my Twitter followers that I'm reading this book or researching this topic. Cretins! But when I asked one of my wife's blog followers about how she felt when my wife had to take down all of the songs she'd posted on her blog because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, she encouraged me to do whatever I could to help amateurs be creative online. It was encouraging, actually. I have a cause.</span><br />Note how making the topic relevant to a friend increases my own interest in pursuing the subject.</li>
<li><b>Find the book's friends</b>. Let the semantic web and recommendation engines do their work. Use <a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank">Amazon</a> and <a href="http://books.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Books</a> to look up your book, then check to see what books they recommend based on your search. Try this on both services and see what's repeated. Look to see if there are books that are more current than the one you are starting with. Take time to click through and read the publisher summaries of a few of those books. Then, make a new heading in your blog post, "Similar Books" and list what you find along with any brief observations. You are curating a very short list: 3-5 books. Consider including the covers of those books as images in the blog post.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: "In searching Google and Amazon for books related to Boyle's, I'm noticing certain authors repeated, including Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler. Plus, I recognized book covers from our digital culture bookshelf (Makers by Chris Anderson and The Master Switch by Tim Wu). After looking at the summaries of four books, it appears the topic of copyright is connected to DIY and maker culture, and to concerns about big media companies, and to issues of creativity and remix culture. I remember seeing remix as a big term in the index to Boyle's book, so I plan to pay attention to that. </span></li>
<li><b>Find the book's social context.</b> Do a social search on your book. This will in part help you learn about the topic and the book's content, but at this stage you are looking for who cares about the book. What are the types of people or organizations that review or reference this book? Search on Twitter, on Google+, on Facebook, and on Diigo. Consider using the book's author or a topical hashtag as part of your search. Then, make another heading in your blog post draft, "Who Cares?" and give a short paragraph that reports on the book's social context.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: "I tried to find people reading Boyle's book on Twitter but found nothing. So I tried the hashtag #publicdomain and it led me to tweets from educators showing great enthusiasm about audiobooks that are in the public domain at librivox, and to news about Getty Images making a lot of their photo archives freely available. I also noticed some other hashtags people used along with #publicdomain, such as #openculture and #dailypublicdomain. Now I want to follow up on those. Since I want to find people who are into public domain issues, I made a Twitter list and added several people (and organizations) to the list that had interesting tweets about public domain. I don't know if they have read Boyle's book, but they are obviously actively discussing the idea of the public domain. Now I'm following @publicdomain, as well as @publicdomainfootage. It's clear people are very excited to have lots of content to play with in their visualizations, videos, and other creative things. When I searched for Boyle's book on diigo, it led me to bookmarks that include Boyle's own website called www.thepublicdomain.org. It looks like he also maintains an intellectual property page at Duke University. Looks like I can follow the author's most current thinking on things through his blog. On Diigo I also looked up some of the people that had curated bookmarks referring to Boyle's book. So, now I'm following Claire Brooks and Phillip Long (chosen in part by the list of tags that these users have commonly used).</span></li>
<li><b>Find formal reviews</b>. Find and read a couple of formal published reviews of your book. Use the search term "review" plus the book title and author -- either on Google or via a library catalog. Use these formal reviews as another way of previewing the book before reading it. Take notes, make another heading for your draft blog post, "Formal Reviews," and make a short paragraph.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: Using BYU's library, I found a 2011 review essay that included not only Boyle's book, but a couple other books that I'd seen in Boyle's bibliography and in the recommended books from my Amazon and Google searches, including Tim Wu's The Master Switch (The review is by Lucas Graves in a publication called <i>Global Media and Communication</i>, and luckily the full text was online). Wow, this was helpful, since the reviewer covers Boyle's book succinctly and refers to other major experts in the field. Since I'm looking for people connected to topics, I wrote the list of "scholar-advocates" that Graves mentions: Lawrence Lessig, Jessica Litman, and Siva Vaidnayayathan. I'm going to have to check them out. Graves boiled down the book to a single claim, "that the reigning 'maximalist' conception of intellectual property -- in which enhancing property rights always produces more innovation - systematically undervalues something the constitutional authors of copyright and patent understood quite well: the need to preserve a flourishing cultural and scientific common....Second...that maximalist consensus has only been sharpened by widespread fears of apocalyptic digital piracy, at precisely the technological moment when global computer networks have rendered the intellectual commons more valuable."</span></li>
<li><b>Find informal reviews</b>. Use <a href="http://www.google.com/blogsearch" target="_blank">Google Blog Search</a> and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/" target="_blank">Goodreads</a> to find informal reviews of the book you are reading. Create a new heading, "Informal Reviews," and comment.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: I found <a href="http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/11/30/the-public-domain-by-james-boyle/" target="_blank">a review</a> of Boyle's The Public Domain on a blog called Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Through it, I found out that Boyle is a founding board member of Creative Commons. That's an organization that I keep running into references about when researching the public domain. The review also included a two-paragraph quote that sums up the book (useful!) that includes his claim "We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it." This intrigued me. Is knowledge really under threat in the digital age? Is this just alarmism? When I searched for reviews of this book on Goodreads, I came across a review from "Bettie" that had a rather blunt statement: "The web was created for science and it works for porn, shoes, twits, farce and books but really stymies science information because of bizarre intelligence bars." Ouch, how can this be? Are we really deciding as a society to let the worst or most superficial stuff circulate online while restricting learned communication? Is the web a threat to science, rather than aid, due to copyright laws?? I liked another Goodreads review from someone named Bruce Sanders, so I clicked through and saw what books he's been reading and reviewing. One of them is called Open Access by Peter Suber. Looks very relevant to my topic. I looked up Suber and he runs an open access blog and is a big authority on all of this.</span></li>
<li><b>Find courses using your book</b>. Do a Google search restricted to .edu domains (educational institutions) and include the word "syllabus" plus the title of your book (like this: james boyle public domain site:.edu). See if any courses are using that book in order to find more context for the book.<br />Example: "I found a wiki associated with a course called 'Open Source Culture" from Spring 2012 at Brown University. Just the list of weekly topics looked awesome. I want to learn more about "found footage," "hack studio," and remix. </li>
<li><b>Find audio, video, or images related to your book.</b> Search YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and other media sources to find references to your topic. View or listen to some of this material, then making a new heading for your blog post, "Multimedia," and report on your findings.<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: I found James Boyle's book on Audible and decided to go ahead and buy it (after all, I saved money from having to buy the book since he put it up for free in the public domain!). In listening to the accounts of popular culture and how it has thrived through a constant reuse of past material, it made me realize how much companies are locking down creativity that has always been there -- because now they can do so through some sophisticated and automated ways.</span></li>
<li><b>Read your book for one hour.</b> Based on all the previewing you have done of the book through these ways, now go back to the book itself and read it -- intelligently and selectively. Look for passages that seem representative of the author's overall point(s), and seek out subtopics of interest to you. You should have a more informed first experience with the book in this way. Copy out key passages that you can then include in yet another section of your blog post, "First Impressions of the Book."<br /><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Example: After all that I read so far, I found myself most drawn to chapters 3 and 8 in Boyle's book (about "The Second Enclosure Movement" and about "A Creative Commons" so I have been reading those more closely. This has made me realize how much market forces are at work in constraining what circulates online and whether people have a right to reuse it. I never appreciated how strong the business aspect of this is, as well as the legal aspect. </span></li>
<li><b>Post and Notify</b>. Review what you've found in the previous steps, reflect and comment on this in a "My Thinking So Far" section to conclude this blog post. State what you intend to do next in your reading of the book and in your researching of the topic. Post your finished post (with appropriate labels, of course), and be sure to notify your social graph (on Google+ etc.) that you have done so. Ask for feedback.</li>
<li><b>Give Feedback</b>. Read two other students' in-progress posts and give feedback through comments.</li>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-89277634942404587442013-10-07T11:05:00.000-07:002013-10-10T21:08:09.256-07:00Digital Culture Topics to DateAs I ask students to be reflective about their learning, I in turn will be reflective about teaching digital culture. These are the readings / media we've read or watched so far, and the topics that go with them. I've added questions likely to be asked of my students. (Recordings for class lectures can be found <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/folder/azby80b5i73eq/Eng_326_Fall_2013_(Digital_Culture)">here</a>.):<br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/michael-weschs-machine-is-using-us.html">Michael Wesch’s “The Web is Us/ing Us”</a><br />How does hypertext differ from written text? How does XML differ from HTML? What is Web 2.0? What does Wesch mean in saying we are the machine, or that we are teaching the machine?</li>
<li><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/">Digital Culture Wiki</a><i><br />What is a topic that you browsed in the digital culture wiki that covers an issue in digital culture we may not have covered in class? </i></li>
<li>“<a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-call-for-digital-explorers.html">A Call for Digital Explorers</a>”<br /><i>What kind of exploring was exemplified in the video shown in this post? How have you explored digital culture this semester? If we are already inundated with info and distracted all the time, why should we explore or how can we do this meaningfully? </i></li>
<li><a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/digital-literacy-consume-create-connect.html">Digital Literacy: Consume, Create, Connect</a><br /><i>What are one or two questions surrounding the principle of consuming, as mentioned in the Prezi presentation? Similarly, for creating and for connecting? What is a tool that you have tried, or might try, for consuming content, for creating media, or for connecting better online? Did you look at any of the tools listed in the Backpack 2.0 site?</i></li>
<li><a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/digital-culture-overview.html">Digital Culture: An Overview</a> </li>
<ul>
<li><i>In Dr. Burton’s Prezi presentation and lecture, he cites Charlie Gere’s definition of “digital culture.” What is something Gere lists in digital culture that we have not yet learned about in class OR that you have learned and blogged about? </i></li>
<li><i>What were the two distinct sense by which Dr. Burton described the digital as historical?</i></li>
<li><i>Give an example of one field (besides music) in which the digital has introduced disruption.</i></li>
<li><i>Describe one digital subculture </i></li>
<li><i>Explain a new or emerging digital genre </i></li>
<li><i>Give an example of one of the core tensions of digital culture mentioned</i></li>
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<ul>
<li>“<a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/collaborative-creativity-and.html">Collaborative Creativity and Crowdsourcing</a>”<br /><i>How is Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir an example of digital creative collaboration? Describe the three types of crowd labor Dr. Burton mentioned in his crowdsourcing presentation. Describe the types of laborers these correlate with, and the types of compensation available. Which of these types of crowdsourcing is the LDS church involved in? What is an example of a non-LDS crowdsourcing platform? </i></li>
<li>“<a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-power-of-long-tail-in-digital.html">The Power of the Long Tail in Digital Culture</a>” | “<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html">The Long Tail</a>” (Anderson)<br /><i>What is the long tail? Why is this concept essential for understanding digital culture? Can you explain what the long tail is either for formats or for one of the long tails listed at the end of this post? </i></li>
<li>"<a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-three-phases-of-academic-blogging.html">The Three Phases of Academic Blogging</a>" | “Chasing the White Whale of Literary Blogging" (chapter 2 of <a href="http://thedigitalwriter.blogspot.com/p/ebook.html">this ebook</a>. 3) <br /><i>Name and describe the three phases of academic blogging, and be prepared to indicate what your plans are to move your blogging along these phases. What are some of the benefits of blogging as described in Burton’s chapter? </i></li>
<li><a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/10/consider-spiral.html">Consider the Spiral</a><br /><i>How does the concept of the spiral, as described by Burton, tie in with the concept of social proof? </i></li>
<li>Digital Culture and Video Games (from lecture 9-26-13)<br /><i>What are some of the reasons we should take video games seriously today? </i></li>
<li><a href="http://prezi.com/dtvqlmns_gqd/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share">Socially Optimized Research</a> (from lecture 10-2-13)<br /><i>What are the steps in a socially optimized research strategy? How does this fit into academic blogging or the process of developing finished or formal content?</i></li>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-49652531317689195742013-09-30T10:40:00.002-07:002013-09-30T10:57:08.327-07:00The Three Phases of Academic Blogging<div>
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As I have taught blogging to students over several years, I've noted that the best academic blogging happens in three distinct phases. This post is written for those who are in phase one of academic blogging and preparing to take it to the next level.</div>
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While I am describing the blogging of undergraduates in literature, I believe these phases to be just as relevant for students in general and for scholars of all disciplines. (See, for example, how Jessie Daniels describes <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/09/25/how-to-be-a-scholar-daniels/" target="_blank">going from a tweet, to a blog, to a published scholarly article</a>). </div>
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<i>Elsewhere I have written on <a href="http://teamshakespeare.blogspot.com/2012/11/using-twitter-for-academic-research.html">using Twitter for academic research</a>. While I am not focusing in this post on such microblogging services as Twitter and Google+, they are a significant means for finding and testing ideas and can greatly complement academic blogging. </i></div>
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Blogging doesn't automagically result in anything. It requires thought and discipline to lead to something worthwhile academically. It can. Here's how.<br />
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<u>Phase One: Exploration</u></div>
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In this initial phase blogging was probably new to you, and you were learning the basics of how to post and what to write about. You were learning how to incorporate media and links, and to design your posts for readability (following a journalist's rhetorical approach of front-loading your ideas, and making use of visual layout tools). The frequency of your posting was determined by an assigned number of posts rather than anything more organic. As for the content of your posts, you have been experimenting with topics, but mostly responding to current lectures and readings. There may be analysis, but of a tentative and exploratory nature--not particularly definitive or rigorous. Interaction with others has consisted mostly of responding to other students' or to instructor posts. You've also been experimenting with tone, trying out the informal and personal approach that makes online content more inviting, even while trying to say things that are meaningful from an educational point of view. </div>
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Success in this phase can be seen in terms of frequency of posting, an openness to experimenting with form and topics, and generating a critical mass of content from which more developed content can arise. Across your posts can be seen emerging themes and prospective claims. Success in this phase is also related to fashioning a bit of an identity -- at least a characteristic style, approach, or set of topics. This is an identifiable ethos for your writing. You are most promising as a blogger at this phase if people recognize you as being committed to and interested in certain ideas and if you are responsive to others -- explicitly referring to and building upon their work. You're not just a solo thinker and writer.</div>
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<u>Phase Three: Launch</u></div>
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I am passing over phase two momentarily just so that you can be pointed toward an ultimate destination for your academic blogging. You are going to launch something -- put something into broader circulation that you have developed during the middle phase of your academic blogging. This will be formalized into a recognizable genre that can be valued independently of your blog. For example, you submit a manuscript for publication, or you submit an abstract for a conference presentation, or you make something else that can stand on its own. This requires finding communities that are actively interested in the topic you've been developing and it means qualifying your work to be introduced to such a community. In short, the final outcome of the very informal medium of blogging is to succeed in a more formal venue beyond it. </div>
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Success in this last phase can largely be measured in terms of being taken seriously by serious communities (academic or otherwise). It is most evident when others evidently refer to and build upon your finished and published content, but is also evident when gatekeepers or professionals legitimize your content in some formal way (peer review, an acceptance, an invitation to speak or publish, etc.). Other measures of success can include this content leading to employment or academic opportunities, or one being consulted as an expert (even if one is not a PhD!).</div>
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How do you get to this point? Through the very important second phase of academic blogging.</div>
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<u>Phase Two: Development</u></div>
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Academic blogging requires one at some point to <u>apply some discipline to one's thinking and some structure to ones content</u>. It means going beyond Op-Ed type editorializing and the casual observation. During phase two of academic blogging, randomness goes down and coherence goes up as you pare down the breadth of your exploration and aim now for depth. You are reflective, returning to prior posts and identifying the themes and potential arguments latent in them, and creating subsequent posts that pull together those ideas, restating and clarifying them -- setting aside many things you could comment on superficially so that you can narrow and deepen. It is much like the middle phase of traditional academic writing -- but not entirely, as you should note.</div>
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In this phase the academic blogger digs deeper into ideas and texts, <u>analyzing primary texts and bringing to bear secondary texts</u>. Books begin to appear in one's writing, and quotations, and serious sources of any other variety. This does not mean that one reverts to traditional, paper-based writing. Blog posts can still be short, and individual posts need not be tightly coherent (as the paragraphs of formal academic prose should be). Posts can include images, video, and media beyond text. But what is present in this phase is that sense of discipline -- one is controlling and cultivating content, and reaching for authoritative content, including from standard academic disciplines and publications, to buttress one's thinking. </div>
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Phase two is also characterized by <u>curation</u>: you explicitly bring together data, media, lists, or other components that provide some of the organized information that you are analyzing or referencing. One might create a wiki, or an annotated bibliography, or a slideshow. There is evidence of organizing material that is not necessarily a discursive essay or even a finalized, finished product (like traditional published bibliographies). Academic bloggers embrace in-process knowledge products that are provisional and purposeful (and others can also profit from this "para-scholarship," too).</div>
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Above all, this phase is characterized by something almost entirely absent from the writing process of traditional, print-based scholarship: <u>social proof</u>. (See this <a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/ignite-your-ideas-with-social-proof.html">post about social proof</a>). Following a launch-and-iterate model, you try out your ideas in short form in front of various audiences, getting feedback from others that proves there is interest in your idea enough to take it to another level. This goes hand in hand with researching and reading, which the academic blogger never limits to the dead audiences of print or texts. You research online and in-person communities where your subjects are being discussed and you target individuals within those communities with whom you interact -- offering informed responses to their content in expectation of reciprocation. The academic blogger is not a private writer. He or she connects with multiple people and audiences in order to vet his or her ideas in process, and not simply when ideas have taken a finished form. </div>
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Before long the randomness of posts pretty much drops away and every post is about some aspect of developing this focused content and targeting it to those who care about it.<br />
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<u>Getting from Phase One to Phase Two</u><br />
I've seen many people get stuck in their academic blogging. They fall into a rhythm of reposting isn't-that-cool media and a series of casual opinions and first-level analysis, but they don't advance their thinking or organize their thoughts. At a certain point I just don't take someone seriously as a blogger (for purposes of advancing learning) if that person is content with making endless, not-that-connected, observations. Let's start getting somewhere.<br />
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My first suggestion for moving from Phase One to Phase to is to circle back to one's existing content and to one's half-developed ideas. This is something I describe thoroughly in a separate post, "<a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/10/consider-spiral.html">Consider the Spiral</a>." My next suggestion is to make use of books -- to find the ones that are current on the topics in question and to use those books as a way not simply of making more informed observations, but of finding and developing social connections (with other readers of such books, or even with the authors of those books). See my "<a href="http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com/2010/09/ten-ways-to-bring-books-into-your.html">Ten Ways to Bring Books into Your Digital Life</a>" (or the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeBExPaPq-Q">video version</a>) and "<a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/beyond-book-report-better-book.html">Beyond the Book Report: Better Book Practices in the Digital Age</a>." For an example of connecting with an author, see the example of a student, Neal, in my post, "<a href="http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com/2010/11/social-discovery.html">Social Discovery</a>."<br />
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<u>Conclusion</u></div>
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That returns us to Phase Three (above). While this may seem to be a way of using blogging to produce traditional academic outputs, it is not. By using a social medium in an appropriate way, in the end, academic blogging really becomes less about content or even publication; it really ends up being a form of entry into various communities who value serious thought about serious subjects.</div>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-47266921582933243522013-09-24T12:24:00.001-07:002013-09-24T12:28:45.903-07:00The Power of the Long Tail in Digital Culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"I celebrate the tail," says Ishmael in a chapter devoted to the flukes of whales in <i>Moby Dick</i>. I wish to celebrate, metaphorically, the concept of the "long tail" as a key way of understanding digital culture.<br />
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In a whale's tail, Ishmael explains, "the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point." As we take stock of the new powers unleashed on the world through ubiquitous computing and a liquid market for information, the "long tail" effect first described by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine may be among the most influential forces of the digital order.<br />
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So, what is this "long tail"? <b>The "long tail" boils down to being a way to talk about both diversity of content and a new dynamics of demand for that content that has been opened up through digital means. </b><br />
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The term was coined and popularized by Chris Anderson beginning with a <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html">2004 article in Wired magazine</a> which he then expanded into <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2574.The_Long_Tail">a book</a> by the same name. <br />
<a name='more'></a>A "long tail" is a power curve statistical distribution that includes a "head" (items to the left that represent the most demand) and a "tail" (the sloping curve that represents quickly diminishing demand). As a business opportunity, it is now more possible to service the "long tail" of the distribution curve; that is, due to virtual shelving of either physical or electronic goods, retailers no longer have to keep their set of available wares limited to what could fit into a brick-and-mortar store. Moreover, this availability is changing the nature of demand, as people become accustomed to finding or consuming more than the most popular items in any given field.<br />
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To put this another way, the long tail refers to increased and differentiated demand across myriad niche interests and markets newly available in the digital age due to the amplified availability of products, services, or digital content previously limited by physical restraints. The phrase also refers to the opportunities available due to this shift in attention dynamics. In short, we are all getting comfortable with there being a vastly expanded variety of content, goods, and services because we are readily able to find and obtain those things through the various online platforms. And since the internet can leverage niche interests, those niches can be served as never before (commercially or otherwise). This is an opportunity for those producing niche content, goods, and services; and it is equally an opportunity for those seeking and consuming the same.<br />
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The long tail is an essential concept for understanding digital culture because it helps to explain how subcultures are thriving and how markets and business models are evolving today to adjust to long-tail dynamics. The long tail is a result of networked information, recommendation engines, and content platforms -- and it in turn drives the success of these essential components of the digital infrastructure.<br />
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<b>It's not about "hits" anymore</b><br />
Pre-internet culture, Anderson explains, was dominated by "hits" -- the items that were most popular or profitable. This is understandable. If you own a store, wouldn't you stock it with that 20% of available merchandise that yields 80% of your profit? Today, however, vendors can offer items "down the long tail" -- the non-hits. Sure, the great percentage of sales will still go to the popular hits. However, increasingly, enough of the sales go cumulatively to the various niche products now available that the long tail of niche goods is now in competition with the head, that 20% that gets the 80% of sales. And when a market is profitable, it tends to grow. And thus we see that lots of retailers are now emerging to service the long tail. Because the internet reaches so many people, it isn't necessary to try to capture even a large percentage of online shoppers in order to be profitable.<br />
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<b>Example: Down the Long Tail of Music via Recommendation Engines</b><br />
Today I went to the best-sellers list of songs on Amazon.com. At the number one spot, Katy Perry's "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roar/dp/B00EH49FRE/ref=zg_bs_digital-music-track_1" target="_blank">Roar</a>." <br />
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I click on it and on that product's page I see the familiar prompt at the bottom, "Customers Who bought This Also Bought."<br />
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I swipe through a few screens of those recommendations and happen upon an artist named Lana Del Rey. I click on her "Summer Sadness" and notice that this track is quite a ways down the list of top songs, ranking at #855 in mp3 song sales. </div>
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I sort of like it, but it is easy to keep exploring, so I do the same thing as I did with the Katy Perry song, I end up browsing the "Customers who bought this..." recommendations. I click on a song by The Script, a group I'd never heard of. Their "The Man Who Can't Be Moved" is only 69 cents (half the price of the songs higher up on the list I was browsing), so there's an economic motive to give an unknown group a shot. Note that this song is even further down the best seller rank, at #1,660.<br />
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From there, I followed the auto-recommendations again until I came to Citizen Cope (another I'd never heard of), who has a best seller ranking of #4,177. I do this again, finding a group called Bosnian Rainbows (at ranking #21,556) whose recommendations take me to Brazos' album Saltwater (ranked #59,260), landing finally (and somewhat ironically) at a track on that album called "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CRDES10/ref=dm_dp_trk3" target="_blank">How the Ranks Was Won</a>"-- I am far, far away from anything that would ever play on popular radio stations like the Katy Perry song I started with.</div>
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So, within only a few minutes, I am experiencing more music that is outside of the top 100 than anything all that popular. The "hits" are the obvious items on the surface of digital culture. But we love to sound the depths of sound. Music is one of the main exemplars of the long tail phenomenon. Perhaps you, also, are experiencing music that is slightly (or very) obscure because you also followed the long tail of recommendations? I know my son listens to Icelandic music and other European artists that make up a far more diverse playlist for his age than the dozen best-seller bands for which I had vinyl albums in the 70s and 80s. </div>
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The long tail invites us to be explorers, and the various content platforms of today make going down the long tail a natural and enjoyable (and profitable) thing for all involved. Haven't you gone down the long tail of music through a platform like iTunes, or Amazon, or Pandora, or SoundCloud, or last.fm, or Rhapsody?</div>
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<b>Not Just Music, Not Just Digital</b></div>
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And the thing is, following the long tail is a common occurrence-- not just with music, but with books and other merchandise. And not just with commercial products, but with information products. I've discovered recipes that I wasn't looking for with ingredients I would never before have purchased, because these were a few clicks away from something very standard that I started with. And while long tail dynamics work easiest with natively digital products, they also work with non-electronic things, too. One can follow the long tail of shoes, or crafts, a myriad of others physical things.</div>
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<b>The Long Tail of Formats and Products</b></div>
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Not only can content, goods, and services be found that serve niche interests, but the same platforms and recommendation engines that drive discovery of new things also drives the discovery, production, and consumption of new forms and formats for the same things. In other words, the power of the long tail is in all kinds of diversity.</div>
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For example, if I search for "Moby Dick" on Amazon, I will encounter multiple formats and editions of the text itself -- <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Classics-Celebrities-Series/dp/1433205505/ref=sr_1_87?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048974&sr=8-87&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">audiobook versions</a>, Kindle eBook versions, illustrated versions, scholarly editions, collector editions, comic book versions, a children's board book edition, editions in foreign languages, etc. One of my favorites is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Pictures-Drawing-Every-Page/dp/1935639137" target="_blank"><i>Moby Dick in Pictures</i></a> by Matt Kish. I was also intrigued by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Rehearsed-Orson-Welles/dp/0573612420/ref=sr_1_47?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048511&sr=8-47&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">a dramatic adaption</a> of Moby Dick by Orson Welles, a Moby Dick <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Screenplay-Ray-Bradbury/dp/1596061804/ref=sr_1_183?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049435&sr=8-183&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">screenplay by Ray Bradbury</a>, and by a book about <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Participatory-Culture-Moby-Dick-ebook/dp/B00CJI3QBQ/ref=sr_1_92?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048974&sr=8-92&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">remixing Moby Dick</a> in the English classroom.</div>
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But I am also taken to various film adaptations of Moby Dick, and to Moby Dick music (of many varieties, from sound tracks and opera adaptations to this <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick/dp/B0011Z1E62/ref=sr_1_37?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048511&sr=8-37&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">Led Zeppelin track</a> called "Moby Dick"). But that's not all! I can get a Moby Dick <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Poster-Typography-inches/dp/B00CNZTE4I/ref=sr_1_46?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048511&sr=8-46&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">poster</a>, a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Out-Print-Vintage-Inspired-T-Shirt/dp/B003LR6QCA/ref=sr_1_45?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048511&sr=8-45&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">Moby Dick T-shirt</a>, an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eco-Fused-Case-Apple-Eco-Fused%C2%AE-Microfiber/dp/B00A47CGJM/ref=sr_1_48?ie=UTF8&qid=1380048511&sr=8-48&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">iPhone case</a> that looks like a leather-bound edition of Moby Dick (or a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Rubber-Silicone-Case-Whale/dp/B00DNJB4KA/ref=sr_1_190?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049435&sr=8-190&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">silicone iPhone case</a> with whale and ship on the back), a Moby Dick model ship, Moby Dick postage stamps, Moby Dick baseball cards, Moby Dick video games, and Moby Dick charm bracelets. There are Moby Dick <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Banpresto-Grandline-Volume-Action-1-Piece/dp/B00CN97B94/ref=sr_1_195?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049620&sr=8-195&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">action figures</a>, door knockers, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Florene-Nursery-Rhymes-Fairytales-Vintage/dp/B00CYQVULG/ref=sr_1_160?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049313&sr=8-160&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">light switch covers</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Florene-Nursery-Rhymes-Fairytales-Vintage/dp/B00CYQWLI2/ref=sr_1_166?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049370&sr=8-166&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">mouse pads</a>. I was a bit disappointed not to find a Moby Dick branded harpoon, but I was consoled to find Moby Dick themed <a href="http://www.amazon.com/14g-12g-10g-Single-Button-Jewelry-Purple/dp/B0052TXE3O/ref=sr_1_180?ie=UTF8&qid=1380049435&sr=8-180&keywords=moby+dick" target="_blank">belly button jewelry</a> sold by a company named Painful Pleasures.</div>
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This may seem to be a sad commentary on the kitsch of popular culture, but look at from the point of view of format diversity and the ease with which one can find it. One of the main points Anderson makes is that the long tail includes a greater quantity of low quality things. But that is the tradeoff from being stuck with the smaller set of (supposedly) higher quality "hits." There is an ocean of substandard stuff, but the point is that with databases, internet connections, and recommendation algorithms, we can harness the power of the long tail until it is a thing of beauty and power, just as Ishmael considered an actual whale's tail to be. You might have to click past some Moby Dick belly button jewelry in order to find those adaptations of the novel by Orson Welles or Ray Bradbury. But it's worth it. Just as the whalers of old had to boil down the blubber of whales to obtain the useful oil hidden within it, we can use powerful search engines and recommendation algorithms to refine our finding amid the murky plenitude of the long tail.</div>
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<b>The Long Tail of the Long Tail</b></div>
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The most obvious long tails are the commercial examples offered by Anderson. But ever since he floated this idea in 2006, people have explored various long tails well beyond online commerce or marketing. See, for example, these discussions of "the long tail" of many different phenomena:</div>
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<ul style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<li><a href="http://www.mendix.com/blog/is-there-a-long-tail-for-apps/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of apps</a></li>
<li><a href="http://thelongtailofbanking.com/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of banking</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.windley.com/archives/2012/05/unlocking_data_exchange_the_long_tail_of_data.shtml" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of data</a></li>
<li><a href="http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/the-very-long-tail-of-science/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of science</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.academicevolution.com/2010/02/scholarly-communications-must-transform-9.html" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of scholarship</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-10-how-thick-is-your-head-and-how-long-is-your-tail/" rel="nofollow" style="color: #551a8b;" target="_blank">the long tail of search</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/08/1billion-odeskskillslongtail/" target="_blank">the long tail of skills</a></li>
</ul>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-46629367791100179072013-09-18T17:07:00.000-07:002013-09-18T17:07:33.574-07:00Collaborative Creativity and CrowdsourcingWe began today by considering technological utopianism and a positive sense of possibility to be had through technology today. I referenced the Renaissance and the romantic views of travel and that animated the European imagination and ultimately led to America as a kind of place of possibility.<br />
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In the spirit of optimism about technology, I asked students to read "<a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-call-for-digital-explorers.html">A Call for Digital Explorers</a>" which included this video about someone figuring out how to launch a camera into space:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/15091562" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://vimeo.com/15091562">Homemade Spacecraft</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user3539560">Luke Geissbuhler</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</span></div>
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I also showed this short video of a woman regaining her hearing:<br />
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I then showed Eric Whitacre's virtual choir and walked through how that came to be. Please <a href="http://bravenewdigital.blogspot.com/2012/09/creativity-and-big-picture-for-new-media.html">see this blog pos</a>t which details all of that. For the rest of the lecture<br />
<a name='more'></a>I talked through Crowdsourcing, as well as LDS "Member"-sourcing. See these two Prezi presentations, and <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/listen/ka2ess9y8avkcm5/Digital_Culture_05_(9-18-2013).mp3" target="_blank">listen to the lecture here</a> if you are interested.<br />
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Crowdsourcing:<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://prezi.com/embed/bpcvsmc7-j9m/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined" width="550"></iframe><br />
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Membersourcing:<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://prezi.com/embed/cywt54ficsyc/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined" width="550"></iframe><br /></div>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-59549872032954688602013-09-16T11:01:00.000-07:002013-09-16T11:01:00.721-07:00Emerging Themes in Moby Dick and Digital CultureI'm always pleased at the way students are able to latch onto key themes even very early into a semester. Here is an index to a few such ideas as we have begun to explore both <i>Moby Dick</i> the novel and Digital Culture the phenomenon. I've added my own thought questions connected to each idea, and hope that some of you will carry the conversation forward:<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Isolation</b><br />In his "<a href="http://teamahab.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-sea-and-solitude.html">The Sea and Solitude" post</a>, Greg Bayles comments that "<i>Moby Dick</i> is full of disconnected, discontented strangers." He links this to "connectivity and how modern technology is shrinking the gaps between individuals." <i>Do you find technology increases or decreases the distance between you and others?</i></li>
<li><b>Collaboration</b><br /><a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-and-education.html">Mele related an experience</a> in which a teacher, upset with how technology isolates, required students to do group work. The students ended up using online collaborative tools like Google Docs. <i>How is digital culture changing the way that people work together?</i></li>
<li><b>Categorizing</b><br />Dr. Wickman's lecture, problematizing the genre of Moby Dick, illustrates how much we rely upon categories to make sense of things. <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/moby-dick-and-literary-canon.html">Amber</a> (in a response to a post by Kayla) claims that "novel" (meaning "new") is most appropriate for such an experimental piece of prose such as Moby Dick. <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/09/moby-dick-novel.html">Victoria</a> devotes a thoughtful post to whether Moby Dick is a novel. She sounds a lot like Ishmael at the close of his Cetology chapter when she states "Perhaps we have gone down the wrong path with constantly trying to categorize everything." Her post led to a follow-up post by <a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-new-response-to-moby-dick-novel.html">Brittany</a> who explores the concept of the new and how both the form and content of Moby Dick take us into novelty. <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/classifying-literature-and-blogs.html">Amber in turn responds</a>, suggesting that our classifications are in flux and we therefore ought to consider blogs to be a category of literature. <i>How fitting is the novel as an art form in the digital age? Where do we see categorizing happening within Moby Dick? within digital culture? What is to be gained by being more inclusive in our literary categories? What lost?<a name='more'></a></i></li>
<li><b>Immersion</b><a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/humanizing-digital-age.html">Kylee calls attention</a> to the fact that we are immersed in digital culture. This, of course, plays off of the water metaphor already at work with the Internet ("surfing") and connects us with the water imagery from Moby Dick. In her post, <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/whats-in-tail.html">Lizy claims</a> that "while a book can completely immerse you, the internet will only immerse you as deep as you want to go."<i>Just how do print culture and digital culture differ in how they immerse you? Also, if immersion means a lack of being able to get objective distance, how can we know digital culture unless we can detach from it somehow?</i></li>
<li><b>User-Generated Content</b><br />Connected with the theme of immersion, <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/etymology-extractsexplain.html">Kelsey claims</a> that Melville's extracts and etymologies in Moby Dick are there to create "an environment that we can become lost in." But she connects this with the content that we post online. By posting our media we help create an online environment that others can share in (or be confused by). <i>Is the internet much like Melville's thematic but random etymology and extracts? Are we helping or making the problem worse by feeding the machine? </i></li>
<li><b>Memes</b><br />A specific kind of user-generated content that has become its own phenomenon is the meme. <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/me-and-my-memes.html">Lizy introduces the topic of memes</a>, showing some of her own that she has created. <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-tangentially-important-fun-facts.html">Kayla</a> used a meme to introduce herself, and in a comment on that post Victoria expresses her pleasure at posting memes on Pinterest. "Sometimes I wish real life had a meme button just so I could explain things with a clear picture," she says. <i>Behind their apparent silliness, what aspect of digital culture do memes reflect? Are they an efficient / authentic mode of communication?</i></li>
<li><b>Identity</b><br /><a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/first-impressions.html">Mele claims</a> that "in a digital world, if we use it correctly, it gives people the opportunity to express their true individual identities" and defends the online environment as a place where we can define how others see us. But <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/online-identity-happily-undefined.html">Mary directly opposes</a> the way online profiles, etc. force one who does not wish to be defined to be categorized (and perhaps limited). She says "online identities are little more than carefully-crafted packaging that attracts interaction with onlookers but doesn't authentically communicate what's inside the box." <i>Does the online environment give us less or more control over how we are seen by others? Does it threaten or promote authenticity in self-representation or in our communication with others?</i></li>
<li><b>Anonymity</b><br />In a response to <a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-digital-culture-of-temple-square.html">a post by Kelsey</a>, Mary points out that Kelsey's story (about someone only feeling comfortable investigating Mormonism while at a digital distance from missionaries) illustrates the positive side to anonymity online. <i>How important is it to have online anonymity, especially when this is so often used as a way of not being directly responsible for one's words or online actions?</i></li>
<li><b>Avatars, Personas and Profiles</b><br />A major way that identity is (re)configured in digital culture is via various kinds of avatars, adopted personas, and profile pages. "Call me Ishmael," Melville's opening line to Moby Dick, reminds us of the arbitrary nature of names as well as the partiality we can expect from any one person's point of view. I found it interesting that several students imitated Melville's line in introducing themselves: "<a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/call-me-eliza.html">Call me Eliza</a>"; "<a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/call-me-kylee.html">Call me Kylee</a>"; and Heidi opted for an avatar of herself, playfully inviting readers to "<a href="http://teamstarbuck.blogspot.com/2013/09/call-me-oatmeal.html">Call me Oatmeal</a>." <a href="http://teamqueequeg.blogspot.com/2013/09/reflecting-on-my-internet-persona.html">Derrick</a> wrote a thoughtful post about how he has developed an online persona with which he isn't entirely happy. Also, <a href="http://teamstarbuck.blogspot.com/2013/09/who-are-we-coming-across-as.html">Ariel</a> found a video that explored the concept of our second (digital) self. Brittany explored her own identity crisis in "<a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/09/show-us.html">Show Us</a>." <i>How do you define or represent yourself differently online? Are these subtle versions of the same named identity, or do you use avatars (screen names, gravatars, visual representations that do not reflect your actual identity? What freedoms and what dangers come with self-disclosure or with adopting virtual / other identities?</i></li>
<li><b>Fan Culture</b><br /><a href="http://teamishmael.blogspot.com/2013/09/comic-con-digital-culture-convention.html">Reporting on her participation in Comic Con</a>, Kylee makes the claim that fan culture is emerging from digital culture, providing life to a variety of subcultures that were evident in this live event. Victoria gives fan culture a close look in her post, "<a href="http://teamstubb.blogspot.com/2013/09/fandoms.html">Fandoms</a>."</li>
<li><b>Digital Humanities</b><br /><a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/dight-what.html">Eliza owned up to studying the digital humanities</a> as a minor, and proffered this definition: " 'Digital Humanities' encompasses learning certain web skills, like basic code literacy, and learning how to reach people and reading people and our changing culture online. It tries to analyze and work with the culture and opportunities online. <i>What is the relationship between the digital humanities and digital culture more broadly?</i></li>
<li><b>Moby Dick in Popular Culture</b><br />Eliza showed us <a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/dight-what.html">clips from Matilda referencing Moby Dick</a>. In comments, Victoria admitted that Matilda was her first exposure to Moby Dick. Amber, in the same comment thread, said X-Files was her first exposure to the great novel.</li>
<li><b>(Un)civilized</b><br />Obviously Moby Dick includes a critique of Christian ethnocentricism within Ishmael's encounter with Queequeg). This is a topic brought up by Mary ("<a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/ive-read-moby-dick-once-before-in-my.html">A Christian Savage and Christian Savagery</a>"). The encounter with The Other is a profound question often explored in literature. As it relates to digital culture, we encounter so many different wild regions (virtually, socially) that it makes us ask the question of "what is it to be civilized?" repeatedly as our values bump up against others. <i>Where is the digital wild? Who are the Queequegs that we are perhaps misjudging from our own partial point of view across the digital landscape?</i></li>
<li><b>Disorder and Digression</b><br /><a href="http://teamflask.blogspot.com/2013/09/syntax-of-moby-dick-and-internet.html">Amber</a> calls attention to the jumbled nature of the language in Moby Dick and compares this to digital culture. There is a manifest lack of order in the digressions and even the sentences of Ishmael; there is also disorder and a general casualness about the content people post online. <i>What are the forces toward disorder in digital culture? What counterbalances are there to these?</i></li>
</ul>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-33969195897732240462013-09-13T09:43:00.000-07:002013-09-13T14:13:15.421-07:00Thinking about Moby Dick alongside Digital CultureI thought my colleague <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/2013/09/digital-culture-overview.html">Gideon Burton's presentation</a> on digital culture was tremendous. The previous meeting, members of our class will recall, I introduced <i>Moby Dick</i>. And on the surface, those two subjects are very different.<br />
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But then again, they're provocative to consider alongside one another -- even before we get to the digital afterlife of Melville's text. In our initial discussion of <i>Moby Dick</i>, we posed the question of how to categorize that text, and ultimately, and with the help of <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/theory-novel/preface.htm">Georg Lukacs</a>, placed it somewhere between epic and novel. Such categories tend not to mean much when taken as ends in themselves, but they open new avenues for thought when imagined as windows onto intellectual and literary history. Here we must ask ourselves some interesting questions about the breadth and depth of human expression. For example, what is the logic behind different literary and rhetorical forms? Why do they develop? What do they imply? In the case of <i>Moby Dick</i>, we said, the tensions between epic and novel tell us something not only about literature, but also about the history of the idea of technology, even converting Melville's text into a technology in its own right.<br />
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This is important to bear in mind in a class that perhaps reflexively equates technology with digital culture. So next week, we'll pick up where our discussion last time left off.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13098203436640805601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-41662963650607685752013-09-11T16:47:00.001-07:002013-09-11T16:49:05.724-07:00Digital Culture: An OverviewI lectured today on digital culture and gave this overview. Step through the Prezi presentation below, and if you wish <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/listen/zk7unwch7buf87f/Digital_Culture_Overview_Lecture_(9-11-2013).mp3" target="_blank">listen to the lecture</a> (45 minutes).<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://prezi.com/embed/oyzowjzezv20/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined" width="550"></iframe>Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-39328076959056657292013-09-11T15:37:00.002-07:002013-09-11T16:53:07.118-07:00Digital Literacy: Consume, Create, ConnectI find these three principles very useful for grappling with the many tools and services that inundate us in the digital realm:<br />
<ol>
<li>Consume</li>
<li>Create</li>
<li>Connect</li>
</ol>
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The following Prezi presentation runs through these three principles. If you'd like a narrated version, see the video right below it. Also, see this student-created wiki based on these principles, "<a href="http://backpack2.wikispaces.com/" target="_blank">Backpack 2.0</a>"<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://prezi.com/embed/vwcrtljq9jj0/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined" width="550"></iframe>
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The narrated video version:<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/V9I79pfpwyQ?list=UUP9-1zYey6P_1kRm6bPFBSw" width="560"></iframe>Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-86842283814495534572013-09-10T16:32:00.000-07:002013-09-10T16:32:08.106-07:00Michael Wesch's "The Machine is Us/ing Us"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This video is important for many reasons, and I want my digital culture students to watch it carefully -- perhaps a few times. I've actually made it the first of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL545C303D595597B1" target="_blank">a playlist of videos about digital culture</a>.<br />
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<ul>
<li>It introduces some key ideas associated with "<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/terms/terms-w/web20">Web 2.0</a>" </li>
<li>Its focus on text -> hypertext is especially apt for students of literature</li>
<li>It is an example of (one of the earliest) viral academic videos. Wesch's student project video essentially launched this anthropologist from Kansas State into the national spotlight.</li>
<li>It is a very creative use of basic screen capturing, and a good example of issue-based, persuasive video.</li>
</ul>
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Here are some thought questions to follow up on the video. I'd love to see students do blog posts exploring some of these:</div>
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<a name='more'></a><ol>
<li>Wesch claims that digital text is fundamentally different from written or printed text -- that it is more flexible. Obviously it is more editable. What other kind of flexibility does he mean? What does <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/terms/terms-x/xml-extensible-markup-language">XML</a>, for example, have to do with the flexibility of digital text?</li>
<li>HTML is described as Web 1.0, and not as important as XML. Why does <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/terms/terms-x/xml-extensible-markup-language">HTML</a> remain important?</li>
<li>What is to be gained when a markup language separates form and content (as XML does)?</li>
<li>If these markup languages help machines do more with content and data, why does Wesch emphasize that we are somehow involved? What does he mean that we are the machine, or that we are teaching the machine?</li>
</ol>
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Wesch doesn't mention Twitter or hashtags, but hashtags are a popular kind of <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/terms/terms-m/metadata">metadata</a> (making what's known as a "<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/digitalculturewiki/terms/terms-m/metadata/folksonomy">folksonomy</a>"). Have you used hashtags before? How do they serve a casual purpose? How a serious one?</div>
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Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-62124825383572336192013-09-05T11:49:00.001-07:002013-09-05T11:49:54.447-07:00Beginning Academic Blogging<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Blogging is still a very new medium, and my students who have kept blogs have mostly kept personal ones. How does one get up and going with a good academic blog? There are some technical aspects, but the most important thing is developing the habits of digital literacy that accompany the best uses of blogs (rather than going by print-based habits that aren't always in keeping with the online environment).<div>
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<u>Technical Basics</u><br />We are using the Blogger platform, for which there are ample tutorials and help pages available online. I tell my students that if the interface is new or confusing, first look up some of those aids and then ask help of fellow classmates. The basics for just posting are simple enough. My students are working off of blogs already created to which they've been invited to be an author, so they do not have to create or set up the blog fresh (though tweaking the design is something to take on soon).</div>
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<li>Get onto Blogger.com </li>
<li>Navigate the dashboard</li>
<li>Create a new post: title, body, basic formatting (including adding in links), using the <a href="http://reinventingknowledge3.blogspot.com/2011/09/breaking-page.html" target="_blank">jump break</a> if their post goes beyond one screen, and adding labels to a post.</li>
<li>Add an image to a post</li>
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<u>Post Length</u></div>
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While Google+ posts should be very short (more quick updates than developed thoughts), blog posts should be longer (a rule of thumb: 100-400 words to start with). Of course, that length is less than two typed pages, double-spaced. It's relative. A good rule of thumb to go by is not to go beyond a screen, or else to front-end what you are saying, since it is a small percentage of those who browse blogs to read past the first screen. (Note that I am violating that rule of thumb right now. There are occasions that justify longer posts, especially as you get into drafting a paper or developing a project. When you do longer post, just be sure that you use the important jump break feature, as I am doing right here before giving further instruction on blogging:</div>
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<a name='more'></a><br /><u>Be Informal and Personal</u></div>
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Online writing is more casual than formal academic writing. It is also more personal. It's vital that you show some color, give some detail about your interests and personality so that people will connect with you. This enhances your ethos (the credibility of your character) as you write.</div>
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<u>Read to Write Publicly</u><br />Blogging should change the way you read by getting you to look for things that you can share very briefly (Google+) or in a more developed way (via blogging). As you read assigned texts, take notes and look for something to remark on in a post. </div>
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<u>Read Blog Posts; Don't Just Write Them</u></div>
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Do not make the mistake of "monoblogging" (the digital equivalent of talking without listening). It will be very tempting for you to treat the blog as a digital dropbox where you turn in a response as though this were on paper, directed only to the teacher, and had no social component to it at all. Avoid this problem by planning time in your blogging for reading the current conversations. Some of the best blog posts come as more developed responses to others' posts. And if your own analysis can refer/link to others' posts, all the better. <br /><br />When I say read the current conversations, I mean 1) look at what your instructors are saying here on <a href="http://mobydigital.blogspot.com/">Moby Digital</a>; 2) read all the posts from the two or three other students on your assigned student blog; 3) sample posts from the other student blogs in our class; 4) find and read other content (print, digital, blogs or other media) on the topics you are exploring or researching. A well-read blogger is a more interesting and influential blogger.<br /><br /><u>Be Creative</u></div>
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Vary your posts and watch how others are clever with post design, or the use of media. Go ahead and find and use images, or supply your own -- or music, or video, or animations. Just make sure that part of things doesn't take over, and that you respect copyright (Try to use Creative Commons licensed content by others, which only requires attribution, not permission). Want to do a video post instead of a written one? Go for it. Want to make a whale-shaped piñata, dress up as a pirate, and whack it with your wooden leg? Go right ahead. Creative doesn't have to mean silly, of course.<br /><br /><u>Be Thoughtful</u><br />That means behave yourself, but it also means to be reflective, to think and to synthesize (rather than merely quoting the latest meme or making light observations about popular culture). The best blog posts, by the way, are not simply the expression of a reaction or an opinion. They show that someone has done some work thinking, connecting, evaluating, and often making claims about things. Good blog posts have substance to them and some life to them -- encouraging good conversation. So, try to go beyond saying "Yeah, privacy is a big problem in the digital age" or "Whoa! That Queequeg is creepy!").</div>
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<u>Advertise Your Posts</u></div>
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Blogger is set up automatically to prompt you, during the posting process, to send a link to your blog post to Google+. You should do that routinely, and be sure that you share to the general public and not just to fellow class members. You won't get interest and feedback that need in order to refine your ideas unless you get these circling among relevant and available audiences.</div>
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Several other suggestions for getting going blogging can be found in my "<a href="http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com/2012/01/ten-tips-for-academic-blogging.html" target="_blank">Ten Tips for Academic Blogging</a>"</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Image credit: Creative Commons Licensed by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gemstone/1119180799/sizes/m/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Mrs. Gemstone</a> (Flickr)</i></span></div>
Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5665771165726807402.post-36283495671736995632013-09-04T10:49:00.002-07:002013-09-04T10:49:20.913-07:00Welcome to Moby DigitalThis blog accompanies English 326 - Digital Culture, a course taught by Gideon Burton and Matt Wickman at Brigham Young University during Fall 2013. We have created <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/english326digitalculture/" target="_blank">a course wiki</a> to complement this blog where students can find details about assignments, etc.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG7AfnqKcFQGE68x03cWE6T0n6MYQWw3C1ZIIFxweDedegeNFX1irbeqKghjizwPazRhgq7swgSgRAQ6Bqx47Uq1fiXNM1jxBMeo7b2iLIH2F9HXaTM0xLUQXHoUGN6cowBS09eeYZk5g/s1600/51JIJZ9PtzL._SY346_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG7AfnqKcFQGE68x03cWE6T0n6MYQWw3C1ZIIFxweDedegeNFX1irbeqKghjizwPazRhgq7swgSgRAQ6Bqx47Uq1fiXNM1jxBMeo7b2iLIH2F9HXaTM0xLUQXHoUGN6cowBS09eeYZk5g/s200/51JIJZ9PtzL._SY346_.jpg" width="131" /></a>Using Moby Dick as our literary test case, we intend to explore digital culture and the digital humanities in particular. How is the study of literature evolving in the digital age? What do the digital humanities offer? How can great literature, such as Moby Dick, help us to "read" the digital age? These are the core questions we are pursuing as students acquire digital literacy skills and investigate the culture, tools, and concepts surrounding digital culture and the digital humanities.<br />
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Some of the readings we will be doing will be drawn from two compilations about the digital humanities (Texts are linked from the images below). Other works we will use for research can be found on our <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/group/bookshelf/72225-digital-culture" target="_blank">digital culture bookshelf on Goodreads</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU3yFFNTVr61gYDsMDoT16hOaY_5WMSEk4h1Dks6gUJk1KFVGLdh25C0QdKK_jcCkBdIYLZ5xmW35UCOTV5LBc7o-nKizSsLPxYUxfQPYjUJt_sVZhCGukGmqjsB5_OV4ftB6uIWoV0UE/s200/9780262018470.jpg" width="156" /></a></div>
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<br />Gideon Burtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282494104976426309noreply@blogger.com0