Texts and Technology Work Area

Creating Long-Term Memories from Online Coursework by Strengthening Fragile Knowledge

2011-11-28T18:42:00.000-08:00

Creating Long-Term Memories from Online Coursework by Strengthening Fragile Knowledge

Abstract:

From coursework students amass material that forms long term memories. Online learning management systems often restrict access to course content soon after the semester ends. I argue that the resulting fragile knowledge is the modern counterpart of shallow knowledge that has been the bane of writing since its inception. An examination of popular learning management systems like Blackboard and the University of Central Florida Webcourses implementation reveals tactics that students, instructors, and software developers may deploy to ensure long term retention of course materials. Lessons learned from electronic portfolios and user-centered design inform a free, open source software project that uses the Moodle course management system as the backbone for individual repositories of not only the content of online courses, but also the situated context in which the content was created.

How do students remember what they learned in a course after the semester is over, and perhaps decades later? Some content is internalized; other information may be recalled from textbooks, handouts, notes, and transcripts. Until recently, all of these records were stored on paper. Online courses, on the contrary, are digitally native, and pose new opportunities for facilitating the long term usability of course content. They also sport new hazards that may result in spotty, fragile knowledge, and potentially complete forgetting, as digital records are deleted or become inaccessible, or are stored in formats that become deprecated. For instance, we presently accept PDF, HTML plus CSS, and XML as file formats for our data.

That is, we are cool with having to save stuff from websites as these kinds of files. However, the default settings encourage long term forgetting by short term neglect of exporting before end of semester and start of next. That is, most LMS users are not encouraged to archive discussion and email before the start of the next semester, at which point they become fragile knowledge, regardless of whether the computer languages encoding them persist. Consider these requirements:

I want to be able to recall coursework after the semester is over (long term).
I want to be able to remember everything I learned in every course of my college education, whether it happened in face to face classrooms or online (comprehensive).
I want to be able to access that knowledge at any time, with minimal preparation and no incremental or maintenance cost, indefinitely (automatically recalled).

I have confidence in the preservation of my prior years of course work before online courses, for I have written notes and kept annotated books used in them. They can be scanned into electronic formats, run through optical character recognition systems, turned into movies as long as I still have the file cabinet of notes and bookcase of notebooks. How about what I am learning online, am I taking adequate steps to preserve it for reuse in ten, perhaps twenty years, when I am deploying my retirement job plan?

In Why Don't Students Like School? cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham presents a popular model of human cognition with three parts: environment, working memory, and long-term memory (Willingham; Baddeley). This model, which localizes memory as a phenomenon within the human brain, leaves questions about how the environment, especially the Internet and other storage media, sustains brain-embedded long term memory, and in turn, fosters the growth of deep knowledge of a subject. Willingham's model of forgetting, reproduced in Figure 1, is symptomatic of a lack of consideration of the role played by machines in human cognition (55).

Figure 1: Willingham's model of forgetting suggests environment-based componentss of LTM mediated by working memory (55).

It must be assumed that

the mind exerts its influence on the environment. Yet embodied action besides unidirectional awareness is absent from the model. That is, there is no arrow going from working or long term memory towards in the sense of influencing, having an effect upon, intentionally controlling, the environment, as in Figure 1b, and it is here that we discover our hidden, forgotten relation to electronic computing machinery, and the potential to be creators of the very machinery.

Kittler is correct in stating, “Understanding media – despite McLuhan's title – remains an impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusion. . . . What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance with McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility” (xl-xli).

In a book-based cognitive milieu, human action brings forward pages before the eyes for attentive reading, that occurs in working memory, the “site of awareness and thinking” (Willingham 55). What is learned in order to be remembered is perceived through reading or hearing by viewing graphic media (papers, books) motionless reading, reading them aloud, or listening to them be read. In a computer-based cognitive milieu, human action brings forward pages for attentive reading in working memory through the agency of programmed control in addition to print-based media. It is getting things out of the computers for appropriate attentive awareness that new problems for thinking exist. Theories of extended cognition include the active roles performed by inanimate objects and processes external to the human brain to be parts of our thought processes, and therefore may play a role in long term memory (Clark; Clark and Chalmers). Thus the role played by the environment goes beyond supplying props that serve as reminders for human brains to recall memories from their depths. This opens space to cast the problem of knowledge that traditionally divides among rote, shallow, and deep knowledge typical to humans with a fragile component as well. The term 'fragile knowledge' appears in research to describe some of the problems students have learning to program computers, identified as “knowledge that is partial, hard to access, and often misused” (Perkins and Ray 2). While computer-based information systems boast many features unavailable to printed records, they can also be more fragile than hard copies, especially in the case of content generated from online course work. Research suggests that, in addition to segregating content within an enclosed, proprietary software system, few, if any, Learning Management Systems (LMS) encourage users to save content before it becomes hard to access (Jafari, McGee, and Carmean). Thus, the outcome of online learning may often be fragile knowledge. How material is saved to long-term 'off-site' memory depends on the degree to which the operation is automated, in which the LMS delivers records to each learner as an end-of-semester zipped archive via email, for example, and the degree to which the learner actively saves them from within the learning portal. The University of Central Florida LMS, UCF Webcourses, only generates text files and copies of attachments from email and discussion threads when requested by the user. However, a mandatory online training program urges instructors to compile discussion groups, student records, and mail when the course ends, and provides step by step instructions. Ironically, instructors are not urged to remind their students to do the same. Moreover, course materials displayed as HTML frames and Flash animations are not easily saved. Furthermore, access to the course is blocked a few days after the end of the semester. As it will be explained in this text, the system-centered design of UCF Webcourses precludes optimizing recollection from the export file through representation in a situated context meaningful to the student. Instructors, on the other hand, are provided with instructions on how to create a course backup that captures the look and feel of the course interface they set up. Instructors are limited to recontextualizing the course content when the backup is loaded back into Webcourses and they can access it. This backup file is in a compressed, proprietary format that is useless until loaded back into same UCF Webcourses system from which it was generated. I can imagine a more open system in which instructors can then load the backup into their personal Webcourses-equivalent system for planning future courses, sharing with colleagues, or transporting to another environment. If students could also save the course skeleton, along with the data exported from discussions and email, then they could reanimate it, sustain it, and have it ready at hand indefinitely. This ideal fulfills the promise of lifelong learning where online coursework seems to fail in comparison to traditional, paper-based learning.

Given that ideal scenario, what is feasible? What long-term archiving options for course content do other popular learning management systems offer? What recommendations can be made to software designers and configuration administrators to facilitate creation of long-term memories from online coursework? Finally, what best practices may students be advised to immediately adopt to maximize the lifetime value of their educational investments? This topic has not been explicitly addressed as a research topic; however, related studies on the fragility of knowledge sharing in distributed communities may be applicable (Gächter, Von Krogh, and Haefliger; Jones). General studies of LMS provide hints at how to identify and overcome the fragility of knowledge created in online course work, especially those that focus on user-centered design and best practices (Selfe; Jafari, McGee, and Carmean; Blythe; Clark and Mayer). Electronic portfolios (ePortfolios or EPs) form a third area in which useful ideas for bolstering fragile knowledge from online coursework (Whithaus; Estes; Indiana University; Barrett and Abrami; Bas and Eynon; Love, McKean, and Gathercoal). “The potential of EPs are nothing short of revolutionary as a dramatic expression of the possibilities of e-learning from cradle to grave as epitomized in the slogan 'E-portfolio for Life'” (Abrami and Barrett).

There is a long tradition going back to Plato's Phaedrus criticizing print-based knowledge of potential shallowness (Baron). Written symbols, like painted figures, are mute, fixed in visible space. Humans remember what they have read, and are able to go back to the original source, if they know what they are thinking about. If not, they are just fooling themselves, and their knowledge is shoddy, shallow, defective (Plato 561-567). Willingham formalizes the ancient Greek notion by distinguishing between rote, shallow, and deep knowledge, asserting that “understanding is remembering in disguise” (88). Shallow knowledge relates to incomplete understanding of the material in question, but the onus is on the human to learn more and keep practicing the knowledge already gained, for which reading is the best alternative in a busy world. Background knowledge requires quick recall from long term memory to sustain thought in working memory. “As far as anyone knows, the only way to develop mental facility is to repeat the target process again and again” (115). The mental techniques of chunking and process automatization provide means of stretching the capabilities of the fixed, innate working memory each human possesses. Willingham does not venture into explaining the role in augmenting intelligence that the built environment may play, especially the active, dynamically aware artificial intelligence of internetworked electronic computing machinery. Some of the awkwardness of Willingham's theory can be avoided by loosening the strict separation at the boundary of the human nervous system as the source of working and long-term memory. For over a decade, Andy Clark and David Chalmers have been arguing for 'the extended mind' in favor of the strict division of mind and external environment. Extended cognition acknowledges that cognition can be borne by devices and in the very structure of the environment as well as that which we limit to human brain activity, similar to the main idea of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. Active externalism opens the study of the distributed cognitive environment that includes the embodiment of external computing resources:

In effect, explanatory methods that might once have been thought appropriate only for the analysis of 'inner' processes are now being adapted for the study of the outer, and there is promise that our understanding of cognition will become richer for it. . . . Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. . . . To consistently resist this conclusion, we would have to shrink the self into a mere bundle of occurrent states, severely threatening its deep psychological continuity. Far better to take the broader view, and see agents themselves as spread into the world. (Clark 10-18)

Extending cognition into the built environment may also require rethinking the way working memory fetches information from long-term memory to account for the work done by external cognitive mechanisms, such as 'the Internet'. Where critics like Baron extend the question of trustworthiness of writing to electronic media, my focus is on 'shelf life' of content exposed in an online course (132). What connects this discussion to online coursework is the risk to easy recollection, and threat of permanent loss, of memories supported by active externalism.

The term 'fragile knowledge' appears in research to describe some of the problems students have learning to program computers, identified as “knowledge that is partial, hard to access, and often misused . . . the person sort of knows, has some fragments, can make some moves, has a notion, without being able to marshal enough knowledge with sufficient precision to carry a problem through to a clean solution” (Perkins and Ray 213-214). Although similar to the critique of writing found in Phaedrus, in which it is argued that “written words are of [no] use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written,” fragility arises from the idiosyncrasies of the medium itself (565). Computer-based information systems boast many features unavailable to printed records, but they can also be more fragile than hard copies, particularly when system-centric design decisions foreclose the ability of users to manipulate the system to meet their personal needs. While the problem seems obvious, the fact that a premier institution like the University of Central Florida fails to safeguard its students' educational accomplishments beyond the close of each semester points to social and cultural, not just technological, roots to the problem.

Cynthia Selfe emphasizes the importance of situated knowledge approaches and user-centered design in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, invoking Donna Haraway's 'coyote' way of knowing and Andrew Feenberg's insight into “considering such sites in terms of their underdetermined potential for political, economic, and social change—a potential which can be exploited by interested and knowledgeable social agents determined to make a difference” (154). Writing in the early days of online coursework, she implicitly recommends community-driven, user-centric, open standards, open source approaches to computer-based communications facilities. Feenberg describes the situation as one in which “the technical code is the most general rule of the game, biasing the play toward the dominant contestant. . . . Tactics thus differ from outright opposition in that they subvert the dominant codes from within by introducing various unexpected delays, combinations, and ironies into the application of strategies” (113). Casting this problem into the language of strategies and tactics in the asymmetrical power relations between technological innovators and subjugated users explained by Feenberg, I may propose options that seem subversive and may verge on prohibited by university policy or LMS End User License Agreement (EULA).

Nonetheless, they represent the boundary on which local, situated solutions of the sort recommended by Selfe form as communications between instructors and students. Other research into the fragility of knowledge sharing between human groups examines the forms of innovation, and the typical dynamics that arise under each.

In the private-investment model, innovators privately fund innovation and then use intellectual property protection mechanisms to appropriate returns from these investments. In the collective-action model, public subsidy funds public goods innovations, characterized by non-rivalry and non-exclusivity in using these innovations. Recently, these models have been compounded in the private-collective innovation model where innovators privately fund public goods innovations. Private-collective innovation is illustrated in the case of open source software development. (Gächter, von Krough, Haefliger 893)

Most learning management systems are produced under the private-investment model. While actions can be taken to rhetorically motivate policy change for both preserving and permitting access to online course work environment—via the sort of 'coyote knowing' Selfe recommends—practical software solutions can be designed and implemented using free, open source software to replicate undependable public higher education resources. That is, community managed software projects such as those hosted on Sourceforge.net, referred to above as 'private-collective innovation', have the potential to support a lifetime knowledge repository for learners as much as the public higher education institutions of various states and countries in which formal learning initially occurs. But first, I want to further define the problem by examining research on existing learning management systems, with the hope to find insight on their archival features.

Stephanie J. Coopman analyzed the Blackboard LMS, which dominates the industry in part through its acquisition of competitors WebCT and ANGEL, because “little research has examined how learning management systems structure participants' experiences and replicate or diverge from traditional pedagogy” (1). Her article does not address the archival features of any of these systems, but is relevant nonetheless when participants' experiences include future activities intent on recollection of knowledge gleaned from pedagogy. It focuses on the implications of design decisions evident in LMS on communications among students, and between teachers and students. Her insistence that with performance metaphors, “knowledge becomes a process involving all learners (including instructors), rather than an object or thing produced by instructors for students.” In contrast, when a learning management system (LMS) emphasizes textual metaphors, the collaborative, dynamic potential of an online course may be diminished. This point, however, can be extended to the topic of creating long term memories from online coursework because, with performance-oriented, collaborative metaphors, students may be encouraged to take more responsibility in ensuring that they are creating knowledge from their coursework, rather than just consuming the texts produced by the teacher. Moreover, Coopman's suggestion that “blogs might hold the greatest potential for breaking out of the traditional discussion board mode” because of their stronger integration of multimedia context, and potential reach outside the confines of the LMS environment, again points in the direction of migrating content from the LMS to other, more persistent and readily accessible virtual locations. Coopman concludes her study with a critique of the hierarchical, system-centric design of Blackboard, in which control over the user interface, features, and policies of the LMS are in the hands of designers, engineers, marketers, and university administrators, leading to a “black-box effect to the infrastructure of Blackboard Inc.'s learning management systems.” She contrasts this student-as-user model to open source software systems like Moodle, which “allows tech-saavy faculty to actively participate in refining the course delivery platform,” thus allowing instructors and students more of a voice, if not an active role, in the evolution of their institution's LMS.

Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites. It is a global development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License). . . . Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support an SQL type database (for example MySQL). It can be run on Windows and Mac operating systems and many flavors of linux (for example Red Hat or Debian GNU). . . . The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. (Moodle.org)

Despite Moodle's self declaration as a lazily meandering process, its constitution as a global, private-collective, free, open source software project strengthens the otherwise subjugated student consumer user experience of private-investment, proprietary, commercial LMS providers. Awareness and change seems more likely to happen in less hierarchical, more user-centered systems.

User-centered design is the subject of Stuart Blythe's earlier work in the design of online courses, before the unified LMS swallowed the individual efforts of instructors deploying a mixture of individual technology systems like web pages, email, and chat. He criticizes technology designs modeled on academic discourse because “curriculum is designed according to formal specifications (procedures) and consideration of existing technologies (published materials), rather than than apparent examination of users' experiences with them.” (334). The goals of the segregated university course are bounded by the formal specification of the academic calendar, and terminates as soon as the letter grade is assigned. Under existing technologies – published materials, written text, paper – it is assumed that students collect course handouts, take notes, and obtain the assigned texts. No thought is really given to what students do with those materials after the course is over; however, it can be assumed that these printed materials will persist for the long term, provided the student does not throw them away or sell the books (throwing away notes is more serious since obsolete versions of textbooks can be easily obtained). According to Blythe's reasoning for user-centered design, “we need to understand ways that our own students at our own campuses and in our own classes produce the knowledge necessary to succeed in a Web-based course. Otherwise, we risk designing unusable courses.” (336). The scope of this understanding needs to extend beyond the scope that is the concern of the system-centered view, to the scope of creating deep knowledge through solid, long-term memories of the course content. The system-centered LMS spits out an export file without keys to recreating the context that makes the content meaningful.

In “Managing Courses, Defining Learning,” authors Ali Jarai, Patricia McGee, and Colleen Carmean note that “transportability, or the ability to move content between systems, was seen by administrators as a system necessity at the institutional level and as a current weakness at the level of institutional data and the individual user” (52). Therefore, they recommend that any next-generation LMS should explicitly address issues of archives and storage: “Students want to be able to access and store content over the duration of their degree work, to have access to material for all their courses in one location . . . [and] to be able to return to a former course and locate materials and resources that were useful to them” (56). The design of most systems, both commercial and open-source, is based on frameworks developed in the mid-to-late 1990s that segregate data within servers located on campus, limiting access to current faculty and students, and typically for the limited duration of the academic semester a course is active. “Thus there is a need for a personal L/CMS, something that establishes access above and beyond current institutional systems” (64). Based on personal experience in the design architecture of Oncourse and ANGEL, the authors propose the 'Jafari model', whose five design requirements are “lifelong, outsourced, global, comprehensive, and smart” (66). The system relies on distributed web services that inter-operate with existing applications such as WebCT, ANGEL, Facebook, MERLOT, and others. It is learner-centric rather than course-centric, “with the learner's e-portfolio being the foundation and the connecting point to the system. . . . [L]earners no longer need to worry about the interruption of access to their learning accomplishments and collections, including e-portfolios, after leaving campus or about whether a campus will end maintenance of their learning and portfolio collections” (66). Figure 2 depicts the proposed architecture, including its integration with existing educational and social networking technologies.

Figure 2: The Jafari Model integrates the LMS into a heterogeneous digital ecosystem where data sharing is implied (Jafari, McGee, and Carmean 68).

As appealing as the Jafari model for a future learning management system may be, the reality is that institutions have already invested a great deal of resources standardizing on an existing system that restricts access and does not allow customization beyond what its interface settings permit.¹ Layering additional information systems alongside the learning management system may be a more feasible solution to improving the hardiness of knowledge based on online course content. Electronic portfolios are gaining popularity as a means for longitudinal, distributed evaluation of student work in addition to or as replacements for standardized, high-stakes testing (Whithaus; Love, McKean, and Gathercoal). As Carl Whithaus opines in Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing:

These new evaluation systems will acknowledge that students must learn how to become more effective communicators through interacting with others. Describing what and how the students learn through using multimodal and multimedia skills will replace focusing on deficits judged by outdated print-based standards. Finally, distributing a work to multiple readers means that various audiences will read student compositions and judge student skill levels and competencies for particular purposes. A single electronic portfolio will represent students' skills across disciplines because it will contain multiple genres. (150)

To bring this vision to fruition, argue Douglas Love, Gerry McKean, and Paul Gathercoal in “Portfolios to Webfolios and Beyond: Levels of Maturation,” institutions must progress through five stages of process maturity in their approach to storing and evaluating student work, from rudimentary, scrapbook-like, printed portfolios to an ideal level at which assessment, evaluation, and reporting is based on authentic evidence that involves students, teachers, and other evaluators, including potential employers. At the third level, dubbed 'Curriculum Collaboration Between Student and Faculty', “employers can view the student's showcase portfolio, including contextual clues from the institution, syllabi, assignments, help, resources, and assessment criteria” (30). At the fourth level, 'Mentoring Leading to Mastery', “additional heuristic value comes from the student's ability to generate her or his own portals for displaying work samples and achievements” (31). In parallel fashion, Whithaus differentiates between database-driven ePortfolio systems, which arrange and present a students' work following programmed patterns, and design-driven systems in which the thoughtful organization and presentation of the portfolio contents by the student forms an integral part of the demonstration of mastery (15).

The connecting thread is that such ePortfolio systems allow students to gather and store not only their compositions, but the real world context in which the work is situated, the aforementioned “contextual clues from the institution.” Additionally, “they may scaffold attempts at knowledge construction” (Abrami and Barrett). Making a connection to the maturation levels of ePortfolio systems suggests that a LMS may also exhibit different degrees of maturation with respect to not only how it presents information to the student within the course portal, but also how it presents information to the student after the course is finished, that 'cradle to grave' perspective. In this context, a LMS that has a function for exporting a threaded discussion as a text file provides less support of scaffolding knowledge construction than one that integrates the discussion into the overall course syllabus, related assignments, lecture notes, and readings, all of which are animated in an always available lifelong learning management system. The pressure is on LMS designers to provide either long-term access to course content, or streamlined tools for exporting course content to other systems, such as ePortfolios, and on university administrators to allow students to utilize such facilities.

Where do we go from here? All users—students taking online courses, and instructors teaching online courses—should take the immediate corrective actions of utilizing all opportunities to export dynamic course content, such as discussions and email, and copying context-defining content such as syllabus, calendar, announcements to a storage location that will not be affected by the administrative policies built into our institution's learning management systems (UCF Webcourses). My long term recommendation is for the automatization of services otherwise requiring 'manual' (that is, intentional) human intervention, for example manipulating a web browser to save content from online coursework out of the care of proprietary learning management systems so they can be reanimated. Until Webcourses permits students to save a backup of the course layout as it does instructors, into a format that can be easily imported into another LMS, then a bit of subversive sharing is in order. Feenberg tactics become instructor sharing Webcourses backup with students who run custom software that translates it into Moodle version of the course for lifelong retention (see Note 3). Of course, if this option is prohibited by university policy or LMS EULA, then students will have to recombine manually exported content from Webcourses to reform the course structure and content not exportable via the student interface via Moodle's user interface. As a long term strategy, students and instructors possessing the programming skills and time can develop free, open source software (FOSS) projects that together implement a lifelong learning management system that can readily be used to save content from all popular learning management systems in use by accredited universities. The term FOSS is typically associated with software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) developed by Richard Stallman. Known as copyleft, the license ensures that four freedoms are maintained: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to modify the source code (which entails having the source code readily available), the freedom to redistribute copies of the program, and the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program along with the modified source code (Stallman, 18).

This 'Jafari model' inspired vision (Figure 2), from which technical requirements may be specified, includes what I have proposed above as “scaffolding knowledge construction” that integrates the exported discussion and email into the overall course syllabus, related assignments, lecture notes, and readings, all of which are animated in an always available lifelong learning management system. Recall the three criteria I specified at the beginning: the solution must be long term, comprehensive, automatically recalled. A 'hacker-grade', pre-consumer model meets these overall requirements in the following system integration:

Moodle API integration offloads background LMS to a reliable third-party FOSS project.
Common LMS attributes (static syllabus, calendar, materials, assignments, dynamic announcements, discussions, email, etc) handled by Moodle to reproduce context of original online course.
MySQL provides shared database for use by third-party services (other free, open source project applications) and custom programs.
Third-party and custom project code parses backup file from Webcourses and imports into Moodle to recreate context of the course (syllabus, calendar, announcements, discussion group sequence, and additional content not archived by student interface). Otherwise user reconstructs his or her representation of the original online course by manually creating structure and copying content from Webcourses into the Moodle interface.
Third-party and custom project code parses exported discussion and email transcripts from Webcourses and imports into Moodle.
Third-party and project maintenance tasks refresh hyperlinks stored in Moodle data to ensure long term soundness.

The project can be started immediately in the Sourceforge.net free, open source software development community, using the author's current UCF Webcourses for supplying exported content. The combined lifelong learning management system begins to sensibly store online course content in a strong form that can be revisited for decades. Preserving the content and context remediates fragile knowledge trapped in the original LMS. Students create scaffolding for long term memories by reconstructing representations of their online courses in their own LMS. Using of formal course documents like the syllabus and calendar, communication mechanisms like assignments and email, and discussions, to support remembering the context of their learning, and leveraging the existing export capabilities of popular learning management systems to facilitate the transfer of dynamic content generated in discussions, blogs, email. Hyperlinks are reminders introduced in ancient information technology media, which like their counterparts in images and writing, have structural fragility. A language may be forgotten or a book may be lost. DNS changes, whims of remote archive maintenance, and other forms of 404 errors destroy memories of online learning. Maintaining the integrity of hyperlinks prevents externally, indirectly stored, reminder-based extended cognition from becoming fragile in the future, and consequently enfeebling its human host. Once the project has been established and users begin to employ it, other useful enhancements will arise through feedback forums associated with the Sourceforge.net project. Even if the proposed solution ultimately fails to provide added value to the default exported data files from the original LMS, the exercise itself is a useful example of a user-centered design initiative that may spur change in the hierarchically controlled, proprietary systems that currently dominate the online education market.

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Whithaus, Carl. Teaching and Evaluating in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. 2005. Print.

Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009. Print.

1In rare occasions an institution may change to a free, open source LMS whose exports students import into their own instances of the LMS. Typically, the institution uses a proprietary system like UCF Webcourses that exports an indecipherable wad of binary data as a backup method. It would have to be reverse-engineered to be read into a Moodle system as if from a Moodle backup file. This will be a key conversion to implement in any software project that attempts to do this. Such 'coyote-thinking' may violate EULA or even United States law.

Sourceforge and Free Open Source Software

2011-11-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

Topic	Benefits
What is it? It is a global free, open source software development community.	Teachers
Define FOSS: four freedoms, GPL, FDL, CC, shareware, freeware 0 1 2 3	Teachers & Students
Exploring Sourceforge: Find useful software: long tail, bazaar Exercise: find projects related to other presentation topics [4-5 minutes] Example: text to speech (examine espeak file speak_lib.h)	Teachers & Students
Course Design Practices Integrate existing projects (audacity, espeak) Create custom applications Create mini-lessons, learning objects that link to Merlot (GPL or FDL) Example: audio virtual reality electronic literature (symposia symposia.cpp)	Teachers
Digital Humanities Assignment Component Create projects related to coursework Evaluate projects for a course task System-level examination of license and copyright notices for FOS compliance	Students
Development (smaller percentage of students have commit rights) programming bug fixes testing	Students
Service Learning opportunities (majority of students document (Yeats)) manuals (espeakedit) web sites wikis bug reports (user-centered design) feature requests (user-centered design)	Students
Unrestricted Public Record of Achievement: For portfolios, applications, resumes	Teachers & Students
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. (Rev. ed.). Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly, 2001. Stallman, Richard. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston: GNU Press. 2010. Yeats, David. “The Role for Technical Communicators in Open-Source Software Development.” Technical Communication 55.1 (February 2008): 38-44.

If there is one takeaway, it is to read Yeats and realize that in most classes only a small percentage will be programmers. And also that paste from Libre Office is flawed.

Notes for Leonardo to the Internet

2011-06-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

Notes for Thomas J. Misa Leonard to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present

Establishes history and demonstrates methodology more so than offers theory.

Preface
(x) The Renaissance court system was the conceptual key. . . . The technical projects they commissioned from the Florence cathedral to the mechanical robots for courtly entertainment, as well as the printed works on science, history, philosophy, religion, and technology, created and themselves constituted Renaissance culture.
(x-xi) There are good reasons to see the industrial revolution as a watershed in world history, but our time-worn inclination to seize on industrial technologies as the only ones that really matter has confounded a proper understanding of the great commercial expansion that followed the Renaissance. . . . I began not only to think of technologies as located historically and spatially in a particular society and shaped by that society's ideas of what was possible or desirable, but also to see how these technologies evolved to shape the society's social and cultural developments. To capture this two-way influence, I look up the notion of distinct “eras” of technology and culture as a way of organizing the material for this book.

Compare to Kittler whom Hayles criticizes for emphasizing military technologies. We are in the age where electronic technologies are now central to interpretation.

(xi) If technologies come from outside, the only critical agency open to us is slowing down their inevitable triumph – a rearguard action at best. By contrast, if technologies come from within society and are products of on-going social processes, we can, in principle alter them – at least modestly – even as they change us.

The participant culture, in principle, although the default comportment of consumer (spectator) is justified by Zizek.

(xii) Beyond Britain, commentators and technologist sometimes looked to copy British models of industry but more frequently adapted industrial technologies to their own economic and social contexts. The result was a variety of paths through the industrial revolution.
(xii) The legacy of the industrial revolution, it seemed, was not a single “industrial society” with a fixed relationship to technology but rather a multidimensional society with a variety of purposes for technology.
(xii) The first of these technology-intensive activities to fully flower was empire building, the effort by Europeans and North Americans to extend economic and political control over wide stretches of land abroad or at home.

He gives interesting accounts of British empire building in India but little detail about American internal activity.

(xiii) A second impulse in technology gathering force from the 1870s onward lay in the application of science to industry and the building of large systems of technology.
(xiv) The achievement of mass-produced steel, glass, and other “modern materials” around 1900 reshaped the aesthetic experience of working or walking in our cities and living in our homes.
(xiv) Technology has been and can be a potent agent in disciplining and dominating. I also discuss the modernists' troubling embrace of a fixed “method” of creativity.
(xiv) In the Cold War decades, scientists and engineers learned that the military services had the deepest pockets of all potential technology patrons.
(xv) The hardest history to write is that of our own time, and yet I believe that “globalization,” or “global culture,” is a force that oriented technology and society in the final three decades of the twentieth century.
(xvi) My corollary [to Moore's Law] states that the size of computer operating systems and software applications has doubled at the same pace as the operational speed of computer chips, soaking up the presumed power of the hardware and blunting its impact.

Do we have any better use for that power as consumers? Does it just mean we would have had internet based television sooner?

(xvii) It is not so much that our technologies are changing especially quickly but that our sense of what is “normal,” about technology and society, cannot keep pace.
(xvii) These eras appear to be shortening: the Renaissance spanned nearly two centuries, while the twentieth century alone saw the eras of science and systems, modernism, war, and global culture. It is worth mentioning a quickening also in the self-awareness of societies – our capacities to recognize and comprehend change are themselves changing. . . . This self-awareness of major historical change is clearly an instance of “reflexive” modernization in sociologist Ulrich Beck's sense. In this way, then, these eras do capture something real in our historical experience.

Is Beck on the same level as Lacan? McLuhan, Ong, and others recognized this quickening of awareness.

1
Technologies of the Court
1450-1600
(1) Whether from the Medici family or from his numerous other courtly patrons, Leonardo's career-building commissions were not as a painter, anatomist, or visionary inventor, as he is typically remembered today, but as a military engineer and architect.

Who are Leonardos of our recent era? Technology billionaires?

(3) Even the well-known history of movable-type printing needs to be reexamined in the light of pervasive court sponsorship of technical books and surprisingly wide court demand for religious publications.

We already are clever enough to examine Internet history in light of the triangle. Hayles develops are more nuanced and less deterministic narrative than Kittler whom she criticizes for focusing on war determining technological development.

The Career of a Court Engineer
(4-5) In addition to his work as an architect and sculptor, Brunelleschi was a pioneer in geometrical perspective, especially useful in capturing the three dimensionality of machines in a two-dimensional drawing. From Leonardo's notebooks it is clear that he mastered this crucial representational technique. . . . The multiple-view drawings, done in vivid geometrical perspective, are a signature feature of his notebooks.
(5) His notebooks from Milan are filled with drawings of crossbows, cannons, attack chariots, mobile bridges, firearms, and horses.
(8-9) While certainly not such exciting subjects as muskets or cannon, the varied means for attacking or defending a fortification were at the core of Renaissance-era warfare.
(9) It is often suggested that Leonardo chafed at having to design theatrical costumes, yet scholars have recently found evidence indicating the Leonardo also built moving stage platforms and settings – and perhaps even an articulated mechanical robot for these festivities.
(10) His fascination with self-acting mechanisms is also evident in Leonardo's many sketches of textile machines found in the surroundings of Milan.

Link Leonardo's fascination with autonomous artificial automata to von Neumann. (Here a timestamp operator would reveal a later reading.)

(13) The special character of technological creativity in the Renaissance resulted from one central fact: the city-states and courts that employed Leonardo and his fellow engineers were scarcely interested in the technologies of industry or commerce. Their dreams and desires focused the era's technologists on warfare, city building, courtly entertainments, and dynastic displays. . . . The intellectual resources and social dynamics of this technological community drew on and helped create Renaissance court culture.
(13) Foremost among these intellectual resources was the distinctive three-dimensionality and depth of Renaissance art and engineering.
(14) Leading Florentine artists such as Massaccio were already practicing something like linear perspective a decade or more before Alberti's famous treatise On Painting (1436).
(14) Durer's most famous “object,” illustrating his 1525 treatise on geometry and perspective and reproduced widely ever since, was a naked woman on her back, suggesting that perspective was not merely about accurately representing the world but about giving the (male) artist power over it.

Throwing a bone to feminists and liberal studies?

(16) Leonardo even copied may of Alberti's distinctive phrases. It is Alberti's ideas we are reading when Leonardo writes that the perspective picture should look as thought it were drawn on a glass through which the objects are seen.
(17) Close study of the two men's notebooks has revealed that Francesco was one source of designs for machines and devices that had previously been attributed to Leonardo alone.
(17-18) In a curious way, the presence of Leonardo's voluminous notebooks has helped obscure the breadth and depth of the Renaissance technical community, because researchers overzealously attributed all the designs in them to him. . . . Scholars believe that about one-third (6000 pages) of Leonardo's original corpus has been recovered; these papers constitute the most detailed documentation we have on Renaissance technology. . . . His notebooks record at least four distinct types of technical projects: his specific commissions from courtly patrons; his own technological “dreams,” or devices that were then impossible to build; his empirical and theoretical studies; and devices he had seen while traveling or had heard about from fellow engineers; as well as “quotations” from earlier authors, including Vitruvious.
(18) Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Leonardo's career was hist systematic experimentation, evident in his notebooks especially after 1500. . . . Some objects of Leonardo's systematic investigations were gears, statics, and fluid flow.
Gutenberg's Universe
(19) The first several generations of printers as well as the best-known early technological authors were, to a surprising extent, dependent on and participants in late-Renaissance court culture.
(19-20) Movable type was also “first” developed in the Far East, centuries before Gutenberg. . . . The first truly movable type is credited to Pi Sheng (1041-48), who engraved individual characters in clay, fired them, and then assembled them on a frame for printing.
(20) Islam permitted handwriting the words of Allah on paper but for many years forbade its mechanical printing. The first Arabic-language book printed in Cairo, Egypt, did not appear until 1825.
(22) Gutenberg's principal inventions were the adjustable mold for casting type and a suitable metal alloy for the type.
(22) Printing traveled quickly.
(22-23) The printing press made a little-known German theology professor named Martin Luther into a best-selling author and helped usher in the Protestant Reformation. . . . Yet printers sensed a huge market for his work and quickly made bootleg copies in Latin, German, and other vernacular languages to fill it. It was said that Luther's theses were known across Germany in two weeks and across Europe in a month. . . . Eventually, Luther himself hailed printing as “God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”

Compare to Busa's praise of magnetic tape.

(23) The Protestant movement's emphasis on individuals' reading the Bible themselves required a massive printing effort. Whatever their personal believes, printers thus had material reasons to support Protestantism.
(23) Although it is tempting to see printers as proto-capitalists – owing to their strong market orientation and substantial capital needs – their livelihood owed much to the patronage and politics of the court system.
(25) Plantin's massive output suggests the huge scale of book production at the time. In the first fifty years of printing (1450s-1500) eight million books were produced in Europe. . . . This economy of scale sharply reduced the cost of books, which meant that one scholar could have at hand multiple copies from several scholarly traditions, inviting comparison and evaluation. Eisenstein writes, “Not only was confidence in old theories weakened, but an enriched reading matter also encourage the development of new intellectual combinations and permutations.” In this way, the availability of vastly more and radically cheaper information led to fundamental changes in scholarship and learning.

Print humanities were born. Compare to relative scarcity and then proliferation of electronic computing machinery.

Technology and Tradition
(26) Transfer of technology before the Renaissance could be hit-or-miss. Machines invented in one time, or place, might well need to be rediscovered or even reinvented. Indeed, something very much like this occurred, after the great technological advances of Song China (960-1279).
(26) Yet these pioneering Chinese technologies were not reliably recorded with the rigorous geometrical perspective that allowed Renaissance engineers to set down their ideas about the crucial workings of machines.

Importance of having technological tools to reflect upon technology.

(27) Eugene Ferguson, a leading engineer-historian, has brilliantly shown how quickly technical drawings might be corrupted, even in the West.
(28) In these terms a permanent and cumulative tradition in technology, enabled by the invention of printing and perspective, appeared first in central Europe's mining industry.
(29) Each of these three authors [Bringuccio, Agricola, Ercker] praised the values of complete-disclosure, precise description, and openness often associated with the “scientific revolution.” These books detailed the processes of mining, smelting, refining, founding, and assaying. Biringuccio and Agricola used extensive illustrations to convey the best technical practices of their time.

Value of open standards, technologies and licenses.

(31) The scientific revolution was also surprisingly dependent on printing technology and courtly patronage networks.
(32) The desires and dreams of Renaissance courts and city-states defined the character of the era's technology and much of the character of its culture.

Manovich two cultures. Consider microcomputer revolution as desires and dreams of late American capitalism.

2
Techniques of Commerce
1588-1740
(34) The age of commerce, anticipate in Spain and Portugal as well as in China and India, found its fullest expression during the seventeenth-century Golden Age of the Dutch Republic.
Technology and Trade
(37) The emergence of specialized ship designs in the Netherlands was another early signal that the Dutch understood how to bring technology and trade together in the pursuit of commerce.
(42) Impressed with how multiple-share ownership helped raise money and spread the risk of losses, the Dutch took the practice much further.
Creating Global Capitalism
(43) The Dutch – through their East India Company in the Pacific and West India Company in the Atlantic, coupled with the extensive trading in Europe and Africa – in effect created the first global economy.
(43) The commodity traders' guild began publishing weekly lists of prices in 1585. Within a few years, the Amsterdam commodity exchanges – for grain, salt, silks, sugar, and more – had surpassed their regional rivals and become a set of global exchanges.
(45) More to the point, tulip trading embodied several of the classic Dutch financial techniques, including futures contracts, commodity pricing, and multiple-share owndership.
(48) On the southeast coast of India and on the innumerable islands of what is now Indonesia, each of the trading countries sought to establish trading alliances; and when these alliances were betrayed, they tried unarmed trading “factories” (warehouse-like buildings where “factors” - traders – did business).

Interesting, unexpected etymology of factories.

(49) While the VOC [Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie] dealt with spices and cotton, the West India Company traded in slaves and sugar.

Little mention of the ethics of slave trade. See multimedia The Corporation. He is more interested in the difference between overall technological modes, ways of being, Tart's states, “major alterations in the way the mind functions” (1986, 4).

“The Great Traffic”
(51-52) Dutch preeminence came through the targeted processing and selective reexporting of the traded materials. . . . Indeed, high wages, relatively low volumes, and high-quality production typified the traffics, in sharp contrast with early industrial technologies, which emphasized low wages, high volumes, and low-quality production.

Compare Misa's differentiation between Dutch precision and British sloppy massive scale to McConnell's differentiation between systematic engineering and gold rush programming styles.

(55) Not only had Dutch traders captured commercial control over many key raw materials, including Spanish wool, Turkish mohair yarns, Swedish copper, and South American dyestuffs; the “traffic” system had also erected a superstructure of processing industries that added value to the flow of raw materials. The Dutch conditions of high wages and labor scarcity put a premium on mechanical innovation, the fruits of which were protected by patents. Another economic role taken on by the Dutch state (at the federal, state, and municipal levels) was the close regulation of industry in the form of setting standards for quality and for the packaging of goods.
(57) While choosing, developing, and using technologies with the aim of creating wealth had been an undercurrent before, this era saw the flourishing of an international (if nonindividual) capitalism as a central purpose for technology. It is really a set of wealth-creating technologies and techniques that distinguishes the Dutch commercial era.

Consider alongside his evaluation of Renaissance era technology. Does Misa apply Kuhn's methodology to technology?

3
Geographies of Industry
1740-1851
(59) Unprecedented growth in the cotton, iron, and coal industries during the decades surrounding 1800, culminating in the steam-powered factory system, powered a self-sustaining “take-off” in the British economy.
The First Industrial City: London
(65) Beer brewing affords a revealing window into industrial London while illustrating the links between industry and sanitation, consumption, and agriculture. . . . Reducing costs and increasing output – rather than enhancing quality, as in Dutch commerce – was the focus of technology in the industrial era.
(66) The competition between brewers to build ever-larger vats waned after 1814, however, when a 7,600-barrel vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery burst open and flooded the neighborhood, killing eight persons “by drowning, injury, poisoning by the porter fumes or drunkenness.”

An amusing fact.

(67) The porter brewers pioneered industrial scales of production and led the country in the capitalization of their enterprises.
(68) Brewers indirectly fixed a key term of measurement born in the industrial era, since Watt had the “strong drayhorses of London breweries” in mind when he defined “horsepower” at 33,000 foot-pounds per minute.
(69) These ancillary industries have not received the attention they deserve, for they are key to understanding how and why industrial changes became self-sustaining and cumulative.

Misa lays out opportunities for future scholarship, part of the value of this work.

(70) By the early nineteenth century perhaps half of all London pubs were tied to brewers through exclusive deliveries, financing, or leasing.
(73) By 1825 Maudslay and Bramah were among the London engineers hailed for their use of specialized machine tools to replace skilled handcraftsmanship.
Shock City: Manchester
(77) Early Arkwright machines were small, handcranked devices with just four spindles. The death blow to home spinning came when Arkwright restricted licenses for his water-frame patent to mills with 1,000 or more spindles. . . . Artkwright's mills – with their low wages and skills, their high-volume production of lower-grade goods, and their extensive mechanization – embodied core features of the industrial era.

In addition to ruthless protection of competitive advantage by restricting licenses: an early Microsoft?

(79) While the first generation of them had built textile machines and managed textile factories, the midcentury machine builders – the generation of London transplants – focused on designing, building, and selling machine tools.
(82) For Engels, Manchester was ground zero for the industrial revolution (he wrote specifically of “industriellen Umwälzung”).
(82) His real object was to shock his readers with visceral portraits of the city's horrible living conditions.

Horrible living conditions.

(83) Marx, with no firsthand industrial experience of his own, took Engels' description of Manchester as the paradigm of capitalist industry. Neither of them noticed a quite different mode of industry forming in Sheffield.
Region for Steel: Sheffield
(84) Sheffield was internationally known as a center for high-quality steel and high-priced steel products. . . . Not Manchester-style factories but networks of skilled workers typified Sheffield's industry.

Like the idealized network of small businesses? But then corrupted by scale. Nice to see remediated in Wired magazine stories.

(86) It is crucial to understand that the factory system so important in Manchester was absent in Sheffield.
(87) Some firms did nothing but coordinate such “hire-work” and market the finished goods, at home or overseas. These firms had the advantages of low capital, quick turnover, and the flexibility to “pick and choose to fit things in with whatever you were doing.”
(87-88) In the latter part of the nineteenth century these large steel mills and oversize forging shops symbolized a second generation of Sheffield's heavy industry.
(91) Steam not only directly killed many grinders, through dangerous working conditions, but also indirectly brought the deaths of many who crammed themselves and their families into the poorest central districts of industrial cities.

The indirect danger of steam technology. Would realization of this kill bourgeois interest in Steampunk?

(91) Sheffield's dire sanitary conditions resembled those of London or Manchester for much the same reason: the city's densely packed population lacked clean water.
(92) The geographies of industry surveyed in this chapter – multidimensional urban networks in London, factory systems in Manchester, and sector-specific regional networks in Sheffield – clinch the argument that there were many “paths” to the industrial revolution.
(93) Workers in steam-driven occupations, whether in London, Manchester, Sheffield, or the surrounding regions, were less likely to be in the country, to eat fresh food, to drink clean water, and (especially if female) to be skilled and have reasonable wages.

4
Instruments of Empire
1840-1914
(97) To a striking extent, inventors, engineers, traders, financiers, and government officials turned their attention from blast furnaces and textile factories at home to steamships, telegraphs, and railway lines for the colonies.
Steam and Opium
(101) Accurately mapping the Ganges in the latter eighteenth century had been a necessary first step in transforming the vague territorial boundaries assumed by the company into a well-defined colonial state. To this end one could say that the first imperial technology deployed on the Ganges was James Rennell's detailed Map of Hindoostan.
(102-103) The opium war began when China took determined steps to ban the importation of the destructive substance, and the British government, acting on the demand of Britain's sixty trading firms with business in China, insisted on maintaining free trade in opium and dispatched a fleet to China to make good its demands.
Telegraphs and Public Works
(104) In the industrializing countries of Western Europe and North America, telegraph systems grew up alongside railroads. Telegraph lines literally followed railway lines, since telegraph companies typically erected their poles in railroad right-of-ways.
(105) Telegraph lines were so important for imperial communication that in India they were built in advance of railway lines.
(107) Quick use of the telegraph saved not merely the British in Punjab but arguably the rest of British India as well. Most dramatic was that the telegraph made possible a massive troop movement targeted at the most serious sites of rebellion.
(108-109) By the time of the 1857 Mutiny, British rule in India had become dependent on telegraphs, steamships, roads, and irrigation works; soon to come was an expanded campaign of railway building prompted by the Mutiny itself. . . . The colonial government in India had no choice but to begin large-scale educational programs to train native technicians.
Railway Imperialism
(113) (Fig 4.4 World Leaders in Railways, 1899.)

Interesting graph for 1899 almost looks like USA today shaving graph.

(127) Even today one can discern a shadow of the imperialist era in railroad maps of North America (look carefully at Canada, the western United States, and Mexico), in the prestige structure of technical education, and in the policy preferences of the orthodox development agencies in the United States and Europe.
(127) In this respect, we can see that imperialism was not merely a continuation of the eras of commerce and industry; rather, to a significant extent, imperialism competed with and in some circumstances displaced industry as the primary focus of technologists.

5
Science and Systems
1870-1930
(128) By transforming curiosities of the laboratory into consumer products, through product innovation and energetic marketing schemes, science-based industry helped create a mass consumer society. A related development was the rise of corporate industry and its new relationships with research universities and government bureaus.
(129) In these same decades technology took on its present-day meaning as a set of devices, a complex of industry, and an abstract society-changing force in itself.

Important for our definition of technology.

The Business of Science
(130) The chemical structures of these early dyes were unknown at the time. It was German chemists – based in universities and with close ties to industry – who deciphered their chemical structures and set the stage for a science-based industry.
(133) “Mass production methods which dominate modern economic life have also penetrated experimental science,” the chemist Emil Fischer state in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1902. “Consequently the progress of science today is not so much determined by brilliant achievements of individual workers, but rather by the planned collaboration of many observers.” Duisberg put the same point more succinctly: “Nowhere any trace of a flash of genius.”
(134) In World War I, popularly known as the chemist's war, chemists were directly involved in poison gas manufacture.
(135) The entanglement of the German chemical industry with the Third Reich also has much to do with the system-stabilizing innovation and the corporate and political forms needed for its perpetuation. . . . With all these heavy investments, Farben's executives felt they had little choice but to conform with Hitler's mad agenda after he seized power in 1933. Not Nazis themselves – one-forth of the top-level supervisory board were Jews, until the Aryanization laws of 1938 – they nevertheless became complicit in the murderous regime.
Flashes of Genius
(136) The singular career of Thomas Edison aptly illustrates the subtle but profound difference separating system-originating inventions from system-stabilizing ones.
(139) Edison wanted his electric lighting system to be cost competitive with gas lighting and knew that the direct-current system he envisioned was viable only in a densely populated urban center. Using Ohm's and Joule's laws of electricity allowed Upton and Edison to achieve these techno-economic goals.
(140) When Edison tested his system in January 1881 he used a 16-candlepower bulb at 104 volts, with resistance of 114 ohms and current of 0.9 amps. The U.S. standard of 110 volts thus has its roots in Edison's precedent-setting early systems.
Battle of the Systems
(143) Edison was wary of the energy losses of transformers, the high capital costs of building large AC stations, and the difficulties of finding insulators that could safely handle 1,000 volts.
(143) Arc lighting for streets, AC incandescent systems for smaller towns, AC motors for factories, and the pell-mell world of street railways were among the lucrative fields that Edison's diagnosis overlooked.
(144) In the mid-1880s Thomson turned his inventive efforts on incandescent lighting and AC systems. His other notable inventions include electric welding, street railway components, improved transformers, watt meters, and induction motors. These inventions were among the necessary technical components of the universal system of the 1890s.
Tenders of Technological Systems
(148) Edison fought it, Thomson denied it, and Insull embraced it: a new pattern of technological change focused on stabilizing large-scale systems rather than inventing wholly new ones.
(148) Industrial scientists and science-based engineers stabilized the large systems by striving to fit into them and, most importantly, by solving technical problems deemed crucial to their orderly expansion. Neither of these professions existed in anything like their modern form as recently as 1870.
(150) Industrial research became a source of competitive advantage for the largest firms, including General Electric, AT&T, and General Motors. . . . Independent inventors, formerly the nations leading source of new technology, either were squeezed out of promising market areas targeted by the large science-based firms or went to work for them solving problems of the companies' choosing.
(151) The industrial orientation of electrical engineering at MIT from around 1900 into the 1930s contrasts markedly with its more scientific and military orientation during and after the Second World War.
(155) Hazen's work on the “network analyzer” began with his 1924 bachelor's thesis under Vannevar Bush. Bush, a pioneer in analog computing, was working for [Dugald] Jackson's consulting firm studying the Pennsylvania-based Superpower scheme. . . . By 1929 the measuring problems were solved and GE's Doherty approved the building of a full-scale network analyzer.
(155) Built jointly by GE and MIT and physically located in the third-floor research laboratory in MIT's Building 10, the network analyzer was capable of simulating systems of great complexity.
(156-157) Synthetic dyes, poison gases, DC light bulbs, AC systems, and analog computers such as Hazen's network analyzer constituted distinctive artifacts of the science-and-systems era. . . . The most important pattern was the underlying sociotechnical innovations of research laboratories, patent litigation, and the capital-intensive corporations of science-based industry.
(157) A neat contrast can be made of the British cotton-textile industry that typified the first industrial revolution and the German synthetic dye industry and American electrical industry that together typified the second.
(157) The presence of the financiers, corporations, chemists, and engineers produced a new mode of technical innovation and not coincidentally a new direction in social and cultural innovation. The system-stabilizing mode of technical innovation - “nowhere any trace of a flash of genius” - was actively sought by financiers. . . . The system-stabilizing innovations, with the heavyweights of industry and finance behind them also created new mass-consumer markets for electricity, telephones, automobiles, household appliances, home furnishings radios, and much else.

6
Materials of Modernism
1900-1950
(158) Modernism in art and architecture during the first half of the twentieth century can be best understood as a wide-ranging aesthetic movement, floated on the deeper currents of social and economic modernization driven by the science-and-systems technologies.
Materials for Modernism
(160) The materials that modernists deemed expressive of the new era – steel, glass, and concrete – were not new.
(163) Glass through most of the nineteenth century was in several ways similar to steel before Bessemer. It was an enormously useful material whose manufacture required much fuel and many hours of skilled labor and whose application was limited by its high cost.
Manifestos of Modernity
(168) Critical to the development of the modern architectural style were the interactions among three groups: the Futurists in Italy, who gave modernism an enthusiastic technology-centered worldview; the members of de Stijl in the Netherlands, who articulated an aesthetic for modern materials; and the synthesis of theory and practice in the Bauhaus in Germany.
(171) Marinetti's provocative avant-garde stance, frank celebration of violence, and crypto-revolutionary polemics landed the Futurists squarely in the middle of postwar fascism.
(173) The task of the artist was to derive a style – or universal collective manner of expression – that took into account the artistic consequences of modern science and technology.
(176) The durable contribution of de Stijl, then, was not merely to assert, as the Futurists had done, that modern materials had artistic consequences, but to identify specific consequences and embed these in an overarching aesthetic theory.
Ironies of Modernism
(184-185) The Stuttgart exposition of 1927 was the first salvo in a wide-ranging campaign to frame a certain interpretation of modernism. It was to be rational, technological, and progressive; historical references and ornamentation were strictly forbidden. In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave top billing to its “International Style” show, which displayed and canonized the preponderantly European works representing this strain of modernist architecture. . . . The influential teaching of Bauhaus exiles Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Mies van der Rohe in Boston and Chicago raised a generation of U.S.-trained architects and designers who imbibed the modern movement directly from its masters. In the 1950s, in architecture at least, the International Style, or Modern Movement, became a well-entrenched orthodoxy.
(186) The German government agency charged with rationalizing workshops and factories also worked closely with several women's groups to rationalize the household.
(189) In examining how “technology changes culture” we see that social actors, often asserting a technological fundamentalism that resonates deeply in the culture, actively work to create aesthetic theories, exemplary artifacts, pertinent educational ventures, and broader social and political movements that embed their views in the wider society.

Misa focuses on what Manovich calls cultural conventions, saying little even in the final chapters of technological aesthetics that Manovich attributes to the conventions of software.

7
The Means of Destruction
1936-1990
(190) No force in the twentieth century had a greater influence in defining and shaping technology than the military. . . . Lamenting the decline of classic profit-maximizing capitalism, industrial engineer Seymour Melman termed the new economic arrangement as contract-maximizing “Pentagon capitalism.” During these years of two world wars and the Cold War, the technology priorities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and France, and to a lesser extent England, China, and Germany, were in varied ways oriented to the “means of destruction.”
(191) Such promising technologies as solar power, analog computers, and machinist-controlled computer machine tools languished when (for various reasons) the military back rival technical options – nuclear power, digital computers, and computer controlled devices of many types – that consequently became the dominant designs in their fields.

An interesting position on technological determinism.

A War of Innovation
(192) It may seem odd to distinguish between the two world wars, linked as they were by politics and economics, but in technology the First World War was not so much a war of innovation as one of mass production.
(193) Not merely a military tactic, blitzkrieg was more fundamentally a “strategic synthesis” that played to the strength of Germany's superior mobility technologies, especially aircraft and tanks, while avoiding the economic strain and social turmoil of a sustained mobilization.
(195) Germany had neither the enriched uranium, the atomic physicists, nor the governmental resources to manufacture an atomic bomb.
“Turning the Whole Country into a Factory”
(195-196) If the First World War is known as the chemists' war owing to military use of synthetic explosives and poison gases, it was the Manhattan Project that denominated the Second World War as the physicists' war. . . . In reality, Los Alamos served as the R&D center and assembly site for the bombs. The far greater part of the project was elsewhere, at two mammoth, top-secret factory complexes in Tennessee and Washington State.
(196) After several governmental committees considered its prospects, the project came to rest in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD, a new government agency headed by MIT engineer Vannevar Bush.

Bush who get so much attention in digital media studies.

(197) Although the point is not frequently emphasized, it was entirely fitting that Roosevelt assigned the construction phase of the bomb project to the Army Corps of Engineers and that the Army assigned command over the Manhattan Engineering District to Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who had been the officer in charge of building the Pentagon complex.
(198) The crucial task at Oak Ridge was to produce enough enriched uranium, somewhere between 2 and 100 kilograms, no one knew precisely how much, to make a bomb.
(204) Many commentators, even Eisenhower and Churchill, miss the crucial point that the two bombs dropped on Japan were technologically quite distinct: the Hiroshima bomb used Oak Ridge's uranium while the Nagasaki bomb used Hanford's plutonium.
(206-207) One hesitates to put it this way, but the two bombs dropped on Japan appear to have been “aimed” also at the U.S. Congress. After all, there were two hugely expensive factories that needed justification. . . . Bohr's observation that the atomic project would transform “the whole country into a factory,” true enough in the obvious physical and organizational sense, may also be insightful in a moral sense as well.
(208) Nautilus, it turned out, was a precedent for more than just the U.S. Navy, which in time fully matched the other military branches with its nuclear-powered submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles.
(210) The enduring legacy of the Manhattan Project above and beyond its contribution to the atomic power effort was its creation of a nuclear weapons complex that framed years of bitter competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
(210) The cost from 1940 to 1986 of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is estimated at $5.5 trillion. No one knows the fair dollar cost of the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, but its currently crumbling state – nuclear technicians have in effect been told to find work elsewhere, while security over uranium and plutonium stocks is appallingly lax – constitutes arguably the foremost danger facing the planet today.
Command and Control: Solid-State Electronics
(211) Yet, together, the massive wartime efforts on radar, proximity fuzes, and solid-fuel rockets rivaled the atom bomb in cost. . . . Even as its radar aided the Allied war effort, the Rad Lab [Radiation Laboratory at MIT] sowed the seeds for three classic elements of the Cold War military-industrial-university complex: digital electronic computing, high-performance solid-state electronics, and mission-oriented contract research.
(211-212) Vacuum tubes were sensitive only to lower frequency signals, so when the radar project's leaders decided to concentrate on the microwave frequency (3,000 to 30,000 megahertz), they needed an electronic detector that could work in these very high frequencies. . . . Much of the solid-state physics done during the war, then, focused on understanding these semiconductor materials and devising ways to purify them.
(213) In the transistor story, as in that of the Shippingport nuclear reactor, we see how the tension between military and commercial imperatives shaped the emergence of a technology that today is fundamental to our society.
(214) Indeed, instead of classifying transistors, the armed services assertively publicized military uses for them. . . . Each [Bell System] licensee brought home a two-volume textbook incorporating material from the first symposium. The two volumes, composing Transistor Technology, became known as the bible of the industry. They were originally classified by the government as “restricted” but were declassified in 1953. . . . A third volume in the textbook series Transistor Technology resulted from a Bell symposium held January 1956 to publicize its newly invented diffused base transistor. . . . For several years Bell sold these high-performance diffused transistors only to the military services.
(215) The Army Signal Corps also steered the transistor field through its “engineering development” program, which carried prototypes to the point where they could be manufactured.
(215) Bell Laboratories had not forgotten its telephone system, but its commercial applications of transistors were squeezed out by several large high-priority military projects.
(216) The integrated circuit was also to a large degree a military creation.
(216-217) Across the 1950s and 1960s, then, the military not only accelerated development in solid-state electronics but also gave structure to the industry, in part by encouraging a wide dissemination of (certain types of) transistor technology and also by helping set industrywide standards. . . . These competing demands probably delayed the large-scale application of transistors to the telephone system at least a half-dozen years (from 1955 to the early 1960s).
Command and Control: Digital Computing
(217) Code-breaking, artillery range-finding, nuclear weapons designing, aircraft and missile controlling, and antimissile warning were among the leading military projects that shaped digital computing in its formative years, from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Impact of military agenda on digital computing.

(219) Forrester wanted Whirlwind to become another megaproject like the Radiation Laboratory or Manhattan Project.
(221) At the center of this fantastic scheme was Forrester's Whirlwind, or more precisely fifty-six of his machines. . . . With participation in SAGE, IBM gained a healthy stream of revenues totaling $500 million across the project's duration. Fully half of IBM's domestic electronic data-processing revenues in the 1950s came from just two military projects: SAGE and the “Bomb-Nav” analog computer for the B-52 bomber.
(221) As important as this revenue stream was the unparalleled exposure to state-of-the-art computing concepts and the unconstrained military budgets that permitted the realization of those concepts.
(222) Even though the commercial success of IBM's System 360 made computing a much more mainstream activity, the military retained its pronounced presence in computer science throughout the 1960s and beyond. . . . The IPTO [Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency Information Processing Techniques Office] was far and away the nation's largest funder of advanced computer science from its founding in 1962 through the early 1980s. . . . Among the fundamental advances in and applications of computer science funded by the IPTO were time-sharing, interactive computer graphics, and artificial intelligence. J.C.R. Licklider, head of the IPTO program in the early 1960s, also initiated work on computer networking that led, after many twists and turns, to the Internet.

Bush, Licklider, Engelbart.

(223) A 1964 RAND Corporation report, “On Distributed Communications,” proposed the theoretical grounds for a rugged, bombproof network using “message blocks” - later known as “packet switching” - to build a distributed communications system. . . . These concepts became the conceptual core of the Internet.
(223) Through the military-dominated era there was an unsettling tension between the West's individual-centered ideology and its state-centered technologies.
(224) Together, these military endeavors were not so much an “outside influence” on technology as an all-pervading environment that defined what the technical problems were, how they were to be addressed, and who would pay the bills. While closed-world, command-and-control technologies typified the military era, the post-Cold War era of globalization has generated more open-ended, consumer-oriented, and networked technologies.

8
Toward Global Culture
1970-2001
(227) Whatever the economic and political consequences of globalization, the threat of cultural homogenization concerns many observers.
(227) While mindful of the possibilities of convergence, I believe there is greater evidence for a contrary hypothesis.
(229) The “divergence hypothesis” is also consistent with what we have learned from earlier eras.
The Third Global Economy
(229) Our present-day global economy is not the first or second global economy we have examined in this book, but the third. The first was in the era of commerce.
(229) A second global economy developed in the 1860s and lasted until around the First World War, overlapping with the era of imperialism.
(231) Since around 1970 there has been a resurgence of global forces in the economy and in society, but who can say how long it will last.
Fax Machines and Global Governance
(232) One might say that in the United States the military market displaced the consumer market, while in postwar Japan it was the other way around. The structure of the global economy can in part be traced to the different paths taken by each nation's electronics industry.
(234) The CCITT, or Comite Consultatif International Telegraphique et Telephonique, was the leading international standards-setting body for all of telecommunications beginning in the 1950s. Its special strength was an remains standards setting by committee.
(235) It was CCITT's success with the 1980 standards that made facsimile into a global technology – and relocated the industry to Japan. . . . The achievement of worldwide standards, digital compression, and flexible handshaking, in combination with open access to public telephone systems, created a huge potential market for facsimile.
(236) This network of students and teachers, along with some journalists and government officials, is notable not only for creatively using fax technology but also for explicitly theorizing about their culture-making use of technology.
(236) The idea of using fax machines for building European identity and youth culture originated with the Education and Media Liaison Center of France's Ministry of Education, which was in the middle of a four-year project to boost public awareness of telematics and videotext. (France's famous Minitel system came out of this same context of state support for information technology.)
McWorld or McCurry?
(238) “McWorld” epitomizes the cultural homogenization and rampant Americanization denounced by many critics of globalization. “McDonaldization” refers to a broader process of the spread of predictability, calculability, and control – with the fast-food restaurant as the present-day paradigm of Max Weber's famous theory of rationalization.
(240) The presence of McDonald's in the conflict-torn Middle East is good news to Tom Friedman, the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999). In his spirited brief on behalf of globalization, Friedman frames the “golden arches theory of conflict prevention.”
(245) McDonald's corporate strategy of localization not only accommodates local initiatives and sensibilities but also, as the company is well aware, blunts the arguments of its critics.
Internet Culture
(249) Overall, we can discern three phases in the Internet story: the early origins, from the 1960s to mid-1980s, when the military services were prominent; a transitional decade beginning in the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation became the principal government agency supporting the Internet; and the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s, when the network itself was privatized and the World Wide Web came into being.
(250) The internet conception resulted from an intense collaboration between Vinton Cerf, a Stanford computer scientist who had helped devise the ARPANET protocols, and Robert Kahn, a program manager at ARPA. In 1973 they hit upon the key concepts – common host protocols within a network, special gateways between networks, and a common address space across the whole – and the following year published a now-classic paper, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” Although this paper is sometimes held up as embodying a singular Edisonian “eureka moment,” Cerf and Kahn worked very closely for years with an international networking group to test and refine their ideas.
(254) A good example of how the Internet gained its seemingly effortless “global” character is the so-called domain-name system, or DNS. . . . With the spread of the domain-name system, any single user can be addressed with on simple address. More important, the DNS established an address space that is massively expandable and yet can be effectively managed without any single center.
(255) The Web is, at least conceptually, nothing more than a sophisticated way of sending and receiving data files (text, image, sound, or video).
(257) From the start, Berners-Lee built in to the Web a set of global and universal values. These values were incorporated into the design at a very deep level.
(257) The second goal, dependent on achieving the first goal of human communication through shared knowledge, is that of machine-understandable information.
(258) These examples – worldwide financial flows, fax machines, McDonald's, and the Internet – taken together indicate that globalization is both a fact of contemporary life and a historical construction that emerged over time.
(259) Indeed, the certainty during the 1990s that globalization would continue and expand, seemingly without borders, ended with the attacks on 11 September 2001. Whatever one makes of the resulting “war on terrorism,” it seems inescapable that the nation-state is, contrary to the globalizers' utopian dreams, alive and thriving as never before. . . . A national security-oriented technological era may be in the offing. It would be strange indeed if the September 11^th attackers – acting in the name of antimodern ideologies – because of the Western nations' national security-minded and state-centered reactions, brought an end to this phase of global modernity.

Misa suggests a post-globalization era resulting from the war on terror.

9
The Question of Technology
Science and Economics
(261) However, the centrality of science to technology is often overstated. Scientific theories had little to do with technological innovation during the eras of industry, commerce, and courts.
(263) Much of the frank resentment today aimed at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization stems from their conceptual blindness to the negative aspects of technology in social and cultural change.
Variety and Culture
(265) A more subtle and yet more pervasive example of technology's interactions with the goals and aims of society resides in the process of technical change.
(267) Power does flow from the end of a gun; Europeans' deadly machine guns in the colonial wars proved that point. But there is an important dimension of power that resides in things, in the built world, and in the knowledge about that world that people have access to or are excluded from.
(267) The conceptual muddle surrounding these questions of technology transfer can be cleared up with Arnold Pacey's useful notion of “technology dialogue,” an interactive process which he finds is frequently present when technologies successfully cross cultural or social barriers.

Pacey. How about Feenberg?

Displacement and Change
(268) Displacement occurs when a set of technology decisions has the effect of displacing alternatives or precluding open discussion about alternatives in social development, cultural forms, or political arrangements.
(269) For roughly fifty years, a certain technical perspective on modern architecture displaced alternative, more eclectic approaches.
(269) Displacement, then, is how societies, through their decisions about technologies, orient themselves toward the future and, in a general way, direct themselves down certain social and cultural paths rather than other paths.
(270) Can technologies be used by nondominant actors to advance their alternative agendas?
(271) A second reason for looking closely at the technology-power nexus is the possibility that non-dominant groups in society will effectively mobilize technology.
(272) The new diagnosis coming from ecological modernization is that dealing effectively with the environmental crisis will require serious engagement with technology.
Disjunctions and Divisions
(273) Nevertheless, it is a mistake to follow the commonplace conviction that technology by itself “causes” change, because technology is not only a force for but also a product of social and cultural change.

Misa's main point, countering a naïve perspective of technological determinism. Also need to broaden understanding of how modern technology interacts with other cultures.

(274) This internal disjunction is compounded by the external division between the Moslem-Arab worldview and the Western worldview, made evident by the September 11^th attacks.
(275) It is an especially pressing concern that scholars and citizens in the West know all too little about the details and dynamics of how modern technologies are interacting with traditional social forms. This is true not only for the Middle East, Asia, and Africa but also for native peoples in North and South America.

Misa, Thomas J. (2004). Leonardo to the internet: Technology & culture from the Renaissance to the present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Misa, Thomas J. Leonardo to the Internet: Technology & Culture from the Renaissance to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Print.

Notes for ECrit

2011-06-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Notes for Marcel O'Gorman E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities

INTRODUCTION

New Media Calls for New Majors

(xiii) E-Crit is an interdisciplinary program that combines English, Communications, Computer Information Systems, and Fine Art.

(endnote 1) the term 'new media' is historically determined.

(xiii-xiv) E-Crit was born out of the Frankfurt School / poststructuralism sensibility of two of my colleagues and their students, who positioned resistance and vigilant critique as the cornerstones in a new media studies curriculum that opposes the compartmentalization of knowledge. .. The goal, then, is to position discourse in such a way that it can play a formative role in reshaping the academic apparatus.

(xiv) The question of the marketability of the humanities is central to this book, and I draw heavily on the work of John Guillory, whose Cultural Capital provides a realistic analysis of the state of the humanities in techno-bureaucratic culture - a culture whose 'fetishization of “rigor”' has led to a veritable crisis in the humanities' (ix). .. I think it's time to take a harder look at how disciplines rooted in the study and preservation of printed texts can remain relevant and viable in a digital, picture-oriented culture.

(xv) One way of explaining this sense of disappointment in the 'failure of theory' is to investigate how attempts to apply deconstruction toward the materialization of revolutionary scholarly practices have been largely ineffectual. .. somewhere in the early 1990s, the major tenets of deconstruction (death of the Author, intertextuality, etc.) were displaced into technology, that is, hypertext. Or to put it another way, philosophy was transformed, liquidated even, into the materiality of new media. This alchemical transformation did not result in the creation of new, experimental scholarly methods that mobilize deconstruction via technology, but in an academic fever for digital archiving and accelerated hermeneutics, both of which replicate, and render more efficient, traditional scholarly practices that belong to the print apparatus.

Recall the readings for A Companion to Digital Humanities.

(xv-xvi) Shaping a new apparatus also involves more than a scholarly remediation of printed texts. .. A large-scale institutional change of the type I am envisioning can only come about with a careful and deliberate implementation that targets not only discourse of scholars, but that of students and classrooms (including ergonomics), administrators and buildings (including architecture), campuses and cities (including urban planning).

(xvi) A large portion of this study involves an attempt to create a new method of scholarly research - which I have dubbed hypericonomy - that is more suitable to a picture-oriented, digital-centric culture. .. E-Crit is a glimpse at what 'knowledge production' might look like, after deconstruction, in an age of computer-mediated communication.

1. The Canon, the Archive, and the Remainder: Reimagining Scholarly Discourse

The Remainder: Structural, Material, Representational

(4) All of the linguistic tools that account for the poetics of this study - a poetics I have called hypericonomy - might be classified under what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has termed 'the remainder' of language. Puns, anagrams, false etymologies, macaronics, and metaphor of all breeds fall into this repressed category, this 'other of language' (99). More importantly here, the remainder is the 'other' of academic or scholarly language. It is deemed as nonsense or rubbish, classified as 'cute' or juvenile, the stuff of children's literature, fantasy, and folklore, and lately, as unstylish poststructural writing.

(4) E-Crit attempts to take this teratological science [study of monsers] a step further by viewing the 'remainder' not only as a means of illuminating conventional language, but as a language with a revolutionary potential of its own. If the remainder is the hidden or repressed, monstrous 'other' of the conventional academic discourse, then those who seek to change that conventional discourse might engage in a science of anagnorisis; that is, a science of invention and knowledge-production that depends on a face-to-face encounter with the monster.

(4) Like the relationship between common sense and nonsense, the relationship between scholarly academic language and the remainder is that of master and slave.

(5) By speaking of the remainder in these political terms, as a case of exclusion, repression, and otherness, I am hoping to supplement John Guillory's important study of canon formation in Cultural Capital. .. Guillory suggests that the canon is nothing more than a product of scholarly imaginary, and that the debate points essentially to a crisis in the humanities wrought by a fetishistic clinging to traditional conceptions of literature and scholarship. This is the fate of literary studies in universities dominated by a techno-bureaucratic culture that values 'rigor' above all else.

(5) While Guillory focuses primarily on the permutations of the category of 'literature,' this study is more concerned with the category of 'academic writing,' which is the primary vehicle for mediating the 'imaginary structures' of higher education. As Guillory suggests, the ideology of literary tradition that is at the root of the canon debate is always 'a history of writers and not of writing' (63). Guillory is interested, therefore, in how writing becomes literature. This study, however, asks how writing becomes scholarship, and it does so not only by examining the practices and structures of the academic apparatus, but also by imagining a new method of scholarly writing (hypericonomy) and a new curricular strategy (Electronic Critique).

(5-6) Four years ago, I submitted a hypertext essay, 'A Provisional Treatment for Archive Fever,' to a Web-based humanities journal. .. The journal referees, however, were not so enthusiastic upon first reviewing the hypertext, and the work was not accepted for publication.

(6) Since the essay I submitted to the journal was non-traditional from an academic prespective, the referee's comments, as reproduced here, should act as a sort of warning for the inventors of new modes of academic discourse, namely, this is what to expect when you submit 'remainder-work' to a traditional journal. .. The first type of remainder is taken directly from Lecercle and Deleuze/Guattari, and it relates to the rhizomatic principle of structure disdained by traditional, rigorous humanities scholars: the structural remainder. The second type is more grammatological in nature; it concerns the repressed technological element of humanities scholarship, and the resistance of scholars to certain communications technologies: the material remainder. The third type of remainder, which is closely allied to the second, accounts for a great deal of the theoretical writing in this book: the representational remainder of scholarly discourse, which might also be termed the pictorial remainder.

Tree vs. Roots - Structural Remainder

(7) In punceptual writing, data is organized according to the logic of the pun, the most base and primitive species of remainder; punning is what makes the work of Marshall McLuhan, for example, both brilliant and annoying.

(7) the puncept can also be pictorial.

(8) Hypericonomy emulates the structural characteristic of the rhizome by foregrounding the remainder in scholarly research and writing. The pun, then, even though it may be deemed as 'cute' or 'confusing' to those who are unaccustomed to its rhizomatic ways, can be used as a structuring tool in a scholarly research program.

Print vs. Electronic - Material Remainder

(8) My submission was, to borrow Lev Manovich's term, an attempt to write (in) the language of new media. The suggestion that it should be 'put into conventional essay form ... before it goes deconstructive' is indicative of the referee's oppressive print-centricity.

(9) As I will argue throughout this book, it is a definitive characteristic of traditional scholars to reject any mode of discourse that diverges from the path of the conventional, hierarchical essay format.

(11) However, although digital technologies provide us with the most effective archiving tools to date, archiving should not be the defining task of digital humanities scholars. In these archival projects, scholars are using only a portion of the potential of new media; it is the portion which most appeases: (a) their nostalgia for a print-oriented culture; and (b) the demands of a digital-oriented, techno-bureaucratic culture that values predictable techno-scientific methods (e.g., archiving) over interpretation and, most of all, invention.

Text vs. Picture - Representational Remainder

(11) from the conventional point of view, pictures are entities to be 'added' to an essay or lesson, and not inherent or repressed elements of the processes of writing, reading, and learning. In this particular case, pictures are seen as elements which might change 'readings of canonical texts,' but not as elements which might altogether change the processes of reading and writing.

(12) On several occasions in this study, the term 'heuretics,' borrowed from Gregory Ulmer, will be used to describe a supplementary or alternative logic to hermeneutic discourse, a way out of the hermeneutic circle. In short, heuretics provides us with a logic of invention, 'a form of generative productivity of the sort practiced in the avant-garde' (Ulmer 1994a: xii). What I am attempting to outline in this book is a heuretic approach to discourse that draws on the suggestive power of pictures as a means of generating new modes of writing suitable to an image-oriented culture. .. The purpose of this foregrounding, however, is not to interpret the picture, or to offer an authoritative reading of it in the conventional sense, but to draw on the picture as a tool for invention, as a generator of concepts and linkages unavailable to conventional scholarly practices. This is how hypericonomy breaks out of the hermeneutic circle.

(12) To understand pictures as generators is to view them much in the same way as Lecercle describes the pun and other forms of metaphor, all of which fall into the category of the remainder, which Lecercle describes as instances of 'diachrony-within-synchrony.' .. The notion of 'diachrony-within-synchrony' points to the capacity of the remainder to interrupt our synchronic understanding of a word by invoking a diachronic association.

(13) it may be possible to capture or at least re-create this sense of schizo 'indirection' [where all possible meanings of a metaphorical phrase are present at once] before it is funnelled, before it is transformed into common sense.

(14) I would like to believe that one purpose of hypericonomy is to provoke or mimic the fluidity of creative thought and crystallize it, transforming delire or schizophrenia into a theory and a discursive practice.

The Good Sense of Nonsense

(14) sense, according to Deleuze, is present in every utterance, even in so-called nonsense, which should not be understood as lack of sense (or direction) at all, but as an overproduction of sense (indirection=too many directions at once, no single direction). .. It is in this sense that the language of new media, with its multi-discursive, diachronic structure, is nonsensical.

This seems like a special kind of intellectual, intentional nonsense rather than the ramblings of a drug-crazed, street corner schizophrenic. I think of a certain story by Paul Auster..

(16) The who of good sense is obvious, then, and the why might be answered by pointing to the history and tradition of scholarly discourse, with its roots in early print technology and the structure of the first universities. But there are other, more political, more confrontational answers to this why of scholarly discourse, which have to do with the unlikely coupling of traditionalists who seek to maintain a certain complacent, bourgeois, academic status quo, and techno-bureaucratic university administrators seeking to run a viable business.

2. The Search for Exemplars: Discourse Networks and the Pictorial Turn

Hypericon

(19) Eye Socket, with its cyborgian electrical outlets, provides us with a fine mnenomic device. Consider the Gibb picture above, then, and the limen, the enchanted looking glass, between a network of discourses and the discourse of networks that I am developing here. In this context, Eye Socket has now become a 'hypericon': 'a piece of movable cultural apparatus, one which may serve a marginal role as illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image ... that encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge' (Mitchell 1994: 49).

Discourse Networks

(20) This is the episteme of what Friedrich Kittler has called the Republic of Scholars, a republic entirely committed to 'endless circulation, a discourse network without producers or consumers, which simply heaves words around' (Kittler 1990: 4). It is this form of scholarly discourse, this discursive circuit, which renders itself visible through the production of banal treatises and dissertations.

(21) To put it in the bluntly economic terms of Katherine Hayles, we are in a situation of 'too many critics, too few texts,' and the result has not been innovation, but repetition, recycling, and reduction.

(endnote 5) a definition of heuretics.. 'Without relinquishing the presently established applications of theory in our disciplines (critique and hermeneutics), heuretics adds to these critical and interpretive practices a generative productivity of the sort practiced in the avant-garde' (Ulmer 1994a: xii).

(21-22) a traditional scholar might spurn Kittler's proposal altogether, and protest its lack of historical rigor. But an alternative reaction - the one I am supporting here - would be to recognize Kittler's methodology as a new way of conducting humanities research, a new method in which a specific scene or textual image (e.g., Faust's sigh, Gibb's Eye Socket, Las meninas) acts as a hypericon, a generative, multi-directional passageway, onto a research project.

(23) the new era demands thinking about the ways in which new media have impacted, and will continue to impact, literary theory. For this reason, Friedrich Kittler, an electrical engineer turned critical theorist, serves as an excellent exemplar of the type of 'fresh thinking' demanded by the new era. Although it's likely that most humanities scholars would shun the idea that in their spare time they should 'pick up the soldering iron and build circuits' (quoted in Griffin 1996: 731).

The old Marxist fantasy of the trans-specialist, jack-of-all-trades. Unfortunately, electronics seems to be a discipline born from print culture and abstract logic, requiring a great deal of learning to grasp. All the same, I like using the references to circuits and relays as electronic metaphors, or, better, hypericons, so that the trigger-image is from a circuit schematic.

(23-24) Kittler draws on a single scene as an inlet into a network of discourses that circulate through the text. .. The text is not something to critique or comment on, but a generator of theories.

Kittler, then, does not write about Faust or about Goethe; he writes with Goethe, just as he writes with Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida. This tendency of Kittler to write with several theorists at once is, according to David Wellberry, an innovation in scholarly method. .. It is by means of this writing with that Kittler departs from the discourse of the Republic of Scholars.

But there are plenty of examples of this style, such as Plato's Symposium, where Plato takes on the identity of each speaker whose name is significant of his psychic framework.

The Republic of Scholars

(24) I am writing under the aegis of electracy (elec-trace-y). .. This Republic of Scholars, with its faith in transparent language, scientific proof, and the text-based, linear, sequential essay, provides the methodology and discourse for all who wish to maintain affiliation within the academic apparatus.

(endnote 8) Gregory Ulmer, who coined the term 'electracy,' explains it in the following manner: 'In the history of human culture there are but three apparatuses: orality, literacy, and now electracy. We live in the moment of the emergence of electracy, comparable to the two principle moments of literacy (The Greece of Plato, and the Europe of Galileo)'.

(25) Citing Michael Taussig, Ray suggests that 'what is at stake with such questions is “the issue of graphicness,” a quality generally disdained by materialist critics who associate it with the enemies - commerce and mystification' (9).

(25) If indeed we are in the thralls of a hypervisual, picture-oriented, digital age, then a scholarly discourse suitable to such an age must accept not only poststructuralism as prior knowledge, but also the fact that technologies of representation have induced a pictorial turn in our culture, subsequently placing us on the threshold of a new subjectivation that we are still in the process of understanding.

Picture Theory

(26) imagine the various intersections, linkages, and lines of flight incited by the following plotting of points on a graph: from Jonathan Crary's historical evalution of 'Scopic Regimes' to W.J.T. Mitchell's identification of a 'pictorial turn'; from E.H. Gombrich's theory of the 'mental set' to Rosalind Kraus's 'optical unconscious.'

You have to be familiar with them in order to visualize the graph.

(26) There is no print-based artifact so accommodating that it could represent the complex network of possibilities posed by the intersection of the various texts that I wish to gather here under the aegis of picture theory.

(endnote 10) The graphic elements of Hayles's text do succeed in pointing to the materiality of her subjects of investigation, but my goal is to have the graphicness drive the production of the text itself. I am attempting to invent a mode of discourse in which the images themselves are theories, and not merely reminders of the materiality of discourse.

(27) Perhaps a more accessible way to visualize such a model is to imagine the non-linear, graphic-rich environment of the Web. Would it complicate things to suggest that, if this essay were a hypertext, its explanation of picture theory would span various nodes?

(29) Gombrich's crucial theoretical contribution to this study is the 'mental set,' a subjective 'horizon of expectation' (60) that guides an individual's optical impressions. Vision, in Gombrich's model, is a form of projection, and each individual possesses mental schemata against which s/he attempts to match the shapes in her/his field of vision. Thus, that which 'we call “reading” an image,' Gombrich suggests, 'may perhaps be better described as testing it for its potentialities' (227).

(30) There are, however, certain methods of classification within 'the filing systems of our mind' (Gombrich 1969: 105) that are not culturally determined, but that are entirely personal and subjective, the result of an individual's psychic experience. These mental images may not even be recognized by the individual herself, although they may have radical effects on the way she organizes visual stimuli.

(31) In order to withstand the image bombardment being deployed in the current mediascape, readers and viewers must possess a means of filtration that will allow them to consciously organize visual information and arrange it into manageable patterns. But in order to develop such an apparatus, it seems that a reader must dismiss the notion of transparent communication, and accept the impossibility of a universal perspective, or of 'a purely responsive act of reading - an act which will decode the transmission in precisely the way that the sender desires' (McGann 1991: 37).

Recall Hayles' attack on Shannon's model of communication where neither the sender nor the receiver play any role in massaging the medium or the message. Of course this model exists for the sake of emphasizing the external, material, technological components of the system that is the object of electrical engineering.

Imagetext and the Sister Arts

(33) The image, he [Barthes] insists, is always subordinated to the message imposed upon it by the written text, whether it is a caption, a headline, or some other written form.

(34) Despite the apparent ingenuousness of Magritte's painting [La trahison des images], Foucault identifies it as a dialectical enigma, a scene of seduction into which the viewer is irresistibly drawn.

(34) When, years after painting La trahison des images, Magritte moved his pipe and caption to a blackboard mounted on an easel, it is as if he was directly targeting the academic apparatus, taunting it with a form of discourse which it could not possibly accommodate.

(34) According to W.J.T. Mitchell, Foucault's short essay ['Ceci n'est pas une pipe'] demonstrates that La trahison des images is not only a metapicture, a picture about pictures that instructs us on the 'infinite relation' between image and text; it is also a hypericon that 'provides a picture of Foucault's way of writing and his whole theory of the stratification of knowledge and the relations of power in the dialectic of the visible and the sayable' (1994: 71).

(37) what I am seeking in the development of a new mode of academic discourse lies between Drucker's 'serious' theoretical work and her artists's books.

(39) At the beginning of each chapter of The Optical Unconscious, we find an icon - a detail from a painting, drawing, or photograph - that serves as the title. The title of each chapter, then, is represented by a pictorial mise en abyme, a conceptually - and ideologically - loaded image that captures the central argument of each chapter.

Remediating Theory

(41) I would argue that Krauss's iconic methodology would be easily adaptable to an electronic environment, where the 'icon' appears as frequently as the written word and imagetexts are the most frequent mode of representation.

Likewise imagine starting with an image of the ground symbol in a relay driver circuit that itself is only a small part of the schematic diagram of a large circuit board, which is finally itself just one part of a device such as a pinball machine.

(42) In Heuretics, Gregory Ulmer suggests that electronic media might be used to invent a 'hyperrhetoric,' a rhetoric 'that replaces the logic governing argumentative writing with associational networks' (18). .. My approach here is to put poststructuralism to work as the software required for inventing new theories, new modes of discourse, new poetics capable of short-circuiting the discourse of the Republic of Scholars.

(42-43) There are no Microsoft software bundles that tell us how to invent a new scholarly methodology. .. I wonder what Blake would have done if his desktop was equipped not with burins, acids, and copper plates, but with a Mac (or would Blake prefer a PC?), Photoshop, Netscape, and Flash?

O'Gorman continues to employ electronic metaphors, but somewhat carelessly: short-circuiting is a destructive operation; shunting is better. And his appeal to Microsoft/PC, Macs, and commodity software reflects a consumer attitude toward electronic technology. He needs to take up the soldering iron!

3. The Hypericonic De-Vise: Peter Ramus Meets William Blake

Books for Little Boys: Thomas Murner and Peter Ramus

(46) Agricola's De inventione dialectica (1479) responds to information overload by providing a discourse on method that instructs readers in the ways of logical organization. Agricola's method, a form of pre-Renaissance new media, involves placing 'things' under their proper headings, and distributing then in an external writing space rather than containing them entirely in memory.

(47-48) The gender and youthfulness of MA students during the Renaissance may go a long way in explaining the methodologies and pedagogical materials used by their instructors. .. [Thomas] Wilson's sly attempt to engage students in a virtual foxhunt [in his 1553 The Rule of Reason] may well be one of the very first samples of an educational 'video game.'

Of course, there are more appropriate precedents to the tradition of teaching with visual aids, such as Thomas Murners Chartiludium logice or logical card game (1509). Murner provides young students with a woodcut set of iconic flashcards representing the elements of logical discourse. .. these texts document a shift from strictly mnemonic, internalized practices to methodologies that are reliant upon the external spatialization of thought.

(48-49) For Ramus, method referred specifically to the 'orderly pedagogical presentation of any subject by reputedly scientific descent from “general principles” to “species” by means of definition and bipartite division' (Ong 1958: 30). .. According to Ong, Ramus was simply responding to the need of universities to corporatize knowledge delivery.

(49) New media have done little to alter the practices of humanities scholars, except perhaps by accelerating - by means of more accessible databases - the rate at which hermeneutics can be performed. .. Just as Ramus's scholarly method had a great influence in shaping a print apparatus that has persisted for five centuries, might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to shape the digital apparatus?

Rather than allow the default to prevail.

(49) Ulmer cites Andre Breton's co-option of Freud to invent surrealism. Since my goal is to invent a mode of discourse that challenges Ramist, print-based methods, I might very well co-opt a pre-Ramist methodology and ask the following question: Is it possible to do with Thomas Murner what Andre Breton did with Freud?

Books for Little Boys and Girls: William Blake

(55) Although such a 'booby-trap' beginning, as Geoffrey Summerfield calls it, would cause bells to go off in the head of the least satirically minded reader, this may not be the case if the reader is a child. An Island in the Moon, like many other satirical texts, from Gulliver's Travels to Animal Farm, works on a variety of levels, at least some of which can be appreciated by children. This concern for couching political and cultural critique in a form suitable for both children and adults is yet one more reason why Blake may have chosen to write children's books.

Digitization in the Age of Blake

(57) Unlike other Romantics, such as Rousseau, Blake was not an outright anti-technologist; his critique targets the mechanistic techniques tied into the apparatus, and not the apparatus itself. Rather than rejecting the apparatus of print production, then, he chose to invent his own, based on techniques that subverted the dehumanizing potential of mechanical reproduction.

Compare this to the free, open source software movement as a response to the dehumanizing potential of closed-source, 'cathedral' software epitomized by Microsoft.

(58) As [Morris] Eaves suggests [in The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake], 'digitization is not a notion confined to electronic devices but a technological norm that operates across a spectrum of materials and processes. As a rule of thumb, the more deeply digitization penetrates, the more efficient the process becomes' (186).

(58) At the heart of digitization is a praxis of 'division' that Blake strived to denounce through his 'chaosethetics.'

(61) As argued by Viscomi and other Blake scholars before him, Blake's references to 'corrosives ... melting apparent surfaces away' underscores the degree to which the materiality of his mode of production was etched into his visionary philosophy.

(62) Blake's work, informed by his notion of the 'contraries,' invovles a unification of form and content, material production and ideology.

(66) By creating execises such as 'Re-writing Blake,' instructors are not asking students to write about the poet/painter; they are asking students to write with him.

New Media for Everyone: Hypericonomy

(67) My strategy has been to 'show' this method in this chapter rather than explain it away with a series of easily replicable instructions. In this way, I am attempting to provoke a certain degree of misunderstanding, with the hope that readers might produce their own monstrous versions of hypericonomy. This is a strategy that, in Ulmer's terms, is designed to trigger a relay.

(endnote 11) Richard Coyne draws on the term 'technoromanticism' to identify narratives that promote an emancipatory vision of new technologies.

If humanities scholarship ever reaches into software design, then the notion of 'writing with' takes truly useful material possibilities, such as joining in the work of an FOS project or remediating obsolete technologies such as the electronic pinball machine by PMREK, so we do those projects. If the chapter begins with an icon, the ground symbol, for grounding the study of electronic media with a study of electronics itself, then zooming reveals a relay driver circuit. O'Gorman's rhetoric enticing you to repeat his experiment 'hypericonomy' succeeds as the impulse at the base of the transistor crossing the threshold to initiate current flow between the collector and emitter, in turn energizing the solenoid relay, which turns out to be a pop bumper momentarily energized during a game on the Flash Gordon pinball machine.

(68) It is this notion of a 'visual puncept' that is at the foot of hypericonomy, and which is also akin to the aesthetic techniques of William Blake.

4. Nonsense and Play: The Figure/Ground Shift in New Media Discourse

Visualization and Intelligence

(73) Could our visual culture, then, the culture which is making us 'sillier by the minute,' actually be responsible for a certain intellectual (r)evolution? The pedagogical avant-garde, from the U.S. Army to the Baby Einstein Company, seem to think so.

These paragons of collective intelligence, thinking, unconscious collective bargaining, and so on are instantiating Nietzsche's silliness?

(74)(figure 4.1) Wendy and Michael Magnifier, 1998: McDonald's Peter Pan Happy Meal toy.

(76) My argument, then, is not that visual media have made us, or our children, more intelligent than our predecessors, but that development in the materiality of media lead to shifts in the hierarchy or matrix of cognitive processes.

Heim's historical drift and gains and losses.

(77) The camera obscura, as described by Krauss, might serve as a convenient hypericon for encapsulating the classical understanding of visuality which the avant-garde challenged.

Influence of Lacan?

(78) In The Optical Unconscious, Krauss relies heavily on the work of Max Ernst in order to demonstrate the surrealists' undoing of the figure/ground binary.

(80) the contemporary popularity of surrealist imagery which stunned and baffled its initial audience, demonstrates the advanced level of optical sophistication possessed by the average contemporary consumer.

Figure/Ground 2: Children's Literature

(80) In general, surrealism involved a sort of psychoanalytic revision of childhood experiences, not as a means of therapy, however, but in order to apply these experiences to the transformation of everyday life.

(81) one can reverse the conventional figure/ground relationship by putting greater emphasis on the frame, or even, on the act of enframing, rather than on the content of an image or text.

Does this permit garbage to slip through the text uncriticized? Isn't that what we mean by “the unconscious”? Can't we detect it with computer programs that analyze what we have written?

(81) Nonsense, then, can take us across cultural and cognitive fields, forcing us to confront the other, and his/her methods of organization. If the form and logic of print textuality began with books for 'little boys' (i.e., Ramus's textbooks), then the model for an electronic textuality might also come from books for children - nonsense books, that is. And not only from children's books, but from their video games and television shows as well.

(endnote 10) It might also be appropriate to consider, here, Heidegger's conception of enframing (gestell) as the essence of technology, and the way in which nonsense thwarts the technological drive toward efficiency.

Invites analysis of computer software, books written for 'the other'. But are they really examples of the intellectual sort of nonsense proposed here, and not just “very stupid phenomena”?

Figure/Ground 3: Digital Media

(81-82) Susan Stewart characterizes nonsense, as a strikingly intertextual mode of discourse, one which cannot occur without transgression, without contraband, without a little help of the bricoleur's hand. To view nonsense in this way is to view communication as a constant interplay of 'universes of discourse' which are incessantly 'involved in borrowing from one another and transforming one another at every step as they are employed in an ongoing social process' (ibid.). .. The Web can facilitate a rapid shift between various modes of discourse and cognition, all within the same perceptual field. .. hypertext offers us a form, a material space, in which we can build our own models.

(82) Admittedly, the computer is the most far-reaching new media tool in education, but it is not the only electronic tool that influences learning. Television, video games, even cell phones - marginal electronic media from a scholarly point of view - all play a part in education, even though they may not be an integral element of the classroom experience. Whereas Katherine Hayles rightly calls for an increased emphasis on material-specific critique, I am calling for an increase in material-specific pedagogy, starting with the materiality for the Web.

Experiment with adding web-enabled mobile devices to the classroom experience using the poller software as an integral part of a presentation.

(83) What [Richard, writer of The Electronic Word] Lanham neglects to consider is that hypertext may be used not only as a sort of light switch between the classical, academic binary of rhetoric vs. philosophy, but also as a multivalent switch, or rheostat, if you will, for toggling between cultural, epistemological, autobiographical, political, and historical categories. .. It may be useful here to leave behind the binary, light-switch model of electronic writing and consider another model, that of Gregory Ulmer's argumentative 'tuning knobs.'

(84-85) If, alongside the knobs for narration, exposition, and poetics, we include knobs for politics, popular culture, theory, autobiography, etc., then we have indeed built a machine (a graphic equalizer?) capable of generating a mode of academic discourse more suitable to a culture of computing.

Give the humanists a quize: Tuning knobs are indeed rheostats if [] is what they control: your choices are (a) capacitance, (b) inductance, (c) resistance, (d) reactance, and (e), none of these.

Figure/Ground 4: 1\0

(86) The semiotic square, employed on its own, is a much too rigid and positivist apparatus. For this reason, 1\0 relies heavily on a more pliable apparatus known as the 'choral square.' The choral square, which first appears in Ulmer's Heuretics, is a descendant of Plato's notion of chora, which was picked up by Jacques Derrida. Like the mnemonic strategy of classical rhetoric or oratory, chorography relies upon the generative potential of a specific place. In Ulmer's chorography, the subject provides the place of invention, with the intention of generating a poetics. The term place here is somewhat inadequate, however, since it actually refers to the space of a quadripode graph which Ulmer calls the popcycle, and within which the chorographer (or mystorian) plots him/herself by filling in the following coordinates or slots: 'Family, Entertainment, School, Discipline.'

Unfamiliarity with Derrida signifies what? Is this the first time O'Gorman really invokes Derrida directly? If so, I'd like to note my astonishment that he never, throughout this entire book, as far as I can tell, nor in his bibliography mentions Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida's picture-driven meditation.

(86-87) What really matters for the sake of mystory, however, is that the categories are filled in before the project actually begins, and they are pursued faithfully as if they formed a set of rules for the deployment of the project.

(87) The popcycle first appeared in Ulmer's Teletheory as a set of guidelines employed in the creation of a mystory, a new critical genre which adds autobiography and pop culture to the scholarly mix. .. What remains essential in any case is that: (a) the academic category is forced to collide with other influential aspects of an individual's life; and (b) the categories are staged around the resolution of a specific problem.

This language is intended to be silly in the sort of indirectional nonsense that is like Blake's children's works.

(87-88) This resolution to not analyse the recurrent pictorial theme deserves further commentary here, since it is an essential element of mystory and of hypericonomy. If, according to Paul Feyerabend, 'by incorporation into a language of the future ... one must learn to argue with unexplained terms and to use sentences for which no clear rules of usage are as yet available' (1975: 256-7), then the commitment to deferring any in-depth analysis of one's thoughts and images during the time of hypericonomising must be considered as a seminal element of the method. In Ulmer's terms, by filling in the slots of the popcycle, we are 'learning how to write an intuition, and this writing is what distinguishes electronic logic (conduction) from the abductive (Baker Street) reasoning of the detective' (1994a: 37).

Isn't this an attempt to snatch meaning from the semi-conscious, like interpreting slips of the tongue but closer to the point where consciousness steers production? I bet Zizek crosses this innovative approach.

(88) Through this process of simulated intuition, or 'artificial stupidity,' the writer, completely unaware, performs an outering of the ideological categories that structure his or her organization of knowledge (1994a: 38). Hypericonomy, then, involves the invention of a new relation to knowledge itself, a techno-ideo-logical relation which Ulmer calls a 'knowledge of enframing' (1989: 183).

(89) The deferred understanding, or 'artificial stupidity,' might be considered as a form of Nachtraglichkeit, a psychoanalytic concept championed by Freud and Lacan. .. The point of recognition, then, can only take the form of a deferred understanding, an understanding-too-late, arrived at by means of a detour through the realm of nonsense (puns, anagrams, macaronics, etc.). .. When a hypericonomy such as 1\0 is finished, we are left with a veritable impression of its creator's unconscious (whether it be political, optical, or psychic).

(90) Lacan frequently employed images to instill this 'sublime of stupidity' in his audience. On the cover of each volume of his seminars, for example, is a hypericonic image taken from classical painting - an 'organizing image of the discourse, not to be interpreted but to serve as a point of departure for working through a theoretical problem' (Ulmer 1989: 194). .. In Lacan's mnemonic technique, we have the precursor, the theoretical bud, of which hypericonomy is indeed in full bloom.

This is the connection between O'Gorman's avant-garde method and 'science' (Freud and Lacan).

(94) Could it be that to produce a hypericonomy of this sort is to place oneself in the presence of a sublime object? An object which, in the Kantian/Derridean sense, invokes a 'violence done to the senses' (Derrida 1987: 130)? An object beyond the grasp of comprehension, beyond calculation and without end?

(94) The method reflects the current situation in which computer users approach their extremely complex and powerful machines as dilettantes. The sense of nausea that I feel when confronting 1\0 today has to do with the fact that I am confronting my own assumptions in 1996, my own lack of skill with Web design. .. The point of underscoring this design issue is to demonstrate that, with the rapid and incessant changes in software and hardware manufacturing, the best way to approach digital media pedagogy may well be to train students in the art of 'well-informed dilettantism.' This is why William Blake, a poet, painter, philosopher, printmaker, and visionary, serves as an excellent exemplar for students in the humanities today.

The cyperpunk/cybersage position. Careful to position between ignorant users and too-entrenched (technostressed); go back to his position wanting Microsoft to offer him a solution, and, lacking that, to permit dilettantism at the state of the art.

5. From Ecriture to E-Crit: On Postmodern Curriculum

Language of the Future

The 4fold Vision

(102) the 4fold Vision asks students to engage in a form of pattern recognition; it asks them to devise a method for organizing and producing knowledge that is suitable to a culture facing an onslaught of information, much of which is pictorial.

Critical Theory, Digital Media Studies, and the Curriculum of the Future

(103) In The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University [Carl A.] Raschke opposes interactivity (a common term in both pedagogy and new media development) to transactivity, which he sees as the pedagogical future of the 'postmodern university.' .. Web-based distance education has already changed the way we understand the university, but it has simply transposed print-centric habits (with varied success) into a new learning space. I believe that the transformation of the academic apparatus is most likely to occur by means of physical agents that engage directly with the traditional material structures of learning, from the essay, to the classroom, to the entire campus itself.

(104) Perhaps what needs to be developed most of all, however, in programs such as DMS, is the study of metastructure. But, to date, this has been the specialty of English departments, where critical theory found a home a few decades ago and is now ready to migrate from its literary, print-oriented focus to the realm of digital artifacts.

(105) As John Guillory has argued in Cultural Capital, the successful integration of critical theory into university education is a result of its being introduced - as a sort of contraband - at the graduate level.

(106) The 'off-the-radar' status of literary studies is capable of provoking severe self-pity in the traditional Romantics scholar. But to a Romatics scholar with an interest in critical theory and the materiality of visual communication, this state of neglect provides room for much-needed experimentation and revolution.

Electronic Critique: A Case Study in Curricular Remediation

(106-107) This leads Guillory to the conclusion that 'the moment of theory is determined, then, by a certain defunctioning of the literary curriculum, a crisis in the market value of its cultural capital occasioned by the emergence of a professional-managerial class which no longer requires the (primarily literary) cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie' (xii). .. The answer, I propose, lies in new media.

(107) The study of new media artifacts must coincide with the development of new media research methods.

(108) From the perspective of university administrators, however, E-Crit remains a nebulous sort of computer art studio that encourages students to take on Web and video projects on campus (this has earned them a reputation as the institution's leading media developers). These projects allow the administrators to tout E-Crit as a cutting-edge program when questioned by alumni and suspicious senior faculty, but the conversation usually ends there.

(109) In many ways, theory's failure has much in common with a culture that identifies with online dating, genetic engineering, and self-replication through increasingly sophisticated recordable media. When I propose that critical theory needs digital media and vice versa, I am proposing a curriculum that supports the thoughtful application of theory to the production of digital media artifacts, the creation of humane technologies and tech-related policies, and the investigation of the impact of technology on human being; or, to borrow Eagleton's shamelessly simple-minded words, I am proposing that educators can combine media and theory to 'find out how life can become more pleasant for more people' (2003: 5).

Notice the E-Crit program has a 15 credits “Programming Track” that includes data communications and networks and requirements and design with no focus on any particular programming language.

(111) For example, the Department of Electrical Engineering might offer a class in microcontroller programming that would involve students from both engineering and liberal arts in the creation of electronic devices suitable, for example, for a critical/digital art installation.

(112) The 'dot.com' bust only serves to increase resistance to changes in academia, but university administrators still recognize the powerful cultural capital of digital media, as evidenced in the persistence of distance education projects. But a legion of University of Pheonix's will certainly not spur a knowledge revolution.

E-Crit and ecriture

(113) As [Hugh] Culik indicates, E-Crit was formed out of a need for resistance, specifically, resistance to 'the ideologies that make up electronic culture.' .. E-Crit requires students and faculty to take an ironic stance toward technology; to be 'in technology, but not of technology,' as a deceased colleague of ours once said.

(114) As Lev Manovich has suggested, 'One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer' (2000: 306-7). Rather than turn the political and intellectual dynamics of poststructuralism or the avant-garde into a selection of menu items in a design program, E-Crit is an attempt to remotivate those dynamic strategies, and recouple them with their (now digitized) aesthetic strategies.

Not surprising at all that avant-garde techniques have been used in consumer-oriented human-machine interface design. O'Gorman's strategy is to reincorporate the philosophies behind avant-garde aesthetics into the new mode of material critique through imitation (writing-with). Be sure to consider this in the context of Drucker and McVarish.

(115) As a final statement on 'postmodern curriculum,' then, I will suggest that it must be as agile and ironic as the ecriture of Barthes and Derrida.

A Final Note on Techno-Romantic Idealism

(116) Between the repressive constraints of 'legacy' and the techno-fetishistic demand for 'progress' levied by the ruling managerial class, curricular innovation has very little chance of leaving the confines of an idealistic vision statement.

O'Gorman, Marcel. (2006). E-crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities. Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press.

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities. Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print.

Notes for Dialectic of Enlightenment

2011-06-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Notes for Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Preface
(xvi) If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive movement, it seals its own fate. By leaving consideration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies, thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth. In the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncomprehended senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident.
(xvi) We believe that in these fragments we have contributed to such understanding by shwoing that the cause of enlightenment's relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself.
(xvii) Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.
(xviii) If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called overproduction in domestic economic crises in the preceding period, today, thanks to the enthronement of powerful groups as that social subject, it is producing the international threat of fascism: progress is reverting to regression. That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, and ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter.

The Concept of Enlightenment
(1-2) Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. Bacon, “The father of experimental philosophy,” brought these motifs together. . . . Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.
(3) For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.
(4-5) For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows. . . . Unity remains the watchword from Parmenidies to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.
(5-6) The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships. . . . In their mastery of nature, the creative God, and the ordering mind are alike. Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command.
(6-7) Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. . . . Representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representation but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. . . . The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearer. . . . The autonomy of thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of the Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology.
(9) Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (Trupp), which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment.
(12) Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step by worshipping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had been merely subjected. Earlier, fetishes had been subject to the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish.
(12-13) Nature as self-representation is the core of the symbolic: an entity or a process which is conceived as eternal because it is reenacted again and again in the guise of the symbol. . . . The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of culture, finally causes them, through internal tendencies as exact opposites, to converge.
(14-15) The work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura. . . . The paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud, the myth of the twentieth century and faith's irrationality into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism.

Compare to Benjamin.

(16-17) Even the deductive form of science mirrors hierarchy and compulsion. Just as the first categories represented the organized tribe and its power over the individual, the entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor. . . . Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality. . . . It is this unity of collectivity and power, and not the immediate social universal, solidarity, which is precipitated in intellectual forms. . . . They originated, as Vico put it, in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with the same fidelity the laws of physics, the equality of freeborn citizens, and the inferiority of women, children, and slaves. . . . The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
(18-19) In the preemptive indentification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It equates thought with mathematics. The latter is thereby cut loose, as it were, turned into absolute authority. . . . Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. . . . Despite its axiomatic self-limitation, it installed itself as necessary and objective: mathematics made thought into a thing – a tool, to use its own term.

Mathematics reified thought as a machine process. Compare to Hayles.

(21-22) Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning, the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of the people. . . . The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. . . . human beings can expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless.
(25) With the spread of the bourgeois commodity economy the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new barbarism are germinating.
(27) The fettered man listens to a concert, as immobilized as audiences later, and his enthusiastic call for liberation goes unheard as applause. In this way the enjoyment of art and manual work diverge as the primeval world is left behind. The epic already contains the correct theory. Between the cultural heritage and enforced work there is a precise correlation, and both are founded on the inescapable compulsion toward the social control of nature.
(27-28) Measures like those taken on Odysseus's ship in face of the Sirens are a prescient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. . . . Odysseus is represented in the sphere of work. Just as he cannot give way to the lure of self-abandonment, as owner he also forfeits participation in work and finally even control over it, while his companions, despite their closeness to things, cannot enjoy their work because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, with their senses forcibly stopped. . . . Humanity, whose skills and knowledge become differentiated with the division of labor, is thereby forced back to more primitive anthropological stages, since, with the technical facilitation of existence, the continuance of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression. Fantasy withers.
(28-29) A consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small. . . . Through the mediation of the total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity.

Examine Turkle's dialectical turning of this theme.

(30) The rulers themselves do not believe in objective necessity, even if they sometimes call their machinations by that name. They posture as engineers of world history. Only their subjects accept the existing development, which renders them a degree more powerless with each prescribed increase in their standard of living, as inviolably necessary.

Feenberg.

(32-33) In declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing the mind, in the best idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the superstructure, socialism clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy. . . . By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization. By subjecting everything particular to its discipline, it left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings. . . . In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed.

Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment
(35) The familiar equation of epic and myth, which in any case has been undermined by recent classical philology, proves wholly misleading when subjected to philosophical critique. The two concepts diverge. They mark two phases of an historical process, which are still visible at the joints where editors have stitched the epic together.
(36) Understanding of the element of bourgeois enlightenment in Homer has been advanced by the German late-Romantic interpretation of antiquity based on the early writings of Nietzsche. Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. He formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power.
(37) The alleged authenticity of the archaic, with its principle of blood and sacrifice, is already tainted by the devious bad conscience of power characteristic of the “national regeneration” today, which uses primeval times for self-advertising.
(38) That is the secret underlying the conflict between epic and myth: the self does not exist simply in rigid antithesis to adventure but takes on its solidity only through this antithesis, and its unity through the very multiplicity which myth in its oneness denies.
(40) If exchange represents the secularization of sacrifice, the sacrifice itself, like the magic schema of rational exchange, appears as a human contrivance intended to control the gods, who are overthrown precisely by the system created to honor them.
(40) Something of this fraud, which elevates the perishable person as bearer of the divine substance, has always been detectable in the ego, which owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future. Its substance is as illusory as the immortality of the slaughtered victim. Nor without reason was Odysseus regarded by many as a deity.
(41) Cunning is nothing other than the subjective continuation of the objective untruth of sacrifice, which it supersedes.
(42) In class society, the self's hostility to sacrifice included a sacrifice of the self, since it was paid for by a denial of nature in the human being for the sake of mastery over extrahuman nature and over human beings. This very denial, the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of proliferating mythical irrationality: with the denial of nature in human beings, not only the telos of the external mastery of nature but also the telos of one's own life becomes confused and opaque.
(45) Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings. . . . He wriggles through – that is his survival, and all the renown he gains in his own and others' eyes merely confirms that the honor of heroism is won only by the humbling of the urge to attain entire, universal, undivided happiness.
(45) The formula for Odysseus's cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her. The mythical monsters under whose power he falls represent, as it were, petrified contracts and legal claims dating from primeval times.
(47) With the dissolution of the contract through its literal fulfillment a change occurs in the historical situation of language: it begins to pass over into designation. Mythical fate had been one with the spoken word. . . . The word was thought to have direct power over the thing, expression merged with intention. Cunning, however, consists in exploiting the difference. . . . Odysseus discovered in words what in fully developed bourgeois society is called formalism: their perennial ability to designate is bought at the cost of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them, so that they refer from a distance to all possible contents, both to nobody and to Odysseus himself. From the formalism of mythical names and statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek to rule over human beings and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of bourgeois thinking.

Foucault order of things.

(48) Odysseus's defenselessness against the foaming sea sounds like a legitimation of the enrichment of the voyager at the expense of indigenous inhabitants. Bourgeois economics later enshrined this principle in the concept of risk: the possibility of foundering is seen as a moral justification for profit.
(61) The transposition of myths into the novel, as in the adventure story, does not falsify myth so much as drag it into the sphere of time, exposing the abyss which separates it from homeland and reconciliation. . . . Speech itself, language as opposed to mythical song, the possibility of holding fast the past atrocity through memory, is the law of Homeric escape. Not without reason is the fleeing hero repeatedly introduced as narrator. The cold detachment of narrative, which describes even the horrible as if for entertainment, for the first time reveals in all their clarity the horrors which in song are solemnly confused with fate.

Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality
(63) Thinking, as understood by the Enlightenment, is the process of establishing a unified, scientific order and of deriving factual knowledge from principles, whether these principles are interpreted as arbitrarily posited axioms, innate ideas, or the highest abstractions.
(65) The system which enlightenment aims for is the form of knowledge which most ably deals with the facts, most effectively assists the subject in mastering nature.
(65) The true nature of the schematism which externally coordinates the universal and the particular, the concept and the individual case, finally turns out, in current science, to be the interest of industrial society. Being is apprehended in terms of manipulation and administration. . . . Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into practice: images are precensored during production by the same standard of understanding which will later determine their reception by viewers.
(68) The work of the Marquis de Sade exhibits “understanding without direction from another” - that is to say, the bourgeois subject freed from all tutelage.
(68-69) After the brief interlude of liberalism in which the bourgeois kept one another in check, power is revealing itself as archaic terror in a fascistically rationalized form. . . . More than a century before the emergence of sport, Sade demonstrated empirically what Kant grounded transcendentally: the affinity between knowledge and planning which has set its stamp of inescapable functionality on a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces. . . . The special architectonic structure of the Kantian system, like the gymnasts' pyramids in Sade's orgies and the formalized principles of early bourgeois freemasonry – cynically reflected in the strict regime of the libertine society of the 120 Days of Sodom – prefigures the organization, devoid of any substantial goals, which was to encompass the whole of life. What seems to matter in such events, more than pleasure itself, is the busy pursuit of pleasure, its organization.

(74) In psychological terms Juliette, not unlike Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, embodies neither unsublimated nor regressive libido but intellectual pleasure in regression, amor intelletualis diaboli, the joy of defeating civilization with its own weapons.
(79) By elevating the cult of strength to a world-historical doctrine, German fascism took it to its absurd conclusion.
(81-83) Magic passes into mere activity, into the means – in short, into industry. The formalization of reason is merely the intellectual expression of mechanized production. The means is fetishized: it absorbs pleasure. Just as the goals with which the old system of rule had veiled itself are rendered illusory by enlightenment in theory, the possibility of abundance removes their justification in practice. . . . Only with increasing civilization and enlightenment do the strengthened self and the secure system of power reduce the festival to farce. . . . Pleasure becomes an object of manipulation, until it finally perishes in the administrative arrangements. . . . The general overflowing is no longer possible. The period of turbulence has been individualized. Holidays have supplanted the feast. In fascism they are supplemented by the collective fake intoxication, concocted from radio, headlines, and Benzedrine.

Zizek.

(84-85) The more universally the system of modern industry requires everyone to enter its service, the more all those who do not form part of the ocean of “white trash,” which is absorbing the unqualified employed and unemployed, are turned into petty experts, into employees who must fend for themselves. . . . What is true in all this is the insight into the dissociation of love, the work of progress. This dissociation, which mechanizes pleasure and distorts longing into a deception, attacks love at its core.
(90-92) Science itself, therefore, is open to the same criticism as metaphysics. The denial of God contains an irresolvable contradiction; it negates knowledge itself. Sade did not drive the idea of enlightenment to this point, where it turns against itself. The reflection of science on itself, the work of the Enlightenment's conscience, was left to philosophy, meaning German philosophy. . . . If the bourgeoisie sent them, its most loyal politicians, to the guillotine, it banished its most outspoken writer to the hell of the Bibliotheque Nationale. For the chronique scandaleuse of Justine and Juliette which, turned out as if on a production line, prefigured in the style of the eighteenth century the sensational literature of the nineteenth and the mass literature of the twentieth is the Homeric epic after it has discarded its last mythological veil: the story of thought as an instrument of power.
(93) Compared to the mentality and actions of the rulers under fascism, in which power has come fully into its own, the enthusiastic description of the life of Brisa-Testa – although those rulers are recognizable in it – pales to harmless banality. In Sade as in Mandeville, private vices are the anticipatory historiography of public virtues in the totalitarian era. It is because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the rooftops, that Sade and Nietzsche are still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers. In a different way to logical positivism, they both took science at its word. . . . In proclaiming the identity of power and reason, their pitiless doctrines are more compassionate than those of the moral lackeys of the bourgeoisie. “Where are they greatest dangers?,” Nietzsche once asked. “In pit.” With his denial he redeemed the unwavering trust in humanity which day by day is betrayed by consoling affirmation.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
(95) Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce.
(95) The technical antithesis between few production centers and widely dispersed reception necessitates organization and planning by those in control. . . . These adverse effects, however, should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself but to its function within the economy today.

Internet media undo this necessity.

(98) Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production. . . . Everything comes from consciousness – from that of God for Malebranche and Berkeley, and from earthly production management for mass art. Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types.
(101) Every phenomenon is by now so thoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur that does not bear in advance the trace of the jargon, that is not seen at first glance to be approved. But the true masters, as both producers and reproducers, are those who speak the jargon with the same free-and-easy relish as if it were the language it has long since silenced. Such is the industry's ideal of naturalness.
(104) The general designation “culture” already contains, virtually, the process of identifying, cataloging, and classifying which imports culture into the realm of administration. Only what has been industrialized, rigorously subsumed, is fully adequate to this concept of culture.
(107-108) The culture industry can boast of having energetically accomplished and elevated to a principle the often inept transposition of art to the consumption sphere, of having stripped amusement of its obtrusive naiveties and imposed the quality of its commodities. . . . What is new, however, is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and amusement have been subjected equally to the concept of purpose and thus brought under a single false denominator: the totality of the culture industry. . . . With good reason the interest of countless consumers is focused on the technology, not on the rigidly repeated, threadbare and half-abandoned content.

A criticism that is often also applied to movies and video games.

(111) Apart from that, and even by the measure of the existing order, the bloated entertainment apparatus does not make life more worthy of human beings. The idea of “exploiting” the given technical possibilities, of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic mass consumption, is part of an economic system which refuses to utilize capacities when it is a question of abolishing hunger.

Benjamin on war.

(113) What is decisive today is no longer Puritanism, though it still asserts itself in the form of women's organizations, but the necessity, inherent in the system, of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible. This principle requires that while all needs should be presented to individuals as capable of fulfillment by the culture industry, they should be so set up in advance that individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry's object.
(115) Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans paid for by private interests.
(116-117) The culture industry has sardonically realized man's species being. Everyone amounts only to those qualities by which he or she can replace everyone else: all are fungible, mere specimens.
(120) On one matter, however, this hollow ideology is utterly serious: everyone is provided for. “No one must be hungry or cold. Anyone failing to comply goes to a concentration camp.” The joke from Hitler's Germany might well shine out as a maxim above all the portals of the culture industry.

Compare to Zizek “enjoy your symptom”?

(124) Everyone can be like the omnipotent society, everyone can be happy if only they hand themselves over to it body and soul and relinquish their claim to happiness. In their weakness society recognizes its own strength and passes some if it back to them. Their lack of resistance certifies them as reliable customers. Thus is tragedy abolished.
(126-128) The dominant taste derives its ideal from the advertisement, from commodified beauty. Socrates' dictum that beauty is the useful has at last been ironically fulfilled. The cinema publicizes the cultural conglomerate as a totality, while the radio advertises individually the products for whose sake the cultural system exists. . . . The mortally sick Beethoven, who flung away a novel by Walter Scott with the cry: “The fellow writes for money,” while himself proving an extremely experienced and tenacious businessman in commercializing the last quartets – works representing the most extreme repudiation of the market – offers the most grandiose example of the unity of the opposites of market and autonomy in bourgeois art. The artists who succumb to ideology are precisely those who conceal this contradiction instead of assimilating it into the consciousness of their own productions, as Beethoven did . . . . The principle of idealist aesthetics, purposiveness without purpose, reverses the schema socially adopted by bourgeois art: purposelessness for purposes dictated by the market. . . . Radio, the progressive latecomer to mass culture, is drawing conclusions which film's pseudomarket at present denies that industry. The technical structure of the commercial radio system makes it immune to liberal deviations of the kind the film industry can still permit itself in its own preserve. . . . The National Socialists knew that broadcasting gave their cause stature as the printing press did to the Reformation. The Fuhrer's metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion, turn out finally to be merely the omnipresence of his radio address, which demonically parodies that of the divine spirit.
(131-133) Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those in control of the system are entrenching themselves in advertising. It strengthens the bond which shackles consumers to the big combines. Only those who can keep paying the exorbitant fees charged by the advertising agencies, and most of all by radio itself, that is, those who are already part of the system or are co-opted into it by the decisions of banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudomarket as sellers. . . . The enthusiastic and unpaid story about the living habits and personal grooming of celebrities, which wins them new fans, is editorial, while the advertising pages rely on photographs and data so factual and lifelike that they represent the ideal of information to which the editorial section only aspires. . . . The montage character of the culture industry, the synthetic, controlled manner in which its products are assembled – factory-like not only in the film studio but also, virtually, in the compilation of the cheap biographies, journalistic novels, and hit songs – predisposes it to advertising; the individual moment, in being detachable, replaceable, estranged even technically from any coherence of meaning, lends itself to purposes outside the work. . . . everything is directed at overpowering a customer conceived as distracted or resistant.

Commercialized art is advertising. Consumer is alienated. Another condition disrupted by electronic technology (but keep in mind Winner), and also redoubled by it.

(133-136) Through the language they speak, the customers make their own contribution to culture as advertising. For the more completely language coincides with communication, the more words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities; the more purely and transparently they communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable they become. The demythologizing of language, as an element of the total process of enlightenment, reverts to magic. . . . The blindness and muteness of the data to which positivism reduces the world passes over into language itself, which is limited to registering those data. Thus relationships themselves become impenetrable, taking on an impact, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them resemble their extreme antithesis, spells. They act once more like the practices of a kind of sorcery, whether the name of a diva is concocted in the studio on the basis of statistical data, or welfare government is averted by the use of taboo-laden words such as “bureaucracy” and “intellectuals,” or vileness exonerates itself by invoking the name of a homeland. . . . The violence done to words is no longer audible in them. The radio announcer does not need to talk in an affected voice; indeed, he would be impossible if his tone differed from that of his designated listeners. . . . The way in which the young girl accepts and performs the obligatory date, the tone of voice used on the telephone and in the most intimate situations, the choice of words in conversation, indeed, the whole inner life compartmentalized according to the categories of vulgarized depth psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into an apparatus meeting the requirements of success, an apparatus which, even in its unconscious impulses, conforms to the model presented by the culture industry. The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.

Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment
III
(143) The Jews had not been the only people active in the circulation sphere. But they had been locked up in it too long not to reflect in their makeup something of the hatred so long directed at that sphere. . . . The Jews were the trauma of the knights of industry, who have to masquerade as productive creators. In the Jewish jargon they detect what they secretly despise in themselves: their anti-Semitism is self-hate, the bad conscious of the parasite.
V
(147) Society's emancipation from anti-Semitism depends on whether the content of that idiosyncrasy is raised to the level of a concept and becomes aware of its own senselessness. But idiosyncrasy attaches itself to the peculiar. The universal, that which fits into the context of social utility, is regarded as natural.
(153) They have not so much eradicated the adaptation to nature as elevated it to the pure duties of ritual. In this way they have preserved its reconciling memory, without relapsing through symbols into mythology. They are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid.
VI
(159) The unconditional realism of civilized humanity, which culminates in fascism, is a special case of paranoid delusion which depopulates nature and finally nations themselves.
(163) Those who were excluded from humanity against their will, like those who excluded themselves from it out of longing for humanity, knew that the pathological cohesion of the established group was strengthened by persecuting them. Its normal members relieve their paranoia by participating in the collective one, and cling passionately to the objectified, collective, approved forms of delusion.

Zizek discusses this role of electronic media instantiating the global village as the imaginary of the virtual.

(164) Conscience is deprived of objects, since individuals' responsibility for themselves and their dependents is replaced – although still under the old moral title – by their mere performance for the apparatus.
(164-165) In face of such power, it is left to chance – guided by the Party – to decide where despairing self-preservation is to project the guilt for its terror. The Jews are the predestined target of this guided chance. . . . Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one.

What repressed groups are on this border of the human now? Are we as polarized in our hatred of Muslim radicalists?

VII
(165) But there are no longer any anti-Semites. The last of them were liberals who wanted to express their antiliberal opinions. . . . Anti-Semitic views always reflected stereotyped thinking. Today only that thinking is left. People still vote, but only between totalities. The anti-Semitic psychology has largely been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole fascist ticket, which is an inventory of the slogans of belligerent big business. . . . Anti-Semitism has practically ceased to be an independent impulse and has become a plank in the platform: anyone who gives fascism its chance subscribes to the settlement of the Jewish question along with the breaking of the unions and the crusade against Bolshevism. . . . When the masses accept the reactionary ticket containing the clause against the Jews, they are obeying social mechanisms in which individual people's experiences of Jews play no part. It has been shown, in fact, that anti-Semitism's prospects are no less good in “Jew-free” areas than in Hollywood itself. Experience is replaced by cliché, the imagination active in experience by diligent acceptance.
(167-169) The individual had become an impediment to production. The lack of synchronicity between technical and human development, the “cultural lag” which used to exercise the minds of sociologists, is beginning to disappear. Economic rationality, the vaunted principle of the smallest necessary means, is unremittingly reshaping the last units of the economy: businesses and human beings. The most advanced form at a given time becomes the predominant one. Once, the department store expropriated the old-style specialist shop. . . . The psychological small business – the individual – is meeting the same fate. It came into being as the power cell of economic activity. Emancipated from the tutelage of earlier economic stages, individuals fended for themselves alone: as proletarians by hiring themselves out through the labor market and by constant adaptation to new technical conditions, as entrepreneurs by tirelessly realizing the ideal type of homo oeconomicus. . . . In the progress of industrial society, which is supposed to have conjured away the law of increasing misery it had itself brought into being, the concept which justified the whole – the human being as person, as the bearer of reason – is going under. The dialectic of enlightenment is culminating objectivity in madness.

The core of their argument can be reiterated through the next dialectical stage of Hayles' posthuman.

(169-170) Although the abundance of goods which could be produced everywhere and simultaneously makes the struggle for raw materials and markets seem ever more anachronistic, humanity is nevertheless divided into a small number of armed power blocs. . . . Ticket thinking, a product of industrialization and its advertising, is being extended to international relations.
(171) The Jewish middleman fully becomes the image of the devil only when economically he has ceased to exist. Victory is thus made easy, and the anti-Semitic family man becomes the spectator, exempt from responsibility, of an irresistible historical tendency, intervening only when called to do so by his role as an employee of the Party or the Zyklon gas factories.

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dissertation Prospectus

2010-12-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

Dissertation Prospectus
Influence of Early Personal Computers and Texts on Programming Style
John Bork
University of Central Florida

Summary

Interest in learning computer programming outside of computer science peaked in the mid 1980s through early 1990s as widespread diffusion of personal computers into public schools and universities occurred in the United States. During this period, Sherry Turkle revealed through ethnographic research that children learning to program exhibited a number of distinct programming styles. Often these individual styles clashed with the dominant culture, forcing some to conceal their true stylistic preferences, thwarting the creative impulses of others, and discouraging some altogether from writing programs. Her theoretical model relies strongly on developmental psychology and post-structuralist cultural critique, and attributes only minor relevance to the specific computer languages being learned, and makes no mention of the different brands and models of computers that were being used. My dissertation prospectus outlines a strategy for discovering how structural, rhetorical, and media-specific features of early personal computers and accompanying texts relate to the development of individual programming style by interviewing people who learned to program on such systems in the late 1970s through mid 1980s. The purpose of the data collection phase is to determine the relevant platforms, texts, and programming styles. The analysis phase will seek connections between them using qualitative analysis of the empirical data from the interviews. Close readings of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) manuals, books, and magazines associated with these computer platforms seek to employ theories and methods from the study of texts and technology to respond to the gap in Turkle's work. The synthesis stage of the dissertation work may reveal recommendations for best practices in teaching computer programming in general settings, and guide the development of future computing platforms and their accompanying texts that are designed for learning.

Literature Review

For a period in the late 1970s through early 1990s, the rapid proliferation of personal computers in public schools and universities generated substantial interest among humanities scholars examining both the study of learning computer programming (Papert; Turkle, 1984; Turkle and Papert; Perkins, Schwartz, and Simmons), as well as how skills related to programming may transfer to other domains (Hoar; Mayer), in addition to the overall phenomenon of the growing presence of computer in education (Shields). Then the interest diminished, and scholarly study of learning programming devolved to the specific domains of computer science and technology education – and only for those children considering programming as a career (Gillespie; Ge, Thomas and Green; Panell). There is no clear picture of the current state of computer technology instruction in American public and private schools; however, it is likely to have shifted from a programming-centric to applications-centric emphasis. (If necessary, this hypothesis will be tested via empirical research, but it is not anticipated as a precondition affecting the validity of the proposed methodology.) Put another way, it is likely that programming-centric learning environments equivalent to (offering at least the same affordances of) late 1970s through early 1990s are not offered to the extent, as a percentage of school age children, that they were during this period. Interest in programming over application-based literacy has diminished since the 1990s, as articulated by David Brin in a 2006 online article, "Why Johnny Can't Code,” among others (Turkle, 1995; Bogost). A few who do promote the casual learning of programming in general academic contexts recommend very simple, modern languages such as HTML and XML (Cummings). Recent observers of this phenomenon suggest learning programming needs a different basis, such as using long defunct, early models of personal computers (PCs) on account of their relative simplicity and operational proximity to the raw hardware (Brin; McAllister; Bogost).
Is such an approach sensible? Has mainstream American culture shifted such that it is not reasonable to expect there to be a great deal of interest in what I would like to call general-purpose, casual programming? Within the realm of cultural studies, a possible means of analysis is to examine whether particular models of early PCs encouraged the development of particular programming styles, and how different programming styles fit into the overall culture of the time. While it may be fanciful to resurrect obsolete PC models to encourage children to learn programming, there may be lessons that can be learned from their design, marketing, and the texts that accompanied them, especially bundled instruction and reference manuals, for the next generation of devices.

Seymour Papert invented the Logo programming language as part of his vision of bringing together the power of easily programmable computers and the innate creativity of small children, as recounted in his 1980 book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. He set in motion other researchers and helped introduce personal computers to American schools. Sherry Turkle, who performed ethnographic studies of children learning to program in the late 1970s through mid 1980s, and later published with Papert, argued that children naturally express different programming styles. She called them 'hard mastery' and 'soft mastery'; children flourished or floundered in their efforts at learning programming depending on whether the learning environment and culture was compatible with their form of mastery (Turkle, 1984; Turkle and Papert, 1990; Turkle and Papert, 1991). She used the term 'bricolage', taken from Claude Levi-Strauss' anthropological studies of pre-industrial societies, to represent a programming style that “works on a problem by arranging and rearranging these elements, working through new combinations” (1984, p. 105). Essential differences between the formal, canonical programming style that is typically taught, and the 'bricoleur' style are the programmers relationship to their materials (abstract versus concrete) and attitude toward errors (avoidance versus acceptance). Turkle writes, “for planners, mistakes are missetps; for bricoleurs they are the essence of a navigation by mid-course corrections. For planners, a program is an instrument for premeditated control; bricoleurs have goals, but set out to realize them in the spirit of a collaborative venture with the machine” (2000, p. 136). Most of her research focused on the Logo programming language, which she argued was superior to BASIC in affording expression of the soft mastery style, and made no distinction between programming language and the particular model of machine that her subjects were using. She leaves to a footnote a brief analysis of the affordancs of Logo over BASIC: “Not all computer systems, not all computer languages offer a material that is flexible enough for differences in style to be expressed. A language such as BASIC does not make it easy to achieve successful results through a variety of programming styles” (1984, p. 105).

Turkle's interest in programming styles represents one aspect of research in learning computer programming. Studies about what teaching techniques do and do not work, and whether and how particular skills such as algorithm flowcharting and troubleshooting (debugging) may transfer from a programming environment to other domains, are more typical. Richard Mayer edited Teaching and Learning Computer Programming: Multiple Research Perspectives in 1988, a book containing research articles reflecting the rapid proliferation of personal computers in public schools and universities. The history of research on teaching and learning computer programming, as related by Mayer in the introduction, began with strong claims by Papert and others concerning the expected positive outcomes of non-directed methods for teaching programming. This was followed by empirical research revealing disappointing realities: “learning even the rudiments of LOGO appeared to be difficult for children and transfer to other domains seemed minimal” (p. 3). The present state (in 1988) characterized by multidisciplinary research and theory, retreated from the early, positive claims. Two trends he notes are “first, instead of advocating discovery methods of instruction, current research suggests that more guidance is needed to insure learning. . . . Second . . . transfer is most likely to occur for skills most similar to those learning in programming” (p. 4). Nonetheless, Papert's influence is evident by the number of chapters that deal with the Logo language. The next four chapters of Teaching and Learning Computer Programming focus on Logo: componential problem solving, cognitive analysis of learning Logo, it influence of intellectual development, and teaching methods that emphasize transfer of general skills. Chapter 11 returns to the topic of skills transfer from programming environments to non-programming contexts, again using Logo, and, contrary to Mayer's assessment in the introduction, claiming to successfully teach a skill that can be transferred beyond computer programming environments.

The other 'learning languages' besides Logo of note in Mayer's anthology are BASIC and Pascal. Chapter 7 presents the research of Perkins, Schwartz, and Simmons on “Instructional Strategies for Novice Programmers,” in which a 'metacourse' was designed to provide supplementary material to a BASIC programming curriculum. It attempts to address three common sources of difficulty for beginning programmers: fragile knowledge of the domain, lack of elementary problem-solving strategies, and attitudinal problems of confidence and control towards computers. This theme is continued in Chapter 8, which investigates the social context of learning computer programming. In Chapter 9 the results of a particular instructional project (the Autonomous Classroom Computer Environments for Learning) in high school Pascal programming classes are analyzed. Chapter 10 is a case study of typical errors students make in an introductory Pascal class. A glance at the history of scholarly journals combining computing and teaching reveals an expectant atmosphere in which it was assumed by most that programming instruction would continue to expand in public school curricula.

The bulk of current literature on learning computer programming is published within computer science and technology education domains, focusing on classroom settings where the currently popular languages used by professional programmers are taught, and not surprising, focusing on post-secondary instruction. A typical research article is "Exploring the relationship between modularization ability and performance in the C programming language: the case of novice programmers and expert programmers” by Maurice Vodounon. The days of general-purpose, casual programming instruction appear to be gone, along with wood shop, sewing, and other 'home economics'. While research publications about learning computer programming increased in quantity in the last two decades, by and large they appear in domain-specific journals and conferences rather than venues more popular for 'humanities computing'. This is not to disregard the rich dialog in new disciplines like Software Studies (Manovich) and Critical Code Studies (Wardrip-Fruin). However, these theorists appear more concerned with overall, societal technology consumption than with the topic of learning programming.

A few stand outs among humanities scholars who do directly address learning programming can be found, and they will be considered next. It is easier to see connections between the themes developed in Mayer's anthology than direct continuations of Turkle's work, although Turkle is often invoked in studies of class, race, and gender biases in instructional and work environments, often associating hard mastery with masculine preferences, and soft mastery with feminist themes (McKenna; Lynn, Raphael, and Olefsky; Sutton; Lau and Yuen). Recent research into 'pair programming' by Jill Denner and Linda Werner further elaborates on the importance of background knowledge and social support for novices that was the subject of the metacourse designed by Perkins, Schwartz, and Simmons.

Robert E. Cummings published an interesting article in 2006, “Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition” that explicitly ties programming, as a form of composition targeted towards machine readers, to composition targeted towards human readers. Besides making a theoretical argument linking programming and composition by presenting a parallel of the rhetorical triangle for addressing machines, he offers practical tips for how to implement his ideas in a class. In private correspondence with Cummings, he supports, as a replacement for writing BASIC programs, having student write Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Type Definition (DTD) representations of the rhetorical elements of narratives and essays that they are studying. His emphasis on writing software code to clarify conceptual understanding alludes to the object-oriented programming style, which can be seen in addition to Turkle's bricoleur style as a rich ground for asserting individual perspectives by focusing on how programming problems map onto their external referents rather than on how to most efficiently code algorithms. The trend toward object-oriented metaphors was recognized by Turkle in Life on the Screen by such ground breaking changes in human computer interfaces as the desktop oriented Apple Macintosh of the mid 1980s. By the mid 1990s her research had taken a turn from studying how people learned to program computers to how people relate to and live in computer environments in general.

From this review of scholarly literature on learning programming a number of gaps are evident, and these gaps appear to be echoed by the cries of the popular press who lament America's loss of its edge in technical innovation attributable to failures of the educational system. The argument of the article by Soloway, Spohrer, and Littman in Chapter 6 of Teaching and Learning Computer Programming is that it is better to focus on the process rather than the product when the goal is to teach that problems can be solved in multiple ways. This idea complements Turkle's notion of epistemological pluralism. Her early investigation of programming styles can be refreshed using more recent programming languages and computing platforms, to see what is happening in elementary and secondary schools today. Alternatively, there is the unasked question of whether there is any influence by the specific, material conditions of learning programming on the development of individual style. By material conditions I mean both the computer platforms themselves, such as the Apple II+ and Commodore 64, and the texts that were bundled with them by the manufacturer, such as the Applesoft Tutorial and the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide, as illustrated in Figure 1.

This question about the influence of specific platforms and media can be studied by interviewing people who learned to program during the same period in which Turkle did her research focusing on Logo. N. Katherine Hayles (2004) coined the term Media-Specific Analysis (MSA) to describe a critical technique that takes into account the physical and structural properties of different media that putatively perform the same rhetorical function that can be used here. Second, the site of learning programming can be shifted from formal instruction – classroom settings in colleges, universities, public and private schools – to where many people in America first learned to write programs, at home, alone, self-taught via OEM manuals, library books, and magazines. Many respondents to online surveys and discussion forums state that they were self-taught (see Table 1 in the Data Collection section). In these settings the texts that were used alongside the computer itself often fulfilled the role of an accompanying instructional regime. A third gap to consider is extending the categories of programming styles beyond Turkle's dichotomy of hard and soft mastery by importing knowledge from mainstream computer science literature and history of software studies. For instance, there may be a recognizable stylistic difference between procedural and object-oriented approaches. There may also be distinct styles tied to specific computing platforms, a point made by Bogost and Montfort in their cultural and technical study of the Atari 2600 game console. In the spirit of qualitative research, however, these questions are best answered using a mixed method of critical analysis guided by empirical study of human subjects.

Methodology

The research questions I am posing revolve around the gaps in Turkle's early work on programming styles, informed by theorists like Hayles who, with Turkle, recognize that specific technologies and texts can have a broad impact on learning, development, and personality, perhaps, in this case, programming style. Understanding the relevance of the affordances of specific technological systems and texts serves to remind us that certain obsolete platforms may offer advantages for learning programming over contemporary, putatively superior ones. The outcome of this study may reveal recommendations for best practices in teaching computer programming in general settings, and may guide the development of future computing systems (for example, as using all free, open source software) and their accompanying texts, both printed and online, when they are designed as platforms for learning. These research questions are:

What platforms were used in learning to program in the late 1970s through mid 1980s?
What printed texts (OEM manuals, popular press books, textbooks, magazines) were used?
What programming styles developed?

My methodology is summarized in the following outline. See Appendix D for the overall project milestones and target completion dates.

Data Collection Stage
1. Refine Interview Protocol
2. Select Interview Candidates
3. Submit IRB materials
4. Conduct Interviews
Data Encoding Stage
1. Code Interview Data from Forms
2. Transcribe and Code Significant Audio Recordings
Data Analysis Stage
1. Qualitative Analysis of Key Platforms, Texts, and Programming Styles
2. Structural, Rhetorical, and Media-Specific Analysis of Key Platforms and Texts
Synthesis Stage

Data Collection

An interview protocol has been developed that elicits data about what computer platforms and what texts people used while learning to program. It also inquires into when, where, and with whom they did so, as well as what kinds of programs they wrote. At the heart of the interview process is a single page form that provides prompts for the researcher and provides room to take organized notes. See Appendix A for a blank form and an image of one that was filled out during a trial interview. Trials of the interview process took 30-60 minutes to cover all of the items on the form, including a substantial amount of free discussion at the end of the interview. However, the protocol needs to be adjusted to provide prompts for learning more about the programming style characteristic of the subject. Turkle seems to imply a connection between programs asking the user questions and soft mastery, although her assignment of style hinges more on how the programmer relates to the computer platform running the program and source code than the actual nature of the programs written. This may be due to her choice of environments (instructional setting) and programming language (Logo) influencing the type of programs being written. It is hoped that Sherry Turkle or one of her students can be solicited to provide guidance. Susan Lammers' interviews of influential programmers in her 1986 book Programmers At Work is helpful for seeing the sorts of responses that may be indicative of programming style without begging the question because their wider scope itself gives narrative, biographical evidence of programming style.

Interviews will be conducted over telephone, voice over IP (VOIP), or in person. During the interviews the researcher takes handwritten notes using the interview form, and also makes an audio recording for later transcription if permission has been given to do so. The Informed Consent Form in Appendix C provides a check box where the interview subject can elect to be recorded or not. In either case, the researcher must be diligent in removing all personally identifying information from any quotations or paraphrases that appear in subsequent oral and written presentations based on this research.

The intended subjects for this study are persons likely to have used early personal computer platforms and associated texts (manuals, books, magazines, etc.) that were popular in the United States from the late 1970s through mid 1980s. Interview candidates will be selected based on their participation in existing surveys, polls, and discussion group threads that address how, when, and with what platforms they first learned to program computers. Sample data sources from which to cull potential interview subjects are shown in the following table. Obviously, only those resources that provide email addresses or another way to contact the respondent, such as through the discussion forum messaging system, will be considered.

URL	http://stackoverflow.com/questions/348098/are-you-a-self-taught-programmer-or-did-you-take-a-programming-course
Survey Question	Are you a self-taught programmer or did you take a programming course?
Sample Response	Self taught using ZX BASIC/assembly on a ZX spectrum. Got it for the games but quickly became very interested in what was happening underneath. No internet/forums so just had to make it up as I went along. Then did a university degree which required us to do programming but did not really teach it (apart from some simple Fortran 77). Was good for me as I was really interested in programming anyway. Then used Fortran/C++ in the real world just by continued learning on the job. Have continued self teaching ever since (e.g reading stackoverflow) but I don't get to do as much programming as I would like these days...... (posted Dec 7, 2008)
Respondent	Registered User “luapyad”
URL	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnmont/archive/2006/05/03/586766.aspx
Survey Question	How did you learn to program?
Sample Response	I started as a hobbiest in high school typing in programs from Compute! magazine into my C=64. The most programming I did at that point was debugging my type-o's which forced me to understand the source of the problem in order to fix them. I started professionaly with MSAccess (using Mike Groh's Access 95 book). I now work with VB.Net/Sql Server/ASP.Net/etc. Most of the learning I get at this point is through trial-error. I also find user groups to be a good source of free training as well as networking opportunities. For a new programmer, the best learning will be to give them a simple task and have them figure out how to solve it. Sure they will make mistakes along the way, but we often learn best from our mistakes. We can read all the books we want, but actually doing is what counts. As evidence, consider the number of people who read the certification books, pass the tests and still can't code their way out of a shoe-box. (posted May 3, 2006)
Respondent	Registered User “Jim Wooley” (registration required to access additonal user profile information)
URL	http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=2082157
Survey Question	How did you learn to program?
Sample Response	I started learning (and learned about backups) simultaneously; the first while modifying my uncle's TRS-80 Color Computer animation program, and the second by saving my alterations to his original tape in ignorance of cassette tape leaders. (posted February 4, 2010)
Respondent	Username “ciparis”

Table 1: Data sources for selecting interview candidates

Interviews may also be solicited through blog postings and other social media, as well as personal references. There are a number of software development businesses in the greater Orlando area including Toptech Systems, Electronic Arts, Fiserv, and NCR with which the researcher has ties. A sample email invitation to participate in the research is shown in Appendix B. Following University of Central Florida Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures, all interview subjects must read, sign, and return a copy of the Informed Consent Form prior to being interviewed.

Data Encoding

Data will be encoded from the interview forms and audio recordings. Sets of identifiers will be created for each category (computing platform, texts, types of programs written, and other stylistic indicators) to normalize the data into units represented by machine configurations, printed texts, and programming styles. A spreadsheet may be used to initially encode the handwritten interview forms, although it is anticipated that custom software will be developed in conjunction with the Spring 2011 Digital Editing and Database course to facilitate encoding. Table 2, below, represents a spreadsheet representation of sample interviews displaying the interview numbers, the age and year they started programming, the computer platforms, and the OEM texts they recall using. The full interview form contains many more dimensions, some of which may take multiple entries for each interview subject to reflect concurrency and temporal change in their programming activities.

Number	Age	Year	Computer Model	OEM Manual
1	18	1978	Mainframe PDP
2	18	1980	PDP – 10 or 11 minicomputer
3	13	87/88	Apple //e, PC jr (later that year)
4	10	1985	C-64, 486 in college	big thick manual that came with it
5	9	1979	Vic-20, C-64, PCs late 80s, Mac 2006	Reference Manual, 64 had 6510 instruction set, section on architecture, very basic overview of kernel, sprites, sounds
6	24	1978	Heathkit H-100 (H8) dual 8085/8080 kit, Zenith Z-100 integrated unit	MSDOS/ROM BASIC came with ROM chips, not the computer

Table 2: Spreadsheet containing interview data from 6 sample interviews

The next level of encoding is to normalize dimensions and category information from the spreadsheet data using an enumerative coding scheme (see Geisler, chapter 4). It is anticipated that the data will be loaded into MySQL relational database tables designed for this project to allow manipulation by custom programs for analysis and display of results. Appendix E contains the Structured Query Language (SQL) commands used to create the sample database and tables that are shown below. The tables will contain fields for the encoded categories for each dimension (as an integer reference to a secondary lookup table), as well as the raw interview transcription if it is available, or raw researcher notes (as a text field). It is important to retain the raw interview text since it is likely that the data may be iteratively recoded as more results accrue and emerging patterns reshape the direction of the study. The table structure will also support multiple instances of the same dimension for each interview, reflecting that the subjects may recall having used multiple computer platforms over the course of the years they learned to program that fall within the target time frame of late 1970s through mid 1980s. The two sample tables definitions shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3 represent the enumeration of various dimensions and their possible categories.

These are considered secondary lookup tables so that the integer key can be used to consistently reference each category type for all of the interviews. The encoding task requires identifying the relevant, distinguishable computer platforms and assigning each an integer; these are the categories of the dimension 'computer platform'. A similar process must be done for the OEM texts, magazines, and so on that are recounted during the interviews, for the types of programs written, and so on.

Then each interview can be encoded using these enumeration numbers to facilitate automated analysis, as shown in Figure 4. Notice the use of the InstanceEnumeration field to indicate when there are multiple instances of the same dimension for an interview, reflecting the temporal ordering of, for example, the computer platforms Commodore Vic-20 followed by Commodore 64 by InterviewNumber 5. A utility program is envisioned for entering the data from the interview form directly into the database rather than through an intermediary spreadsheet representation.

It is understood that the encoding models for many of the dimensions captured by the form and that may be derived from transcriptions of the recorded audio have yet to be defined. In particular, the categories of the dimension 'programming style' have yet to be expanded beyond Turkle's dichotomy of hard and soft mastery, let alone have heuristics for determining those programming styles from raw data be developed. Therefore, one of the first tasks in the project time line presented in Appendix D is to refine the interview protocol to achieve these goals.

Data Analysis

Data analysis will be divided into two parts: analysis of the interview data, and analysis of computer platforms and texts. Interview data will be analyzed using custom software written by the researcher to perform qualitative analyses or prepare the datasets for analysis by third-party software applications. Nominal data about the use of computer platforms, texts, and programming style will be generated to perform quantitative statistical analysis of correlations between platforms/texts and programming styles, as well as other pairings of variables that emerge as possibly significant. This data will also inform the selection of the specific platforms and texts that will be scrutinized in detail as items of material culture. The analysis of computer platforms and texts represents a study of material culture and is the least developed part of this proposal. The cultural milieu and aspects of production of many early personal computers are recounted in Freiberger and Swain's Fire in the Valley. It is anticipated that future coursework in 2011 will flesh out the methods for this content analysis. Any custom software created from this project will be licensed under a popular free, open source license such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or higher. The analysis methods will include assessment of the reliability and validity of the measurement system, following the recommendations made by Lauer and Asher (see Chapter 7 on Measurement).

Synthesis

The final stage of the dissertation project will synthesize the findings of the data analysis that will happen after encoding data from interviews. In connecting this work with mainstream research in teaching and learning computer programming, I am hypothesizing that certain texts may impose "more guidance" (as developed by Perkins, Schwartz, and Simmons in the description of their 'metacourse' supplement to formal programming instruction) than their absence or other texts during the unmediated discovery of the computer's programming possibilities, as well as other features of the metacourse for novice programmers. Texts may also function like a partner in the "pair programming" research discussed by Denner and Werner without the authoritarian auspices of an adult teacher. Also consider how media-specific features of colorful, spiral-bound printed texts such as The Applesoft Tutorial differentiate their rhetorical and practical functions from other types of texts, such as browser-based resources or help features built into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). For example, consider the rhetorical impact of its cover (Figure 5), containing a program that can be typed in and run. This gave the Apple platform an advantage because you could use it at face value. In terms of designing an optimal text today, while it is true that printed and video display media can both show the picture on the cover, there may be advantages to having a physical, printed book from which to learn about how to use the computer, versus using the same computer to display the instructional text. At minimum, a solution to the conundrum of why it seems to be better to go back to previous states of the art in computer technology to best learn how to program in general to best develop individual style, both innate and determined by the environmental affordances of the technologies in use in experience, will be offered.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. (2010, February 19). Pascal spoken here: Learning about learning programming from the Apple ][. Message posted on http://www.bogost.com/blog/pascal_spoken_here.shtml. Retrieved October 3, 2010.

Brin, David. (2006, September 14). Why Johnny can't code. Message posted on http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2006/09/14/basic. Retrieved October 3, 2010.

Cummings, Robert E. (2006). Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition. Computers and Composition, 23(4), 430-443.

Denner, Jill, & Werner, Linda. (2007). Computer programming in middle school: How pairs respond to challenges. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 37(2), 131-50.

Freiberger, P., & Swaine, M. (2000). Fire in the valley: The making of the personal computer. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ge, Xun, Thomas, Michael K., & Greene, Barbara A. (2006). Technology-rich ethnography for examining the transition to authentic problem-solving in a high school computer programming class. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 34(4), 319-52.

Geisler, Cheryl. (2004). Analyzing streams of language. New York: Pearson Education, Inc.

Gillespie, C.W. (2004). "Seymour Papert's vision for early childhood education? A descriptive study of preschoolers and kindergarteners in discovery-based, Logo-rich classrooms. Early Childhood Research and Practice, 6(1).

Hayles, N. Katherine. (2004). Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis. Poetics Today, 25(1), 67-90.

Hoar, Nancy. (1987). Conquering the myth: Expository writing and computer programming. College Composition and Communication, 38, 93-95.

Lammers, Susan. (1986). Programmers at work: Interviews with 19 programmers who shaped the computer industry. Redmond, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press.

Lau, Wilfred W. F., & Yuen, Allan H. K. (2009). Exploring the effects of gender and learning styles on computer programming performance: Implications for programming pedagogy. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(4), 696-712.

Lauer, Janice M. and J. William Asher. (1988). Composition research: Empirical designs. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lynn, Kathleen-M., Raphael, Chad, & Olefsky, Karin. (2003). Bridging the gender gap in computing: An integrative approach to content design for girls. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 28(2), 143-162.

McAllister, Neil. (2008, October 2). Should computer programming be mandatory for U.S. students? Infoworld.

McKenna, Peter. (2000). Transparent and opaque boxes: Do women and men have different computer programming psychologies and styles? Computers & Education, 35(1), 37-49.

Mayer, Richard E. (1988). Introduction. In Richard E. Mayer (Ed.), Teaching and learning computer programming: Multiple research perspectives. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Panell, Chris. (2003). Teaching computer programming as a language. Tech Directions, 62(8), 26-27.

Papert, Seymour. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Perkins, D.N, Schwartz, Steve, & Simmons, Rebecca. (1988). Instructional strategies for the problems of novice programmers. In Richard E. Mayer (Ed.), Teaching and learning computer programming: Multiple research perspectives. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Shields, Mark A. (1995). The legitimation of academic computing in the 1980s. In Mark A. Shields (Ed.), Work and technology in higher education: The social construction of academic computing. Technology and education. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

-----. (1995). The social construction of academic computing. In Mark A. Shields (Ed.), Work and technology in higher education: The social construction of academic computing. Technology and education. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sutton, Rosemary E. (1991). Equity and computers in the schools: A decade of research. Review of Educational Research, 61(4), 475-503.

Turkle, Sherry. (1984). The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.

-----. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Turkle, Sherry, & Papert, Seymour. (1990). Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs, 16(1), 128-157.

-----. (1991). Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 11(1), 3-33.

Vodounon, Maurice A. (2006, June 22). Exploring the relationship between modularization ability and performance in the C programming language: the case of novice programmers and expert programmers. The Free Library.

Weinstein, Peter. (1999). Computer programming revisited. Technology & Learning, 19(8), 38-42.

Werner, Linda, & Denner, Jill. Pair programming in middle school: What does it look like? Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42(1), 29-49.

Programming Survey

2010-10-13T17:45:00.000-07:00

The refined problem that interests me concerns the rhetorical and media-specific functions of the texts that people used to learn (or turn away from) programming computers, particularly (based on initial responses) the OEM manuals that were packaged with early personal computers that contain programming examples and language tutorials (for example, The Applesoft Tutorial that accompanied Apple //+ computers from 1979-1982). A cursory look at online discussion threads and polls reveals that many people consider themselves self-taught, or starting programming at home long before receiving any formal instruction at school. These resources can be analyzed to reveal the computer models used to learn programming. Sometimes they mention using OEM manuals, magazines or other texts; however, a new survey and interview process needs to be created that focuses on discovering these texts and how they were used. Use a blog posting to host the survey and its responses, or some other hosted, on line survey instrument. Invite participants of prior discussions and surveys to participate in the new survey (eventually; for now just invite friends, coworkers, and colleagues). Interview candidates can then be selected from the survey respondents. Please answer these questions:

Have you ever written computer programs?

Do you remember how old you were when you started programming? (Or what grade you were in?)

Can you recall the setting of your first programming experiences? (Was it at school, at home, at a friend's, some other family member, another place?)

Did you work alone or with other people?

And what model did you use? (Was it made by Apple, Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Texas Instruments?)

What was the programming language?

Do you remember if you used any books that were with the computer?

What do you remember about them?

Did they contain programs that you typed in?

Did they contain pictures?

Did you read the text?

Ask similar questions for those who respond negatively to the first question, and did not program computers. They still will recall the first places they remember using computers, their approximate age, and perhaps less clearly, the model. The researcher (or proxy) can guess at which texts they may have used, and for certain models, the fact of their absence. Thus I can collect information about the negative effects of bundled texts for particular models and particular people who never became programmers. Please answer these questions:

If you did not write programs, do you remember how old you were when you first used a computer?

Can you recall the setting of your first computer using experiences?

Were you alone or with other people?

Do you remember what type of computer it was?

Do you remember using any books were with the computer?

Do your remember anything about them?

In connecting this work with mainstream research in teaching and learning computer programming, I am hypothesizing that certain texts may impose "more guidance" than their absence or other texts during the unmediated discovery of the computer's programming possibilities, and that certain texts may provide the function of the "metacourse" recommended by Perkins, Schwartz, and Simmons for novice programmers. Texts may also function like a partner in the "pair programming" research discussed by Denner and Werner without the authoritarian auspices of an adult teacher. Also consider how media-specific features of colorful, spiral-bound printed texts such as The Applesoft Tutorialdifferentiate their rhetorical and practical functions from other types of texts, such as browser-based resources or help features built into Integrated Development Environments.

References

Bogost, Ian. "Pascal Spoken Here: Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][." [Weblog entry.] Ian Bogost Blog. 19 Feb 2010. (http://www.bogost.com/blog/pascal_spoken_here.shtml) 12 Oct 2010.
Brin, David. "Why Johnny Can't Code." Salon. Salon, 14 Sept 2006. (http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2006/09/14/basic). 3 Oct 2010.
Cummings, Robert E. "Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition." Computers and Composition 23.4 (2006): p. 430-443. Print.
Denner, Jill, and Linda Werner. "Computer Programming in Middle School: How Pairs Respond to Challenges." Journal of Educational Computing Research 37.2 (2007): 131-50. Print.
Mayer, Richard E. Introduction. Teaching and Learning Computer Programming: Multiple Research Perspectives. Ed. Richard E. Mayer. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1988. Print.
Perkins, D.N, Steve Schwartz, and Rebecca Simmons. "Instructional Strategies for the Problems of Novice Programmers." Teaching and Learning Computer Programming: Multiple Research Perspectives. Ed. Richard E. Mayer. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1988. Print.
Vodounon, Maurice A. "Exploring the relationship between modularization ability and performance in the C programming language: the case of novice programmers and expert programmers." The Free Library. 22 June 2006. (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Exploring the relationship between modularization ability and...-a0144705087) 10 Oct 2010.

Participate in the survey by copying the appropriate set of questions into a comment (programmer or nonprogrammer).

Refining Research Questions

2010-10-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

Searching for two to three research papers to find the gaps:

Brin, David. (2006). Why Johnny Can't Code. Salon. 9/14/2006.
Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in the Classroom. Harvard U. Press.
Cummings, Robert E. (2006). Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition. Computers and Composition v. 23 no.4, p. 430-433.
Denner, Jill. "The Girls Creating Games Program: An Innovative Approach to Integrating Technology into Middle School." Meridian: a Middle School Computer Technologies Journal Winter 2007. 4 Oct. 2010. http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2007/girlgaming/index.htm
Denner, Jill, and Linda Werner. "Computer Programming in Middle School: How Pairs Respond to Challenges." Journal of Educational Computing Research 37.2 (2007): 131-50. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
"From codex to code: programming and the composition classroom." Computers and Composition 16.3 (1999): 319-436. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Ge, Xun, Michael K. Thomas, and Barbara A. Greene. "Technology-Rich Ethnography for Examining the Transition to Authentic Problem-Solving in a High School Computer Programming Class." Journal of Educational Computing Research 34.4 (2006): 319-52. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Gillespie, C.W. (2004). Seymour Papert’s vision for early childhood education? A descriptive study of preschoolers and kindergarteners in discovery-based, Logo-rich classrooms. Early Childhood Research and Practice, 6(1).
Hoar, Nancy. "Conquering the myth: expository writing and computer programming." College Composition and Communication 38 (1987): 93-5. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Kocian, Lisa. (2010). One computer for every student. Boston Globe. 2/11/2010.
Lau, Wilfred W. F., and Allan H. K. Yuen. "Exploring the effects of gender and learning styles on computer programming performance: implications for programming pedagogy." British Journal of Educational Technology 40.4 (2009): 696-712. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Lynn, Kathleen-M., Chad Raphael, and Karin Olefsky. "Bridging the Gender Gap in Computing: An Integrative Approach to Content Design for Girls." Journal of Educational Computing Research 28.2 (2003): 143-62. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
McAllister, Neil. (2008). Should computer programming be mandatory for U.S. students? Infoworld. 10/2/2008.
McKenna, Peter. "Transparent and opaque boxes: do women and men have different computer programming psychologies and styles?." Computers & Education 35.1 (2000): 37-49. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2005). Computer Technology in the Public School Classroom: Teacher Perspectives.
Panell, Chris. "Teaching Computer Programming as a Language." Tech Directions 62.8 (2003): 26-7. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Solomon, Justin. "Programming as a Second Language." Learning and Leading with Technology 32.4 (2005): 34-9. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Sutton, Rosemary E. (1991). Equity and Computers in the Schools: A Decade of Research. Review of Educational Research. Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 475-503.
Weinstein, Peter. "Computer programming revisited." Technology & Learning 19.8 (1999): 38-42. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.
Werner, Linda, and Jill Denning. "Pair Programming in Middle School: What Does It Look Like?." Journal of Research on Technology in Education 42.1 (2009): 29-49. Education Full Text. Web. 4 Oct. 2010.

The Brin article is an opinion piece but hits the subject directly, asking why BASIC or some other language is not provided on home computers for children to type in sample programs found in their math textbooks. He declares that “Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.” The opinion piece by McAllister attacks the stereotype of the programmer as nerdy, male social misfit by appealing to the rationale responding to the new needs of the global marketplace. His argument is that baseline computer literacy, including programming fundamentals, should be a requirement: “Make no mistake; the days when knowledge of computer programming was a ticket to a golden future are over. In today's globalized job market, computer literacy should be seen as a baseline skill for the U.S. workforce, not a differentiator.” The Wikipedia entry for “Educational Programming Languages” fills in many details to bring things up to the present. Its external links includes this interesting news story about the Scratch language. A recent article by Lisa Kocian in the Boston Globe describes technology initiatives aimed at providing “one computer for every student,” noting that “Maine is at the forefront of technology in the schools, with all public school students in the seventh and eighth grades receiving a laptop computer.” However, the article does not describe what the children will be doing with the computers, besides emphasizing the need for teacher buy in and training. Nor does the U.S. government report on teacher perspectives of the adequacy of computer technology in public school classrooms, although it does introduce some statistics. Nancy Hoar wrote a short piece in 1987 linking expository writing and programming. The most promising article so far is by Robert Cummings, who “explores the connection between computer programming (coding) and traditional composition.” He does not directly cite any quantitative or qualitative research, though (I sent him an email asking for more information). The article by Lynn, Raphael and Olefsky does involve empirical findings, but its focus is studying the gender gap in computer use in general, not programming in particular. Peter McKenna's article directly picks up on Turkle's work, but does not appear to contain any empirical data. Lau and Yuen's article does contain research findings, but its focus on gender in Hong Kong schools strays from my interest in the current state of programming instruction in general in the U.S. Denner's article on girls creating a computer game contains research data but is still not in the direct sphere of texts and technology studies. Her article with Linda Werner on how pairs of girls respond to programming challenges gets closer still, containing qualitative empirical data and citing Turkle, and may be transportable into the composition studies area as a way to implement Cummings' starter ideas. See also their 2009 article that contains coded transcripts. Then there is the article by Ge, Thomas and Greene that almost enunciates my original research idea. “Technology-Rich Ethnography for Examining the Transition to Authentic Problem-Solving in a High School Computer Programming Class” states in its abstract, “our findings lend support to the argument that teachers in high school computer programming classes should incorporate the following features in their curricula: open-ended problem solving, real-world clients, group work, student autonomy and ample opportunities for student creative expression. ”

My sense from the first iteration of the research question postings was that my topics did not have clear connections to texts and technology, despite the fact that I was invoking theorists whose work we read in various T&T courses, in particular Sherry Turkle. Therefore, I spent some time this weekend looking for journal articles dealing with the intersection of computer programming and English composition. In the process I found a number of qualitative research studies looking at differences in programming styles between men and women, most of which cited Turkle. Robert E. Cummings published an interesting article in 2006, “Coding with power: Toward a rhetoric of computer coding and composition” that explicitly ties programming, as a form of composition targeted towards machine readers, to composition targeted towards human readers. Besides making a theoretical argument linking programming and composition by presenting a parallel of the rhetorical triangle for addressing machines, he offers practical tips for how to implement his ideas in a class. I contacted him to see whether he has indeed enacted his idea in any of his classes, and if so, if he tried to measure anything, or whether he knows of any external studies conducted to test his hypotheses or that are related to them. But I when it comes down to want-to-do-ability, I still wish to focus on improving our understanding of casual, everyday programming as it exists in America, how children are being exposed to programming instruction, in order to meditate upon the art of programming for humanities scholars and as a subject for texts and technology theorists.

Part I: Framing the Problem and Considering the Context

The problem in which I am interested is that the sense of urgency and value in teaching computer programming as a basic skill to American youth appears to have diminished from the late 1980s and early 1990s when Turkle was doing her ethnographic studies of programming styles. The disciplinary and professional communities that are interested in this problem may of course be technology educators, but I believe the problem is also relevant to ethnographers of technology as well as texts and technology theorists because programming computers is one of the quintessential acts of post-literate culture. Conversational partners include those like the later Turkle who argue that deep structure cognitive styles have been replaced by mastery of surface applications, as well as those who continue to rally for the importance of the former. My purpose for conducting this research is to explore the current diffusion of programming as an everyday skill in the United States, demonstrating its value for non-professional as well a professional achievement, with the hope that it will influence policy and practice to help America regain its competitive edge in the global economy.

Part II: Writing Focused Research Questions for your Problem and Context

What exposure to computer programming instruction did Americans who were the first generation to grow up with personal computers have in their schooling? What about subsequent generations, up to the present? This may entail both quantitative measures (how much exposure? Over what period of time?) and qualitative details about what was learned (different languages) and how this knowledge was applied (for example, in programming contests and after-school activities).
In what ways and to what extent have they written software in a non-professional context, and do they currently do so?
In what ways, if any, do they feel that their programming experience helps them solve everyday problems, come up with novel ideas, and communicate their ideas more effectively?

Part III: Choosing Research Methods to Answer Your Questions

Survey (web-based), interview small number of survey participants from each generation
Survey (web-based), interview small number of survey participants
Interview small number of survey participants

Assessing Your Plan

Do-ability/feasibility: The availability of web-based survey tools and services makes the initial survey feasible and the population is accessible on line, with the exception of the current generation, which is children in school now. While I can speak the language as a professional programmer and long time technology hobbyist, I need more training in interview and data collection skills.

Should-do-ability: My initial searching has not found any research directly addressing these questions. The topic is significant based on the presence of theoretical articles and opinion pieces that address the current state of general programming instruction in schools and the its perceived advantages. There do not seem to be any risks to participants or repercussions for me or the research participants.

Want-to-do-ability: While my personal interest has been shifting the more I get to know the disciplinary boundaries of this program, as long as I can keep relevant linkages I care deeply about promoting general programming skills and am personally interested in talking to people my age about their experience of learning to use computers.

Forming a Research Question

2010-09-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

Is it better to program as a bricoleur (following the famous ethnographer of electronic computing Sherry Turkle) or to not program at all?

inspirations
Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
By Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert
http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html

Working Code Abstract revised

2010-03-10T17:57:00.001-08:00

From Codework to Working Code: A Programmer's Approach to Digital Literacy

John Bork, University of Central Florida

What does it mean to be digitally literate? Obviously it entails a basic familiarity with commonly used technologies, so that one may navigate the technological life world that has permeated nearly every aspect of the human one. One aspect of this knowledge is the recognition of computer languages, communications protocols, syntactic forms, passages of program code, and command line arguments, even when they have been taken out of their operational context for use as literary and rhetorical devices. In addition to the infiltration of the abbreviated language of email and text messaging into mainstream print media, it is now also commonplace to encounter programming keywords, symbols, operators, indentation, and pagination entwined with natural, non-technical, mother tongue expressions. Codework is the term associated with the literary and rhetorical practice of mixing human and computer languages (Hayles; Raley; Cramer). Types of codework span from intentionally arranged constructions intended for human consumption that do not execute on any real computer system, to valid expressions in bona fide programming languages that are meaningful to both human and machine readers. Examples of the former include the work of Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) and Talon Memmott, of the latter, the work of John Cayley and Grahan Harwood (Raley; Fuller). Rita Raley notes, however, that of the popular electronic literature of the early twenty first century, there is “less code per se than the language of code.” In addition to its infusion for literary effect, program source code may be cited in scholarly texts like conventional citations to explain a point in an argument. Although it is more common to encounter screen shots of user interfaces, examples of working source code appear on occasion in humanities scholarship. This study will briefly consider why working code has been largely shunned in most academic discourse, and then identify the types and uses of bone fide code that do appear, or are beginning to appear, in humanities scholarship. Its goal is to suggest ways in which working code – understood both as code that works, and as the practice of working code – plays a crucial role in facilitating digital literacy among social critics and humanities scholars, and demonstrate through a number of examples how this effect may be achieved.

The first argument in favor of studying computer code in the context of humanities scholarship can be drawn from N. Katherine Hayles' methodological tool of Media-Specific Analysis (MSA). Probing the differences between electronic and print media when considering the same term, such as hypertext, requires comprehension of the precise vocabulary of the electronic technologies involved. A second, more obvious argument comes from the growing disciplines of Software Studies and Critical Code Studies. If critical analysis of software systems is to reveal implicit social and cultural features, reading and writing program code must be a basic requirement of the discipline (Fuller; Mateas; Wardrip-Fruin). As the media theorist Friedrich Kittler points out, the very concept of what code is has undergone radical transformations from its early use by Roman emperors as cipher to a generic tag for the languages of machines and technological systems in general; “technology puts code into the practice of realities, that is to say: it encodes the world” (45). Or, following the title of Lev Manovich's new, downloadable book, software takes command. Yet both Kittler and Manovich express ambivalence towards actually examining program code in scholarly work. A third argument, which will form the focus of this study, is reached by considering the phenomenon of technological concretization within computer systems and individual software applications. According to Andrew Feenberg, this term, articulated by Gilbert Simondon, describes the way “technology evolves through such elegant condensations aimed at achieving functional compatibilities” by designing products so that each part serves multiple purposes simultaneously (217). The problem is that, from the perspective of a mature technology, every design decision appears to have been made from neutral principles of efficiency and optimization, whereas historical studies reveal the interests and aspirations of multiple groups of actors intersecting in design decisions, so that the evolution of a product appears much more contingent and influenced by vested interests. The long history of such concretizations can be viewed like the variegated sedimentation in geological formations, so that, with careful study, the outline of a technological unconscious can be recovered. The hope is that, through discovering these concealed features of technological design, the the unequal distribution of power among social groups can be remedied. Feenberg's project of democratic rationalization responds to the implicit oppression of excluded groups and values in technological systems by mobilizing workers, consumers, and volunteers to make small inroads into the bureaucratic, industrial, corporate decision making.

For computer technology in particular, digital literacy is the critical skill for connecting humanities studies as an input to democratic rationalizations as an output. Working code replaces the psychoanalytic session for probing the technological unconscious to offer tactics for freeing the convention-bound knowledge worker and high tech consumer alike. Many theorists have already identified the free, open source software (FOSS) community as an active site for both in depth software studies and for rich examples of democratic rationalizations (Fuller; Yuill; Jesiek). Simon Yuill in particular elaborates the importance of revision control software for capturing and cataloging the history of changes in software projects. As as corollary to this point, it can be argued that concealed within these iterations of source code are the concretizations that make up the current, polished version of the program that is distributed for consumption by the end users, and from which the technological unconscious may be interpreted. However, even when they are freely available to peruse in public, web-accessible repositories, these histories are only visible to those who can understand the programming languages in which they are written. Therefore, it is imperative that humanities scholars who wish to critically examine computer technology for its social and cultural underpinnings include working code - as practicing programming - in their digital literacy curricula.

References

Cramer, Florian. “Language.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Fuller, Matthew. Introduction to Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today, Volume 25:1 (Spring 2004): 67-90. Print.

Jesiek, Brent K. “Democratizing Software: Open Source, the Hacker Ethic, and Beyond.” First Monday, Volume 8:10 (October 2003). n. page. Web. 5 Oct. 2008.

Kittler, Friedrich. “Code.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Mateas, Michael. “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner.” On The Horizon. Special Issue. Future of Games, Simulations and Interactive Media in Learning Contexts 13.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

Raley, Rita. “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework.” Electronic Book Review 8 Sept. 2002. n. pag. Web. 17 Oct. 2009.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. Print.

Yuill, Simon. “Concurrent Version System.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Hayles Electronic Literature reread

2010-02-01T20:24:00.000-08:00

Notes on Katherine Hayles Electronic Literature

CHAPTER ONE

Electronic Literature: What Is It?

(3) Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast “digital born,” a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer. .. The [Electronic Literature Organization] committee's formulation reads: “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”

What about digitizations of print literature mediated by programs whose source code fall within Hayles's conception of EL, for she implies that source code can be considered and interpreted as a part of EL: create source code containing 'verbatim' digitizations of print literature such as ancient Greek and Latin texts beyond the grasp of any copyright, patent, trademark or other type of law taken in the form of the kind that put Socrates to death, not the biochemical law of the poison he presumably drank, but the state, government, body politic, collective consciousness, what about custom code consuming print literature? The ELO's formulation does not entail the universal law based on the specific example of the most basic digitization of print texts that we would all agree with Hayles does not rise to the occasion of being sufficiently literary, a term she will soon introduce (and there could be a useful hyperlink here). So despite the harsh use of conjoining exclusion and generally Hayles has really opened the door to electronic texts that are powered, in part, by exact digitizations of commonly conceived as the authoritative and canonical originals, all of which if in the public domain can be cited. In fact she says as much on page 84. The next thing to consider is the question of style, whether early versions of programs should be preserved, for we do not have a fixed number to consider like we do ancient texts. Can you imagine an index of combinations of key phrases such as “electronic literature” and “code work”, a sort of phasor (a degree beyond vector in physics, and another word I used to use often in my old notes, which I referred to a few sentences ago as “a useful hyperlink” do distinguish it from all the possible combinations most of which are nonsense)?

(4) Hybrid by nature, it comprises a “trading zone” (as Peter Galison calls it in a different context) in which different vocabularies, expertises, and expectations come together to see what might emerge from their intercourse. .. I propose “the literary” for this purpose, defining it as creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper.

GENRES OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

(5) The immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production.

(6) Readers with only a slight familiarity with the field, however, will probably identify it first with hypertext fiction characterized by linking structures, such as Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl. .. Although Storyspace continues to be used to produce interesting new works, it has been eclisped as the primary Web authoring tool for electronic literature.

(6-7) Whereas early works tended to be blocks of text (traditionally called “lexia”) with limited graphics, animation, colors, and sound, later works make much fuller use of the multimodal capabilities of the Web; while the hypertext link is considered the distinguishing feature of the earlier works, later works use a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface metaphors that tend to deemphasize the links as such.

(7) hypertext fictions also mutated into a range of hybrid forms, including narratives that emerge from a collection of data repositories such as M.D. Coverley's Califia.

(8) Paraphrasing Markku Eskelinen's elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, wheres in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret. .. In his pioneering study [Twisty Little Passages], [Nick] Montfort characterizes the essential elements of the form as consisting of a parser (the computer program that understands and replies to the interactor's inputs) and a simulated world within which the action takes place.

(10) While works like [Donna Leishman's] Deviant use perspective to create the impression of a three-dimensional space, the image itself does not incorporate the possibility of mobile interactivity along the Z-axis.

(10) One kind of strategy, evident in Ted Warnell's intricately programmed Javascript work TLT vs. LL, is to move from the word as the unit of signification to the letter.

(11) David Knoebel's exquisitely choreographed “Heart Pole,” from his collection “Click Poetry,” features a circular globe of words, with two rings spinning at 90 degrees from one another, “moment to moment” and “mind absorbing.”

(11) The next move is from imaging three dimensions interactively on the screen to immersion in actual three-dimensional spaces. As computers have moved off the desktop and into the environment, other varieties of electronic literature have emerged.

(12) The complements to site-specific mobile works, which foreground the user's ability to integrate real-world locations with virtual narratives, are site-specific installations in which the locale is stationary, such as a CAVE virtual reality projection room or gallery site.

(12) Pioneering the CAVE as a site for interactive literature is the creative writing program at Brown University spearheaded by Robert Coover, himself an internationally known writer of experimental literature.

(13) the work has redefined what it means to read, so that reading becomes, as Rita Raley has pointed out, a kinesthetic, haptic, and proprioceptively vivid experience, involving not just the cerebral activity of decoding but bodily interactions with the words as perceived objects moving in space.

(13) the “page” is transformed into a complex topology that rapidly transforms from a stable surface into a “playable” space in which she is an active participant.

(14) CAVE equipment, costing upward of a million dollars and depending on an array of powerful networked computers and other equipment, is typically found only in Research 1 universities and other elite research sites. .. Of the few institutions that have this high-tech resource, even fewer are willing to allocate precious time and computational resources to creative writers.

(15) Like the CAVE productions, interactive dramas are often site specific, performed for live audiences in gallery spaces in combination with present and/or remote actors.

(16) Interactive drama can also be performed online.

(16) How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.

(17) the constraints and possibilities of the medium have encouraged many writers to turn to nonnarrative forms or to experiment with forms in which narratives are combined with randomizing algorithms.

(18) The combination of English and Spanish vocabularies and the gorgeous images from Latin American locations [in Glazier's White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares] further suggest compelling connections between the spread of networked and programmable media and the transnational politics in which other languages contest and cooperate with English's hegemonic position in programming languages and, arguably, in digital art as well.

(18) Philippe Bootz has powerfully theorized generative texts, along with other varieties of electronic literature, in his functional model that makes clear distinctions between the writer's field, the text's field, and the reader's field, pointing out several important implications inherent in the separation between these fields, including the fact that electronic literature introduces temporal and logical divisions between the writer and reader different from those enforced by print.

(19) Naming such works [Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Regime Change and News Reader] “instruments” implies that one can learn to play them, gaining expertise as experience yields an intuitive understanding of how the algorithm works.

(20) As Andrews, Kearns, and Wardrip-Fruin acknowledge, these works are indebted to William Burroughs's notion of the “cut-up” and “fold-in.” They cite as theoretical precedent Burroughs's idea that randomization is a way to break the hold of the viral word and liberate resistances latent in language by freeing it from linear syntax and coherent narrative.

(20-21) “Code work,” a phrase associated with such writers and Alan Sondheim, MEZ (Mary Ann Breeze), and Talan Memmott and with critics such as Florian Cramer, Rita Raley, and Matthew Fuller, names a linguistic practice in which English (or some other natural language) is hybridized with programming expressions to create a creole evocative for human readers, especially those familiar with the denotations of programming languages. “Code work” in its purest form is machine readable and executable, such as Perl poems that literally have two addressees, human and intelligent machines. More typical are creoles using “broken code,” code that cannot actually be executed but that uses programming punctuations and expressions to evoke connotations appropriate to the linguistic signifiers.

(21) The conjunction of language with code has stimulated experiments in the formation and collaboration of different kinds of languages.

Among those languages are programming languages and natural languages, breaking their exclusion in Ong in Orality and Literacy on the grounds that they could never be natural languages. The door opened by the ready supply of ideological constants, a term I used many years ago when I was groping at the vision now much clearer, leads to the idea of “code work” usable by both “human and intelligent machines.”

(22-23) The multimodality of digital art works challenges writers, users, and critics to bring together diverse expertise and interpretive traditions so that the aesthetic strategies and possibilities of electronic literature may be fully understood. .. when a work is reconceived to take advantage of the behavioral, visual, and/or sonic capabilities of the Web, the result is not just a Web “version” but an entirely different artistic production that should be evaluated in its own terms with a critical approach fully attentive to the specificity of the medium.

(23) the computational media intrinsic to electronic textuality have necessitated new kinds of critical practice, a shift from literacy to what Gregory L. Ulmer calls “electracy.”

(24-25) Exemplifying this kind of critical practice is Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and Forensic Textuality. .. He parses the materiality of digital media as consisting of two interrelated and interacting aspects: forensic materiality and formal materiality. Whereas forensic materiality is grounding in the physical properties of the hardware - how the computer writes and reads bit patterns, which in turn correlated to voltage differences - formal materiality consists of the “procedural friction or perceived difference . . . as the user shifts from one set of software logics to another” (ms. 27). Using the important distinction that Espen J. Aarseth drew in Cyberspace: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature between scriptons (“strings as they appear to readers”) and textons (“strings as they exist in the text”) (62), Kirschenbaum pioneers in Mechanisms a methodology that connects the deep print reading strategies already in effect with scriptons (letters on the page, in this instance) to the textons (here the code generating the screenic surface). He thus opens the way for a mode of criticism that recognizes the specificity of networked and programmable media without sacrificing the interpretive strategies evolved with and through print.

Come in via this guy by suggesting that subdivisions of forensic and formal materiality cross in the articulation of technological .

(25) In “Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of E-Poetry,” she focuses on the ways in which E-poetry achieves dynamism, leading her to coin the neologism “poietics” (from “poetry” and “poiisis,” the Greek (sic) work for “making”).

Here is a slip by Hayles and her proofreaders, friends, and editors.

(26) Any work that uses algorithmic randomizers to generate text relies to a great or lesser extent on the surprising and occasionally witty juxtapositions created by these techniques. It should be noted that algorithmic procedures are not unique to networked and programmable media.

(27) The Demon, Stefans notes, is involved in a two-way collaboration: between the programmer who works with the limitations and possibilities of a computer language to create the program, and between the user and the computer when the computer poem is read and interpreted.

(27) The collaboration between the creative imagination of the (human) writer and the constraints and possibilities of software is the topic of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, in which he develops an extended analogy between the unit operations of object-oriented programming and a literary approach that explores the open, flexible, and reconfigurable systems that emerge from the relations between units.

(28) As Bogost's approach suggests, taking programming languages and practices into account can open productive approaches to electronic literature, as well as other digital and nondigital forms. The influence of software is especially obvious in the genre of the Flash poem, characterized by sequential screens that typically progress with minimal or no user intervention.

(30) Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, “codework,” generative art, and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient

ELECTRONIC LITERATURE IS NOT PRINT

(31) Early hypertext theorists, notably George Landow and Jay David Bolter, stressed the importance of the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing feature, extrapolating from the reader's ability to chose which link to follow to make extravagant claims about hypertext as a liberatory mode that would dramatically transform reading and writing and, by implication, settings where these activities are important, such as the literature classroom.

(31-32) Compared to the flexibility offered by the codex, which allows the reader complete freedom to skip around, go backward as well as forward, and open the book wherever she pleases, the looping structures of electronic hypertexts and the resulting repetition forced on the reader/user make these works by comparison more rather than less coercive.

The limitation of current technologies reflected in state of the art designs sees electronic literature as much more restricting than the codex (book) form of literature, overshadowing the unique capability of electronic literature to reform itself dynamically in response to the reader. Whereas following hyperlinks may have its print correlate, this property is unique.

(32) In conflating hypertext with the difficult and productive aporias of deconstructive analysis, these theorists failed to do justice to the nuanced operations of works performed in electronic media or to the complexities of deconstructive philosophy.

They are two different things, being dynamically reconfigurable and being deconstructive.

(33) Rather than circumscribe electronic literature within print assumptions, Aarseth swept the board clean by positing a new category of “ergodic literature,” texts in which “non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1).

(33) Markku Eskelinen's work, particularly “Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The Challenge of Cybertext Theory and Ludology to Literary Theory,” further challenges traditional narratology as an adequate model for understanding ergodic textuality, making clear the need to develop frameworks that can adequately take into account the expanded opportunities for textual innovations in digital media.

(34) Similar ground clearing was undertaken by Lev Manovich in his influential The Language of New Media. .. Although it is too simplistic to posit these “layers” as distinct phenomena (because they are in constant interaction and recursive feedback with one another), the idea of transcoding nevertheless makes the crucial point that computation has become a powerful means by which preconscious assumptions move from such traditional cultural transmission vehicles as political rhetoric, religious and other rituals, gestures and postures, literary narratives, historical accounts, and other purveyors of ideology into the material operations of computational devices.

(35) Alexander Galloway in Protocol puts the case succinctly: “Code is the only language that is executable” (emphasis in original). Unlike a print book, electronic text literally cannot be accessed without running the code. Critics and scholars of digital art and literature should therefore properly consider the source code to be part of the work, a position underscored by authors who embed in the code information or interpretive comments crucial to understanding the work.

This means any study of electronic literature may, or ought, to include some analysis of the source code and enframing technologies. The implications of availability of the source code are obvious here. Additionally, where is the boundary between “the” source code of the work and the surrounding operating environment? What is the status of database records and ephemera of the running of the code?

(35) [Jerome McGann] turns this perspective on its head in Radiant Technology: Literature after the World Wide Web by arguing that print texts also use markup language, for example, paragraphing, italics, indentation, line breaks, and so forth.

(36-37) Complementing studies focusing on the materiality of digital media are analyses that consider the embodied cultural, social, and ideological contexts in which computation takes place. .. Much as the novel both gave voice to and helped to create the liberal humanist subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so contemporary electronic literature is both reflecting and enacting a new kind of subjectivity characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and non-human actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations.

(37-39) How and in what ways it should engage with these commercial interests is discussed in Alan Liu's magisterial work The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. .. Realizing this broader possibility requires that we understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (although it is that, or course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise.

Among these constituencies are theorists and researchers interested in the larger effects of network culture. .. Adrian Mackenzie's Cutting Code: Software as Sociality studies software as collaborative social practice and cultural process. .. electronic literature is evolving within complex social and economic networks that include the development of commercial software, the competing philosophies of open source freeware and shareware, the economics and geopolitical terrain of the internet and World Wide Web, and a host of other factors that directly influence how electronic literature is created and stored, sold or given away, preserved or allowed to decline into obsolescence.

This choice of wording suggests that a more sensitive study of free, open source cultural movements can expand the perspective taken by Mackenzie and/or Hayles.

PRESERVATION, ARCHIVING, AND DISSEMINATION

(39) whereas books printed on good quality paper can endure for centuries, electronic literature routinely becomes unplayable (and hence unreadable) after a decade or even less. The problem exists for both software and hardware.

(40) The Electronic Literature Organization has taken a proactive approach to this crucial problem with the Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination Initiative (PAD). Part of that initiative is realized in the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1, co-edited by Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland, and me, featuring sixty works of recent electronic literature and other scholarly resources.

(41) [Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin's] “Acid-Free Bits” offers advice to authors to help them “find ways to create long-lasting elit, ways that fit their practice and goals” (3). The recommendations include preferring open systems to closed systems, choosing community-directed systems over corporate driven systems, adhering to good programming practices by supplying comments and consolidating code, and preferring plain-text to binary formats and cross-platform options to single-system options.

(41) More encompassing, and even more visionary, is the proposal in “Born-Again Bits” for the “X-Literature Initiative.” The basic premise is the XML (Extensible Markup Language) will continue to be the most robust and widespread form of Web markup language into the foreseeable future.

(42) The X-Literature Initiative makes startlingly clear that the formation we know as “literature” is a complex web of activities that includes much more than conventional images of writing and reading. Also involved are technologies, cultural and economic mechanisms, habits and predispositions, networks of producers and consumers, professional societies and their funding possibilities, canons and anthologies designed to promote and facilitate teaching and learning activities, and a host of other factors.

CHAPTER TWO

Intermediation: From Page to Screen

DYNAMIC HETERARCHIES AND FLUID ANALOGIES

(44) I focus here on two central conceptual clusters to develop the idea of intermediation: dynamic heterarchies and fluid analogies as embodied in multiagent computer programs, and the interpretive processes that give meaning to information.

(45) One proposal is “intermediation,” a term I have adopted from Nicholas Gessler, whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another medium, and so forth. The result is what researchers in artificial life call a “dynamic hierarchy,” a multi-tiered system in which feedback and feedforward loops tie the system together through continuing interactions circulating throughout the hierarchy.

(45) The potential of this idea to explain multilevel complexity is the subject of Harold Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex.

(46) digital and analog processes together perform in more complex ways than the digital alone. .. They [analog processes] excel in transferring information from one medium to another through morphological resemblance, and the complexity of continuous variation allows them to encode information in more diverse ways than digital encodings.

(47) Now let us make a speculative leap and consider the human and the digital computer as partners in a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics.

(47) citizens in technologically developed societies, and young people in particular, are literally being reengineered through their interactions with computational devices.

(48-49) In Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, Hofstadter details this research. His mantra, “Cognition is recognition,” nicely summarizes his conclusion that cognition is built on the ability to recognize patterns and extrapolate from them to analogies (pattern A is like pattern B).

(51) Because literature is not limited to factual recreation but rather works through metaphor, evocation, and analogy, it specializes in the qualities that programs like Jumbo and Copycat are designed to perform.

(51-52) the programs function as components in an adaptive system bound together with humans through intermediating dynamics, the results of which are emergent realizations. .. the literal/metaphoric binary becomes a spectrum along which a variety of programs can be placed, depending on their cognitive capacities and the ways in which the patterns they generate and/or recognize are structurally coupled with humans.

The idea of considering meaning making as a spectrum of possibilities with recursive loops entangling different positions along the spectrum has been catalyzed by Edward Fredkin's recent proposal that “the meaning of information is given by the process that interprets it” (my emphasis), for example, an MP3 player that interprets a digital file to produce audible sound. The elegance of the concept is that it applies equally well to human and nonhuman cognizers.

(53) For the MP3 player, “aboutness” has to do with the relation it constructs between the digital file and the production of sound waves. For the music sophisticate, “aboutness” may include a detailed knowledge of Beethoven's work, the context in which it was written and performed, historical changes in orchestral instrumentation, and so on.

(53) [Dennett's thought experiments demonstrate] that in a certain sense human intentionality too is an artifact that must ultimately have emerged from the subcognitive processes responsible for the evolution of humans as a species.

(54-55) Fredkin's concept also can potentially heal the breach between meaning and information that was inscribed into information theory when Claude Shannon defined information as a probability function. .. The divorce between information and meaning was necessary, in Shannon's view, because he saw no way to reliably quantify information as long as it remained context dependent, because its quantification would change every time it was introduced into a new context, a situation calculated to drive electrical engineers mad. Nevertheless, the probability functions in Shannon's formulations necessarily implied processes that were context dependent in a certain sense - specifically, the context of assessing them in relation to all possible messages that could be sent by those message elements. The difficulty was that there seemed to be no way to connect this relatively humble sense of context to the multilayered, multifaceted contexts ordinarily associated with high-level meanings (for example, interpretations of Beethoven's Fifth). Fredkin's formulation overcomes this difficulty by defining meaning through the processes that interpret information, all the way from binary code to high-level thinking.

(55) Putting Shannon's mechanistic model together with MacKay's embodied model make sense when we see higher-order meanings emerging from recursive lower level subcognitive processes, as MacKay emphasizes when he highlights “visceral responses and hormonal secretions and what have you.” Like humans, intelligent machines also have multiple layers of processes, from ones and zeros to sophisticated acts of reasoning and inference.

(56-57) In electronic literature, this dynamic is evoked when the text performs actions that bind together author and program, player and computer, into a complex system characterized by intermediating dynamics. The computer's performance builds high-level responses out of low-level processes that interpret binary code. These performances elicit emergent complexity in the player, whose cognitions likewise build up from low-level thoughts that possess much more powerful input to high-level thoughts than the computer does, but that nevertheless are bound together with the computer's subcognitive processes through intermediating dynamics. The cycle operates as well in the writing phase of electronic literature. When a programmer/writer creates an executable file, the process reengineers the writer's perceptual and cognitive systems as she works with the medium's possibilities. .. The result is a meta-analogy: as human cognition is to the creation and consumption of the work, so computer cognition is to its execution and performance.

(57-58) The book is like a computer program in that it is a technology designed to change the perceptual and cognitive states of a reader. .. “Recombinant flux,” as the aesthetic of such works [that is, electronic texts] is called, gives a much stronger impression of agency than does a book.

(58) this knowledge is carried forward into the new medium typically by trying to replicate the earlier medium's effects within the new medium's specificities.

(59) In My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, I explored intermediation by taking three different analytical cuts, focusing on the dynamics between print and electronic textuality, code and language, and analog and digital processes.

FROM PAGE TO SCREEN: MICHAEL JOYCE'S AFTERNOON: A STORY AND TWELVE BLUE

(60) That evolution is richly evident in the contrast between Michael Joyce's seminal first-generation hypertext afternoon: a story and his later Web work Twelve Blue.

(62-63) The technique of conflicting plot lines is of course not original with Michael Joyce. .. Comparing the two works reveals how printcentric afternoon is, notwithstanding its implementation in an electronic medium. .. Although the reader can choose what lexias to follow, this interaction is so circumscribed that most readers will not have the sense of being able to play the work - hence my repeated use here of the term “reader” rather than “player.”

In Twelve Blue, by contrast, playing is one of the central metaphors. .. Compared with afternoon, Twelve Blue is a much more processual work. Its central inspiration is not the page but rather the flow of surfing the Web.

(63-64) Twelve Blue's epigraph, taken from William H. Gass's On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, signals that the strategy will be to follow trails of associations, as Gass says, “the way lint collects. The mind does that” (7). .. The second, less explicit, intertext is Vannevar Bush's seminal essay “As We May Think,” in which he argues that the mind thinks not in linear sequences but in associational links, a cognitive mode he sought to instantiate in his mechanical Memex, often regarded as a precursor to electronic hypertext. .. [Twelve Blue] instantiates associational thinking and evokes it for the player, who must in a certain sense yield to this cognitive mode to understand the work (to say nothing of enjoying it). .. Like sensual lovemaking, the richness of Twelve Blue takes time to develop and cannot be rushed.

(69) As Anthony Enns points out in his reading of Twelve Blue, this work challenges Frank Kermode's criterion for “the sense of an ending” that helps us make sense of the world by establishing a correlation between the finitude of human life and the progression through a beginning, middle, and end characteristic of many print narratives. .. I would argue rather that Twelve Blue makes a different kind of sense, one in which life and death exist on a continuum with flowing and indeterminate boundaries.

(70) Gregory Ulmer relates it to the shift from a novel-based aesthetic to a poetics akin to the lyric poem. He also relates it to a change from literacy to “electracy,” arguing that its logic has more in common with the ways in which image and text come together on the Web than to the linearity of alphabetic language bound in a print book. .. The leap from afternoon to Twelve Blue demonstrates the ways in which the experience of the Web, joining with the subcognitive ground of intelligent machines, provides the inspiration for the intermediating dynamics through which the literary work creates emergent complexity.

MARIA MENCIA: TRANSFORMING THE RELATION BETWEEN SOUND AND MARK

(71) In “Methodology,” Mencia comments that she is particularly interested in the “exploration of visuality, orality and the semantic/'non semantic' meaning of language.” On the strength of her graduate work in English philology, she is well positioned to explore what happens when the phone and phoneme are detached from their customary locations within morphemes and begin to circulate through digital media into other configurations, other ways of mobilizing conjunctions of marks and sounds. .. With traditional print literature, long habituation causes visuality (perception of the mark) to flow automatically into subvocalization (cognitive decoding) that in turn is converted by the “mind's eye” into the reader's impression that the words on the page give way to a scene she can watch as the characters speak, act, and interact.

An excellent articulation of the hegemonic computation process of reading to produce virtual realities.

(73) [In Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs] the human is in-mixed with nonhuman life forms to create hybrid entities that represent the conjunction of human and nonhuman ways of knowing.

(74) The analogy-between-analogies suggests that media transformations are like the dynamic interchanges between different kinds of cognizers, thus revealing a deep structure of intermediation that encompasses the history of media forms as well as the emergent complexities of interactions between humans, animals, and networked and programmable machines.

RUPTURING THE PAGE: THE JEW'S DAUGHTER

(74-76) The entire work exists as a single screen of text. .. When the player mouses over the blue letters, some part of the text, moving faster than the eye can catch, is replaced. Reading thus necessarily proceeds as rereading and remembering, for to locate the new portion of the page the reader must recall the screen's previous instantiation while scanning to identify the new portion, the injection of which creates a new context for the remaining text.

(78-79) The “stickiness” of phrases that can ambiguously attach to different sentences and phrases also enacts a difference between modernist stream of consciousness and the kind of awareness represented in The Jew's Daughter. .. narration is both belated and premature, early and late.

(79) Taken as a representation of consciousness, the kind of awareness performed here is not a continuous coherent stream but rather multilayered shifting strata dynamically in motion relative to one another.

This kind of interaction is very similar to the “Multiple Drafts Model” that Daniel C. Dennett, in Consciousness Explained, argues best explains the nature of consciousness. Dennett proposes that consciousness is not the manifestation of a single coherent self synthesizing different inputs (characterized as the “Cartesian Theater,” the stage on which representations are played out and viewed by a central self); rather, interacting brain processes, operating with varying temporal dynamics and different neural/perceptional inputs, are consciousness. .. To explain the subjective impression of possessing a central self, Dennett argues that the self is not synonymous with consciousness as such. Rather, the illusion of self is created through an internal monologue that does not so much issue from a central self as give the impression a central self exists.

This is a very rich but complicated reinterpretation of consciousness as an epiphenomenon in which there is no self, only an illusion of one.

(80) Seen in this perspective, The Jew's Daughter recapitulates the temporal and spatial discontinuities constitutive of consciousness through the (inter)mediation of computer software and hardware.

(81) Without knowing anything about The Jew's Daughter, Dennett sets up the comparison between human and machine cognition by likening the subcognitive agents from which consciousness emerges, and the even simpler processes that underlie them, to mechanical programs that could theoretically be duplicated in a computer.

(82-83) The Error Engine, a collaborative work co-authored by Judd Morrissey, Lori Talley, and computer scientist Lutz Hamel, carries the implications of The Jew's Daughter to another level by functioning as an adaptive narrative engine that initiates a coevolutionary dynamic between writer, machine, and player. .. In the next instantiation of the program, no yet implemented, the authors envision an algorithm whose selection criteria can itself evolve in relation to the player's choices. Such a program would deserve to be called a “genetic algorithm,” a complex adaptive system in which the user's choices and the algorithm responding to those choices coevolve together. .. In this sense intermediating dynamics, whereby recursive feedback loops operate through the differently embodied entities of the computer and human, become an explicit part of the work's design, performance, and interpretation. Adaptive coevolution implies that real biological changes take place in the player's neuronal structure that result in emergent complexity, expressed as a growing understanding of the work's dynamics, thematics, and functional capabilities; these in turn change and evolve in interaction with the player's choices.

(83) Certainly print literature changes a reader's perceptions, but the loop is not closed because the words on the page do not literally change in response to the user's perceptions. .. To fully take this reflexivity into account requires understanding the computer's cascading interpretive processes and procedures, its possibilities, limitations, and functionalities as a subcognitive agent, as well as its operations within networked and programmable media considered as distributed cognitive systems. .. Whatever limitations intermediation as a theory may have, its virtue as a critical framework is that it introduces computation into the picture at a fundamental level, making it not an optional add-on but a foundational premise from which to launch further interrogation.

Gratuitous reference to Phaedrus with the close loop feedback difference between electronic and print literature. More important is the undeniable influence of computation for the critical framework.

(84) No less than print literature, literary criticism is affected because digital media are increasingly essential to it, limited not just to word processing but also to how critics now access legacy works through digital archives, electronic editions, hypermedia reinstantiations, and so forth.

(85) Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational.

CHAPTER THREE

Contexts for Electronic Literature: The Body and the Machine

(87) The context of networked and programmable media from which electronic literature springs is part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they construct themselves as contemporary subjects. . . . The stakes are nothing less than whether the embodied human becomes the center for humanistic inquiry within which digital media can be understood, or whether media provide the context and ground for configuring and disciplining the body.

(88) I argue that both the body and machinic orientations work through strategic erasures. A fuller understanding of our contemporary situation requires the articulation of a third position focusing on the dynamics entwining body and machine together. .. Most importantly, it empowers electronic literature so that it not only reflects but reflects upon the media from which it springs.

THE EPOCH OF TECHNICAL MEDIA

(88-89) No theorist has done more to advance the idea of technical media as an autonomous force determining subjectivity than Friedrich A. Kittler. .. Influenced by Foucault rhetorically as well as methodologically, Kittler departs from him in focusing not on discourse networks understood as written documents, but rather on the modes of technology essential to their production, storage, and transmission.

(89) Literature acts on the body but only within the horizon of the medium's technical capabilities. Especially important in this regard, Kittler argues, was the development of the phonetic method of reading, introduced in Germany by Heinrich Stephanie around 1800. The phonetic method transformed the mark into sound, erasing the materiality of the grapheme and substituting instead a subvocalized voice.

(90) [from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter] So-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology. (intro, 16)

(90) With the formation of a new kind of subject, the voice of Mother/Nature ceases to spring forth from the page in a kind of hallucination.

(91) In his excellent forward to Discourse Networks 1800/1900, David E. Wellbery calls this the “presupposition of exteriority” (DN, xii). . . the crucial move of making social formations interior to media conditions is deeply flawed. . . . Although Kittler's presupposition is fruitful as a theoretical provocation, leading to the innovative analyses that make his work exciting, it cannot triumph as a theoretical imperative because it depends on a partial and incomplete account of how media technologies interact with social and cultural dynamics.

(91-92) One indication of this partiality is the inability of Kittlerian media theory to explain how media change comes about (as has often been noted, this is also a weakness of Foucault's theory of epistemes). In a perceptive article, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young argues that in Kittler's analyses, war performs as the driving force for media transformation.

(93) clearly the real problem is that media alone cannot possibly account for all the complex factors that go into creating national military conflicts. What is true for war is true for any dynamic evolution of complex social systems; media transformations alone are not sufficient.

(93) To be fair to the Kittlerian viewpoint, I have chosen a site where media conditions are unusually strong in determining the interactions that take place within it - namely, the elite world of global finance. The media conditions that prevail here are characteristic of the contemporary period, in that the differentiation between data streams marking early twentieth century media transformations have undergone integration. . . . Contemporary de-differentiation crucially depends on digital media's ability to represent all kinds of data – text, images, sound, video – with the binary symbolization of “one” and “zero.”

MEDIA CONDITIONS FOR GLOBAL FINANCE: WHY MEDIA THEORY IS NOT SUFFICIENT

(94) Among important recent work on global finance are the ethnographic studies of international currency traders by Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger. . . . In brief, this is money at its most virtual, moving around the globe in nearly instantaneous electronic exchanges and reflecting rate fluctuations sensitively dependent on a wide variety of fast-changing economic, social, and political factors.

(94-95) Knorr Cetina and Bruegger propose the theoretical concept of global microsociality. . . . Global microsociality represents a new kind of phenomenon possible only with advanced communication technologies allowing for nearly instantaneous exchanges between geographically distant locations; compared to the telephone and teletype, the quantitative differences are so great as to amount to qualitative change. . . . Inflecting by the dynamics of global economics, the traders nevertheless operate within microsocial dynamics – hence the necessity for global microsociality.

(95) Recapitulating within their sensoria the media differentiation into separate data flows, the traders develop a form of parallel processing through a division of sensory inputs, using phones to take orders from brokers through the audio channel and the screens to take in visual data and conduct trades electronically. The environment, however, is dominated by the screens.

(95-96) the effect that dominates is watching time unfold. .. As new events appear over the ever-transforming horizon, the traders use their knowledge of past configurations, present statistics, and anticipated tendencies to weave a fabric of temporality, which like the fabled magic carpet is perceived at once as a space one can occupy and as an event as ephemeral and ever-changing as the air currents on which the magic carpet rides.

(96-97) Temporality partakes of these characteristics because the screens function as temporalized “places” traders occupy; time in these circumstances becomes the spatialized parameter in which communities are built and carry out their business. . . . Time thus ceases to be constructed as a universal “now” conceived as a point source moving unambiguously forward along a line at a uniform pace. Driven by globalized business pressures, time leaves the line and smears into a plane.

(97) Greenwich time thus operates as the conventional one-way time that always moves in one direction, whereas local time becomes incorporated into a spatialized fabric that can be traversed in different directions as circumstances dictate.

(97-98) In this spatialized temporality, the traders occupy an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they are participants in the place of temporality they create by watching the screens, helping in significant ways to shape the market and related events as they continuously unfold and affect one another. . . . On the other hand, they are also observers outside the screens, watching the action as it unfolds. . . . The net result of these interactions is perceived by the traders as “the market.” . . . Note that although location enters into the trader's sense of the market, it is the temporal dimension - everything all the time - that constitutes the place of habitation the market creates and the traders occupy.

(98) This sense of the market as “everything” is reinforced by the traders' experience in being so intimately and tightly connected with the screens that they can sense the “mind” of the market. . . . This intuition is highly sensitive to temporal fluctuations and, when lost, can be regained only through months of immersion in current conditions. Attributing a “mind” to the market of course implies it is an entity possessing consciousness, desires, and intentions; more precisely, it is a megaentity whose existence is inherently emergent. Containing the traders' actions with everything else, it comes into existence as the dynamic realization of innumerable local interactions.

Instead of calling the market a mind, call it a megaentity. Does this then exclude interpreting it with respect to Gallagher's body image / body schema distinction?

(99) This is the context in which the screens become objects of intense attachment for the traders.

(99) So far the case study has functioned as an object lesson demonstrating Kittler's dictum, “Media determine our situation.” At this point, however, let us turn to consider how cultural dynamics interact with the media conditions to codetermine their specificities. . . . This gender predominance, far from accidental, is deeply imbricated into the ways in which the media dynamics play out.

(100-101) In this setting, gendered cultural practices proliferate more uniformly and extensively than normally would be the case. . . . Traders see themselves as engaged in combat, if not outright ware, with rival banks and other traders. . . . Warfare here does not function to bring about media transformations, as it often does in Kittler's analyses; rather, warfare is encapsulated within the horizon codetermined by media conditions and cultural formations. It is appropriated in part because it expresses - indeed, explains and justifies - the intensified desires and fears aroused by the traders' situation.

(101) The media conditions alone, then, are underdetermining with respect to the culture that actually emerges. Other factors, particularly cultural models linked with masculine dominance, are necessary to explain how the media function to “determine the situation.”

(102) Media provide the simultaneity that spatializes time, creates global microsociality, catalyzes attachment to screens, and gives rise to emergent objects “that are not identical with themselves,” but the emotional tone, dominant metaphors, hypermasculinized dynamics, and capitalist economics codetermine how trading practices actually operate.

EMBODIMENT AND THE COEVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY

(102-103) No one has more forcefully argued for the importance of embodiment in relation to new media art than Mark B. N. Hansen. . . . Updating Bergson's idea in Matter and Memory that the body selects from the environment images on which to focus, Hansen contests Deleuze's reading of Bergson in Cinema 1 in order to reinstall affectivity at the center of the body-brain achievement of making sense of digital images.

(103) This is a major intervention that serves as an important counterweight to Kittler's perspective. Hansen posits that “only meaning can enframe information” (82), and in his view it is humans, not machines, who provide, transmit, and interpret meanings.

(103-104) Yet despite my overall sympathy, I cannot help noticing places where the argument, in its zeal to establish that embodiment trumps every possible machine capacity, circumscribes the very potential of the body to be transformed by its interaction with digital technologies for which Hansen otherwise argues.

(105) Vision, then, cannot in Hansen's account be allowed to be the dominant perceptual sense, on even on par with privileged faculties that (not coincidentally) are much more difficult to automate, particularly what he calls “affectivity,” the capacity of the sensorimotor body to “experience itself as 'more than itself' and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7). To substantiate that the sensorimotor body has this capacity, he draws on the writing of Raymond Ruyer, a French theorist who during the 1950s proposed to combat the mechanist tendency of post-World War II cybernetics by positing bodily faculties that, he argued, are nonempirical and nonobservable. Chief among these is a “transpatial domain of human themes and values” (80) . . . If we were to call the “transpatial domain” by the more traditional name “soul,” its problematic nature would quickly become evident.

Clearly a tie into Gallagher's work since she mentions Francisco Valera. Can't find the reference to Demasio I remember reading.

(106) Although it is undoubtedly true, as Hansen argues citing Brian Massumi (109), that proprioception, kinesthetic, and haptic capacities are involved with vision, this does not mean that they replace vision or even that they become dominant over vision in the VR interface. Indeed, it is precisely because vision plays such an important role in VR that VR sickness arises.

(108) Falling back on such mystified terms as “transpatial domain” and “absolute survey” fails to do justice to the extensive research now available on how synesthesia actually works.

(108) there is an unavoidable tension between Hansen's insight that technology and the body coevolve together and his ideological commitment to the priority of embodiment over technology.

(109) As Hansen uses the term, however, reality becomes “mixed” when the perceptual input for humans comes not from their unaided bodies operating alone in the environment, but rather from their embodied interactions with technologies.

(109) In this account, then, the coevolution of the body and technology is given a teleological trajectory, a mission as it were: its purpose is to show the “constituting or ontological dimension of embodiment.” Largely erased are material specificities and capacities of technical objects as artifacts. It is as though the feedback loop between technical object and embodied human enactor has been cut off halfway through: potentiality flows from the object into the deep inner senses of the embodied human, but its flow back into the object has been short-circuited, leading to an impoverished account of the object's agential capacities to act outside the human's mobilization of its stimuli.

(110) This encapsulation is problematic for several reasons. It ignores the increasing use of technical devices that do not end in human interfaces but are coupled with other technical devices that register input, interpret results, and take action without human intervention.

Thus the machine dimension on my timeline.

(111) Such an account is helpless to explain how technology evolves within the horizon of its own limitations and possibilities.

(111-112) As if assuming a mirror position to Kittlerian media theory, which cannot explain why media change except by referring to war, Hansen cannot explain why media develop except by referring to embodied capacities. . . technologies are embodied because they have their own material specificities as central to understanding how they work as human physiology, psychology, and cognition are to understanding how (human) bodies work.

(112-113) Had early tools developed along different technological lineages, early hominid evolution also might have developed along quite different biological lines. . . . Instead of subordinating the body to technology or technology to the body, however, surely the better course is to focus on their interactions and coevolutionary dynamics.

(113) Central to these dynamics, especially in the context of media theory and electronic literature, are neural plasticity and language ability. . . . Evidence indicates that compound tools were contemporaneous with the accelerated development of Broca's area in the frontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in language use.

(114) Although synaptogenesis is greatest in infancy, plasticity continues throughout childhood and adolescence, with some degree continuing even into adulthood. In contemporary developed societies, this plasticity implies that the brain's synaptic connections are coevolving with environments in which media consumption is a dominant factor. .. Children growing up in media-rich environments literally have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity in such conditions.

(115) [James Mark] Baldwin argued for what he called “organic selection.” In the same way that the brain overproduces neuronal connections that are then pruned in relation to environmental input, so Baldwin thought that “organic selection” proceeded through an overproduction of exploratory behaviors, which are then pruned through experience to those most conducive to the organism's survival. This results in a collaboration between phylogenetic selection (that is, selection that occurs through genetic transmission) and ontogenic mechanisms of adaptation (which occur in individuals through learning).

(115) what begins as ontogenetic adaptation through learning feeds back into selective pressures to affect physical biology.

What does Gallagher think about synaptogenesis and this explanatory combination of phylogenetic selection (genetics) and ontogenic mechanisms of adaptation (learning)?

(116) Ambrose's scenario linking compound tools with the emergence of language illustrates how technology enters into the psychophysical feedback cycle by changing the ways in which learning occurs and the kinds of learning that are most adaptive. . . . If data differentiation at the beginning of the twentieth century broke the ancient monopoly of writing, the computer at the beginning of the twenty-first century breaks the monopoly of vision associated with reading. Interactive text, reminiscent in some ways of the digital art discussed by Hansen, stimulates sensorimotor functions not mobilized in conventional print reading, including fine movements involved in controlling the mouse, keyboard, and/or joystick, haptic feedback through the hands and fingers, and complex eye-hand coordination in real-time dynamic environments. Moreover, this multisensory stimulation occurs simultaneously with reading, a configuration unknown in the Age of Print. Brain imaging studies show that everyday tool use entails complex feedback loops between cognitive and sensorimotor systems. For humans who habitually interact with computers, especially at young ages, such experiences can potentially affect the neurological structure of the brain.

(117) Steven Johnson, in Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, cites the studies of James R. Flynn indicating that Iqs rose significantly from 1932-78, the so-called Flynn effect that Johnson correlates with increased media consumption. Anecdotal evidence as well as brain imaging studies indicate that “Generation M” (as the Kaiser Family Foundation dubbed the 8- to 18-year-old cohort) is undergoing a significant cognitive shift, characterized by a craving for continuously varying stimuli, a low threshold for boredom, the ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously, and a quick intuitive grasp of algorithmic procedures that underlie and generate surface complexity. The cognitive mode, which I have elsewhere called “hyper attention,” is distinctively different from that traditionally associated with the humanities, which by contrast can be called “deep attention.” Deep attention is characterized by a willingness to spend long hours with a single artifact (for instance, a seven-hundred-page Victorian novel), intense concentration that tends to shut out external stimuli, a preference for a single data stream rather than multiple inputs, and the subvocalization that typically activates and enlivens the reading of print literature.

Deep attention versus hyper attention as examples of ontogenic mechanisms of adaptation. Ironically, hyper attention is what makes me turn away from The Jew's Daughter. Heim discusses this shfit, too.

(118) The effects of hyper attention are already being reflected in literary works, for example in John Caylety's Translation and Imposition, discussed in Chapter 5, where text is accompanied by glyphs visually indicating the algorithm's operation.

(118) As media change, so do bodies and brains; new media conditions foster new kinds of ontogenic adaptations and with them, new possibilities for literary engagements. This is the context in which we should evaluate and analyze the possibilities opened by electronic literature.

(119) It is precisely when these multilayered, multiply sited processes within humans and machines interact through intermediating dynamics that the rich effects of electronic literature are created, performed, and experienced.

THE BODY AND MACHINE IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

(120) The notorious “nervousness” of this work [Lexia to Perplexia], whereby a tiny twitch of the cursor can cause events to happen that the user did not intend and cannot completely control, conveys through its opaque functionality intuitions about dispersed subjectivities and screens with agential powers similar to those we saw with international currency traders.

(122) Memmott's rewriting of the myth in the context of information technologies, the “I-terminal,” a neologism signifying the merging of human and machine, looks at the screen and desires to interact with the image, caught like Narcissus in a reflexive loop that cycles across the screen boundary between self/other.

(122) The feedback cycle suggested here between self and other, body and machine, serves as a metaphor for the coconstruction of embodiment and media technologies.

(123) The passage cited above continues with “broken” code, that is, code that is a creolization of English with computer code, evocative of natural language connotations but not actually executable. . . . In particular, the play between human language and code points to the role of the intelligent machine in contemporary constructions of subjectivity, gesturing toward what Scott Bukatman has called “terminal identity,” or in Memmott's lexicon, the “I-terminal.”

A good place to distinguish broken code and pseudo code.

(123-124) Engaging the hyper-attentive characteristics of multiple information streams and rapid transformations (images, words, graphics, lightning-quick morphing of screens, mouseovers, and so on), the work reflects upon its own hyper-attentive aesthetics in the final section, where the prefix “hyper” replicates itself with every imaginable stem. At the same time, the work obviously requires deep-attention skills to grasp the complex interactions between verbal play, layered screen design, twitchy navigation, and JavaScript coding. . . . In terms of the complex dynamics between body and machine, we might say that the gamer and textual critical have had their neural plasticities shaped in different but overlapping ways.

(124) While Lexia to Perplexia is primarily concerned with the transformative effect of information technologies on contemporary subjectivity, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries engages the global microsociality and spatialization of temporality characteristic of information-intensive settings such as international currency trading discussed above. . . . Programmed in Flash, their works use timed animation to display sequential blocks of text, with the movement from one screen of text to the next synchronized with an accompanying sound track, typically jazz.

(125) The impression is not that the eye moves but rather that the text moves while the eye remains (more or less) stationary. Agency is thus distributed differently than with the print page where the reader controls the pace of reading and rate at which pages turn.

(125) [Bill] Brown devised a machine that he called the “Readie,” [in the 1920s] which was intended to display text much as it appears in YHCHI's compositions.

(126-127) In Nippon, global microsociality is emphasized by an intimate address that appears on a screen split between Japanese ideograms above and English words beneath. .. The subvocalization that activates the connection between sound and mark in literary reading here is complicated by the text's movement and its interpenetration by sound, becoming a more complex and multimodal production in which embodied response, machine pacing, and transnational semiotics, along with the associated spatialization of temporality, all contribute to construct the relation between text, body, and machine.

(128) The resulting tension mandates that the user intent on comprehending the work will necessarily be fored to play it many times, unable to escape hyper attention by stopping the text-in-motion or deep attention by lapsing into interactive game play.

(130) Hence the rhetoric of imperatives employed by Kittler (“must not think,” “forbids the leap,” and so on) finds its mirror opposite in Hansen's rhetoric of encapsulation (“subordination of technics,” “from within the operational perspective of the organism,” and the like). In contrast, the model herein proposed entagles body and machine in open-ended recursivity with one another. This framework mobilizes the effect recursivity always has of unsettling foundations while simultaneously catalyzing transformations as each partner in the loop initiates and reacts to changes in the other. In this model neither technological innovation nor embodied plasticity is foreclosed. The future, unpredictable as ever, remains open.

CHAPTER FOUR

Revealing and Transforming: How Electronic Literature Revalues Computational Practice

(131) The chapter elucidates further a framework in which digital literature can be understood as creating recursive feedback loops among embodied practice, tacit knowledge and explicit articulation.
(132) in developed societies, almost all communication, except face-to-face talk, is mediated through some kind of digital code.

(132) As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown, robust and durable knowledge can be transmitted through social practices and enactments without being consciously articulated.

(134) In this context, literature can be understood as a semiotic technology designed to create - or more precisely, activate - feedback loops that dynamically and recursively unite feelings with ratiocination, body with mind.

But how do these feedback loops operate in nonhuman systems? Hayles does not spend much time at all discussing the source code of any of the examples of EL in this book. Her musings on what feelings/body and ratiocination/mind may be in nonhuman systems trace the same boundaries of fantasy as do those surrounding her postulate that nonhuman intelligences exist in Memmott's many representations of it.

(135) while the technological nonconscious has been a factor in constituting humans for millennia, the new cognitive capabilities and agencies of intelligent machines give it greater impact and intensity than ever before.

(136) The first proposition asserts that verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code, and the second argues that distributed cognition implies distributed agency.

(136) Stuart Moulthrop, writing on “404” errors, notes that such episodes are not simply irritations but rather flashes of revelation, potentially illuminating something crucial about our contemporary situation.

Deleuze and G make the same point about break-downs in Anti-Oedipus; the torn sock..

(137) In Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Andy Clark argues that we are “human-technology symbionts,” constantly inventing ways to offload cognition into environmental affordances so that “the mind is just less and less in the head.” Edwin Hutchins makes similar points in Cognition in the Wild.

(138-139) Electronic literature can tap into highly charged differentials that are unusually hetergeneous, due in part to uneven developments of computational media and in part to unevenly distributed experiences among users. .. These differences in background correlated with different kinds of intuitions, different habits, and different cognitive styles and conscious thoughts. .. Only because we do not know what we already know, and do not yet feel what we know, are there such potent possibilites for intermediations in the contemporary moment.

This may be an antidote to the suggestion that all narrative themes have been exhausted except science fiction by escaping print into electronic media forms.

RECURSIVE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PRACTICE AND ARTICULATION

(139) William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope is modeled after a technology developed for experimental psychology exploring the effects of subliminal images.

(140) In historical context, then, the tachistoscope was associated with the nefarious uses to which subliminal perception could be put by Communists who hated capitalists and capitalists who egged on the persecution of “Reds” and “Commies.”

(140-141) As the kinds and amounts of sensory inputs proliferate, the effect for verbally oriented users is to induce anxiety about being able to follow the narrative while also straining to put together all the other discordant signifiers.

(142-143) Programmed by a human in the high-level languages used in Flash (C++/Java), the multi-modalities are possible because all the files are ultimately represented in the same binary code. The work thus enacts the borderland in which machine and human cognition cooperate to evoke the meanings that the user imparts to the narrative, but these meanings themselves demonstrate that human consciousness is not the only actor in the process. Also involved are the actions of intelligent machines. In this sense the abyss may be taken to signify not only those modes of human cognition below consciousness, but also the machinic operations that take place below the levels accessible to the user and even to the programmer.

Incomprehensible temporal orders.

(143) Without subvocalization, which connects the activity of the throat and vocal cords with the auditory center in the brain, literary language fails to achieve the richness it otherwise would have. [Garrett] Stewart's argument implies that embodied responses operating below the level of conscious thought are essential to the full comprehension of literary language, a proposition enthusiastically endorsed by many poets.

(145) Automating the homophonic variants that are the stock in trade of literary language, [Millie Niss's] Sundays in the Park brings to conscious attention the link between vocalization and linguistic richness.

(145-146) Cayley has been exploring what he calls “transliteral morphing,” a computational procedure that algorithmically morphs, letter by letter, from a source text to a target text. .. Cayley conjectures that underlying these “higher-level” relationships are lower-level similarities that work not on the level of words, phrases, and sentences but individual phonemes and morphemes. .. Just as Mencia invokes the philological history of language as it moves from orality to writing to digital representation, so Cayley's transliteral morphs are underlain by an algorithm that reflects their phonemic and morpemic relations to one another.

(146-147) The complexity of these relationships as they evolve in time and as they are mediated by the computer code, Cayley conjectures, are the microstructures that underlie, support, and illuminate the high-level conceptual and linguistic similarities between related texts.

(147) Cayley suggests that if a user watches these long enough while also taking in the transliteral morphs, she will gain an intuitive understanding of the algorithm, much as a computer game player intuitively learns to recognize how the game algorithm is structured. The music helps in this process by providing another sensory input through which the algorithm can be grasped.

While all this is happening, through embodied and tacit knowledge, the conscious mind grapples with the significance of the transliterating text [Walter Benjamin “On Language as Such an on the Language of Man”].

(149) For Benjamin the transcendent language associated with God ensures translatability of texts, while for Cayley the atomistic structures of computer and human languages are the correlated microlevels that ensure translatability.

(149-150) The “objectivity” of this translation is guaranteed not by God but by the entwining of human and computer cognitions in our contemporary mediascapes.

(151) At the performance, laptops throughout the space began playing versions while Cayley projected the full implementation on the front screen. .. The stunning effect was to create a multimodal collaborative narrative distributed on laptops, throughout the performance space, in which different sensory modalities and different ways of knowing entwined together with machine cognition and agency.

In other recent work, Cayley has focused on the ways in which our inuitive knowledge of letter forms can define space and inflect time.

(152) The temporal interactions, as well as the virtual/actual spatiality of the textual surfaces, create an enriched sense of embodied play that complicates and extends the phenomenology of reading.

(153) Cayley further explores the phenomenology of reading in Lens, designed first as a CAVE installation and then transferred to a QuickTime maquette.

(154-155) For text, the ability to function simultaneously as a window into the computer's performance and as a writing surface to be decoded puts into dynamic interplay two very different models of cognition. .. Mediatint between the brute logic of these machinic operations and human intentions is the program that, when run, creates a performance partaking both of the programmer's intentions and the computer's underlying architecture as symbolic processor. In electronic literature, authorial design, the actions of an intelligent machine, and the user's receptivity are joined in a recursive cycle that enacts in microcosm our contemporary situation of living and acting within intelligent environments.

REVALUING COMPUTATIONAL PRACTICE

(156) [Brian Kim] Stefans sees in this confrontation the possibility that the boundaries of the conscious self might be breached long enough to allow other kinds of cognitions, human and nonhuman, to communicate and interact. “The space between tehse poles - noise and convention - is what I call the 'attractor,' the space of dissimulation, where the ambiguity of the cyborg is mistaken as the vagary of an imprecise, but poetic, subjectivity” (151).

(157) Joining technical practice with artistic creation, computation is revalued into a performance that addresses us with the full complexity our human natures require, including the rationality of the conscious mind, the embodied response that joins cognition and emotions, and the technological nonconscious that operates through sedimented routines of habitual actions, gestures, and postures. Thus understood, computation ceases to be a technical practice best left to software engineers and computer scientists and instead becomes a partner in the coevolving dynamics through which artists and programmers, users and plays, continue to explore and experience the intermediating dynamics that let us understand who we have been, who we are, and who we might become.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Future of Literature: Print Novels and the Mark of the Digital

(159) So essential is digitality to contemporary processes of composition, storage, and production that print should properly be considered a particular form of output for digital files rather than a medium separate from digital instantiation.

(160) This engagement is enacted in multiple senses: technologically in the production of textual surfaces, phenomenologically in new kinds of reading experiences possible in digital environments, conceptually in the strategies employed by print and electronic literature as they interact with each other's affordances and traditions, and thematically in the represented worlds that experimental literature in print and digital media perform.

(161) How does the mark of the digital relate to the subjectivities performed and evoked by today's experimental print novels? .. Rather than asking if there is evidence that the “literary” novel may in fact be losing audience share to other entertainment forms, however, [Kathleen] Fitzpatrick asks what cultural and social functions are served by pronouncements about the death of the print novel.

(162) imitating electronic textuality through comparable devices in print, many of which depend on digitality to be cost effective or even possible; and intensifying the specific traditions of print, in effect declaring allegiance to print regardless of the availability of other media.

(163-164) Computer-mediated text is layered. .. the layered nature of code also inevitably introduces issues of access and expertise.

(164) Computer-mediated text tends to be multimodal.

(164) In computer-mediated text, storage is separate from performance. .. code can never be seen or accessed by a user while it is running.

(164) Computer-mediated text manifests fractured temporality.

Excellent example is the 'futz time' required to adequately 'see' ('run') Lexia to Perplexia.

DIGITALITY AND THE PRINT NOVEL

(166) Why write it [numerical code in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close] in code? Many reviewers have complained (not without reason) about the gimmicky nature of this text, but in this instance the gimmick can be justified. It implies that language has broken down under the weight of trauma and become inaccessible not only to Thomas but the reader as well.

(169) The text, moving from imitation of a noisy machine to an intensification of ink marks durably impressed on paper, uses this print-specific characteristic as a visible indication of the trauma associated with the scene, as if the marks as well as the language were breaking down under the weight of the characters' emotions. At the same time, the overlapping lines are an effect difficult to achieve with letter press printing or a typewriter but a snap with Photoshop, so digital technology leaves its mark on these pages as well.

(170) The novel remediates the backward-running video in fifteen pages that function as a flipbook, showing the fantasized progression Oskar has imagined (327-41).

(172) Further complicating the ontology implicit in the book's materiality is the partitioning of some chapters into parallel columns, typically with three characters' stories running in parallel on a page spread, as if imitating the computer's ability to run several programs simultaneously.

(173) Within the narrative world, however, this apparent imitation of computer code's hierarchical structure is interpreted as the baby's ability to hide his thoughts from the reader as well as from Saturn, an interpretation that locates the maneuver within the print novel's tradition of metafiction by playing with the ontological levels of author, character, and reader.

What ontological levels are available for metafictional play in the genres of electronic literature Hayles has introduced? Relate to Foucault's meditation upon what is an author.

(175) In a now-familiar pattern, a technique that at first appears to be imitating electronic text is transformed into a print-specific characteristic, for it would, of course, be impossible to eradicate a word from an electronic text by cutting a hole in the screen.

(175) In House of Leaves, the recursive dynamic between strategies that imitate electronic text and those that intensify the specificities of print reaches an apotheosis, producting complexities so entangled with digital technologies that it is difficult to say which medium is more important in producing the novel's effects.

(177) As if positioning itself as a rival to the computer's ability to represent within itself other media, this print novel remediates an astonishing variety of media, including film, video, photography, telegraphy, painting, collage, and graphics, among others.

(178) Digital technology functions here like the Derridean supplement; alleged to be outside and extraneous to the text proper, it is somehow also necessary.

(180) Although it is true that digital technologies can create objects for which there is no original (think of Shrek, for instance), the technology itself is perfectly representable, from the alternating voltages that form the basis for the binary digits up to high-level languages such as C++. The ways in which the technology actually performs plays no part in Hansen's analysis. For him the point is that the house renders experience singular and unrepeatable, thus demolishing the promise of orthographic recording to repeat the past exactly. Because in his analogy the house equals the digital, this same property is then transferred to digital technology.

Enter the concept of epistemological transparency.

(180-181) More important, in my view, is an aspect of digital technology that Hansen's elision of its materiality ignores: its ability to exercise agency. .. the layered architectures of computer technologies enable active interventions that perform actions beyond what their human programmers envisioned.

(182) Increasingly human attention occupies only the tiny top of a huge pyramid of machine-to-machine communication. .. We would perhaps like to think that actions require humans to initate them, but human agency is increasingly dependent on intelligent machines to carry out intentions and, more alarmingly, to provide the data which the human decisions are made in the first place.

Old thoughts bad bots; participation in process of preference formation.

(183) Although humans originally created the computer code, the complexity of many contemporary programs is such that no single person understands them in their entirety. In this sense our understanding of how computers can get from simple binary code to sophisticated acts of cognition is approaching the yawning gap between our understanding of the mechanics of human consciousness. .. As Brian Cantwell Smith observes, the emergence of complexity within computers may provide crucial clues to “how a structured lump of clay can sit up and think.”

Really we have long been in the position that no single person can comprehend not just many but most programs and communications systems. The tie back to Socrates question is another old thought (von Neumman).

(185) Like the nothingness infecting the text's signifiers, a similar nothingness would confront us if we could take an impossible journey and zoom into a computer's interior while it is running code. We would find that there is no there there, only alternating voltages that nevertheless produce meaning through a layered architecture correlating ones and zeros with human language.

This statement may be rich or slip. Ties back to Dennett's theory of consciousness.

(186) Overwhelmed by the cacophony of competing and cooperating voices, the authority of voice is deconstructed and the interiority it authorized is subverted into echoes testifying to the absences at the center.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008). Electronic Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Print.

Machine Analogies Revisited

2010-01-26T18:25:00.000-08:00

I feel that there is merit in developing the body image body schema distinction even for considering nonhuman, machine embodiment as it may exist in cyberspace. Of course I do not have any inside knowledge or strong conviction that nonhuman subjectivity exists today. However, it does not seem implausible, either, and our shared cultural fantasies predict its arrival (I just watched the latest Terminator movie, for example). The world is wrapped in energized wires, circuitry, sensors, cameras, processors, programs, operating in a distributed yet interconnected fashion, both explicitly programmed and governed by emergent patterns from internal feedback, instrumentation, and human interaction; and this is definitely a physical body. Why can there not be such an emergent consciousness, or subjectivity? Even as a thought experiment, the ontological framework you have presented serves nicely to begin the meditation.

You suggest there are probably better metaphors; what are they? Why not begin with what we think we know and understand the best, our own embodiment, as we asymptotically trace the outline of unknown, cyborg identity? By cyberspace I mean something like “TCP/IP inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery” as the current state of the art. For each aspect (TCP/IP version 4 protocols, C/C++ programming, electronic circuits, and so on) think about what would be the body image, that which it can learn about itself and perceive, and the body schema, that which controls its actions and ideas, about which it can become partially aware, the area Slavoj Zizek defines as “unknown knowns.” There is plenty of work to do there, and sufficient precedent.

The research I would like to pursue for this course involves looking at the theories of consciousness, subjectivity, and embodiment informed by recent Texts and Technology friendly publications such N. Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature and Matthew Fuller's Software Studies that survey the current thinking about the human machine synergism we call cyberspace in the light of the philosophies of embodiment we are studying.

I Dare you to Philosophize about Machine Embodiment!

2010-01-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

INPUT:

Topic: Basic concepts: Body image and body schema, etc.
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2010
Subject: machine analogies

I am thinking about how the body image and body schema distinction relates to my study of the nonhuman part of cyberspace. It seems in the world of engineered systems, the body image includes procedures and software data structures represented in human readable source code, such as variables, class definitions, data base field contents, and so on, that are the conscious object of active code work; the body schema is the overall physical technology system integration project product embodying cyberspace, which includes other programmed systems, electronic circuits, communications systems, and so on. Thus while comprehension of parts of the body schema can be intended for a subsystem that is the object of software development activities, comprehension of the entire environment, such as if it is entirely comprised of open protocols implemented in free, open source software, on open hardware platforms, is impossible and unnecessary for cyberspace to work, but nevertheless does have a contingent structure amenable to analysis. This is an underlying assumption of software studies and critical code studies. Does this make sense?

Topic: Basic concepts: Body image and body schema, etc.
Date: Saturday, January 23, 2010
Subject: Re:machine analogies Author: Gallagher Shaun

There are probably better metaphors to use in order to talk about cyberspace. I'm not sure that using the schema/image distinction does much work in that context.

Do you think that in some way cyberspace has a kind of subjectivity? Body schema and body image are terms that in some way relate to subjective experience -- the body schema in some way shaping our experience of the world; the body image as the way that we experience our body.

SG

OUTPUT:

Gallagher challenges me to describe machine subjectivity in cyberspace. I respond with a logical argument. First, let me define cyberspace as TCP/IP version 4 inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery; this accounts for at least 80, if not closer to 99 percent of nonhuman cyberspace. Why not all of cyberspace? Because we assume cyberspace is a human and nonhuman interactivity. It is multipurposive, simultaneous, synergetic, highly correlated, statistically interpretable, quantifiable, enumerable phenomena. So can we agree that cyberspace has human and nonhuman components, and focus on the nonhuman components, that we have identified as PHI (that is, TCP/IP version 4 inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery)? If so, then the argument continues. Remember, we are responding to Gallagher's comment and challenge to better articulate our argument. He is a philosopher and no doubt a fine logician. But is he a programmer? How would you find better metaphors than to start with what we know, the human? Begin with the universally quantified, second order well formed formula that cyberspace is made up of human and nonhuman components, that that for the human components embodiment is important. For all x, if x is cyberspace then there is some y such that y is a component of x that is human or, or y is a component of x that is nonhuman. How do we symbolize the embodiment being important to y? Gallagher is asking for subjectivity; I am suggesting a design problem for artificial intelligence, how to make it.
A very specific case of simulation expresses uncertainty as to the utility of simulating versus effecting a physical, real, non virtual process, yet it is the best we can do with our meager understanding of how cyberspace works and (or) what cyberspace is. How would cyberspace intelligence become aware of its body as PHI? Starting with the human body image body schema distinction, apply the same analysis to PHI. For each aspect (TCP/IP version 4 protocols, C/C++ programming, electronic circuits) think about what would be the body image, that which it can learn about itself and perceive, and the body schema, that which controls its actions and ideas, about which it can become conscious, the area Zizek defines as unknown knowns. We subject it to the ontology prescribed by our embodiment as human beings. Has enough of the argument been made? I would rather concentrate on coding. When we posit what nonhuman cyberspace consciousness may be like, of course we subject it to the ontology prescribed by our own embodiment as humans. To me this is sufficient to fall into the appeal for making the comparison across human and machine domains of the terms body image and body schema. Yet I do not think it is communicating enough of an argument for it to be what Garson called “knock down, drag out.”

From Codework to Working Code: A Programmer's Approach to Digital Literacy

2009-11-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

~Proposal Submitted for Digital Humanities 2010 Conference~ (website)

What does it mean to be digitally literate? Obviously it entails a basic familiarity with commonly used technologies, so that one may navigate the technological life world that has permeated nearly every aspect of the human one. One aspect of this knowledge is the recognition of computer languages, syntactic forms, and passages of program code, even when they have been taken out of their operational context for use as literary and rhetorical devices. In addition to the infiltration of the abbreviated language of email and text messaging into mainstream print media, it is now also commonplace to encounter programming keywords, symbols, operators, indentation, and pagination entwined with natural, non-technical, mother tongue expressions. Codework is the term associated with the literary and rhetorical practice of mixing human and computer languages (Hayles; Raley; Cramer). Types of codework span from intentionally arranged constructions intended for human consumption that do not execute on any real computer system, to valid expressions in bona fide programming languages that are meaningful to both human and machine readers. Examples of the former include the work of Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) and Talon Memmott, of the latter, the work of John Cayley and Grahan Harwood (Raley; Fuller). Rita Raley notes, however, that of the popular electronic literature of 2002, there is “less code per se than the language of code.” In addition to its infusion for literary effect, program source code may be cited in scholarly texts like conventional citations to explain a point in an argument. Although it is more common to encounter screen shots of user interfaces, examples of working source code appear on occasion in humanities scholarship. This study will briefly consider why working code has been shunned in most academic discourse, then identify the types and uses of bone fide code that do appear in humanities scholarship. Its goal is to suggest ways in which working code – understood both as code that works, and as the practice of working code – plays a crucial role in facilitating digital literacy among social critics and humanities scholars, and demonstrate through a number of examples how this effect may be achieved.

The first argument in favor of studying computer code in the context of humanities scholarship can be drawn from N. Katherine Hayles' methodological tool of Media-Specific Analysis (MSA). Probing the differences between electronic and print media when considering the same term, such as hypertext, requires comprehension of the precise vocabulary of the electronic technologies involved. A second, more obvious argument comes from the growing disciplines of Software Studies and Critical Code Studies. If critical analysis of software systems is to reveal implicit social and cultural features, reading and writing program code must be a basic requirement of the discipline (Fuller; Mateas; Wardrip-Fruin). A third argument, which is the focus of this study, is reached by considering the phenomenon of technological concretization within computer systems and individual software applications. According to Andrew Feenberg, this term, articulated by Gilbert Simondon, describes the way “technology evolves through such elegant condensations aimed at achieving functional compatibilities” by designing products so that each part serves multiple purposes simultaneously (217). The problem is that, from the perspective of a mature technology, every design decision appears to have been made from neutral principles of efficiency and optimization, whereas historical studies reveal the interests and aspirations of multiple groups of actors intersecting in design decisions, so that the evolution of a product appears much more contingent and influenced by vested interests. The long history of such concretizations can be viewed like the variegated sedimentation in geological formations, so that, with careful study, the outline of a technological unconscious can be recovered. The hope is that, through discovering these concealed features of technological design, the the unequal distribution of power among social groups can be remedied. Feenberg's project of democratic rationalization responds to the implicit oppression of excluded groups and values in technological systems by mobilizing workers, consumers, and volunteers to make small inroads into the bureaucratic, industrial, corporate decision making.

For computer technology in particular, digital literacy is the critical skill for connecting humanities studies as an input to democratic rationalizations as an output. Working code replaces the psychoanalytic session for probing the technological unconscious. Many theorists have already identified the free, open source software (FOSS) community as an active site for both in depth software studies and for rich examples of democratic rationalizations (Fuller; Yuill; Jesiek). Simon Yuill in particular elaborates the importance of revision control software for capturing and cataloging the history of changes in software projects. As as corollary to this point, it can be argued that concealed within these iterations of source code are the concretizations that make up the current, polished version of the program that is distributed for consumption by the end users, and from which the technological unconscious may be interpreted. However, even when they are freely available to peruse in public, web-accessible repositories, these histories are only visible to those who can understand the programming languages in which they are written. Therefore, it is imperative that humanities scholars who wish to critically examine computer technology for its social and cultural underpinnings include working code - as practicing programming - in their digital literacy curricula.