Category Archives: composition

poetry in motion

I’m not sure why we didn’t note QuickMuse last year when it debuted. No matter: the concept isn’t dated and the passing year has allowed it to accrue an archive worth visiting. On the backend, QuickMuse is a project built on software by Fletcher Moore that tracks what a writer does over time; when played back, the visitor with a Javascript-enabled browser sees how the composition was written over time, sped up if desired. On the front, editor Ken Gordon has invited a number of poets to compose a poem in fifteen minutes, based, usually, on some found text. The poetry thus created isn’t necessarily the best, but that’s immaterial: it’s interesting to see how people write. (If you’d like to try this yourself, you can use Dlog.)
Composition speeds vary. Rick Moody starts writing early, making mistakes and minor corrections, but ceaselessly moving forward at a formidable clip until his fifteen minutes are up; you get the impression he could happily keep writing at the same pace for hours. The sentence “Every year South American disappears” hangs alone in Mary Jo Salter’s composition for thirty seconds; you imagine the poet turning the phrase over in her mind to find the next sentence. Lines are added, slowly, always with time passing.
What this underscores in my mind is how writing is a weirdly private act. In a sense, the reader of QuickMuse is very close to the writer, watching the poem as it unfolds; the letters appear at the exact speed at which the writer’s fingers type them in. There’s a sense of intimacy that comes with the shared time. But the thought behind the action of typing is conspicuously absent. Is the pause a pregnant moment of decision? or simply the writer not paying attention? It’s impossible to say.

ways of seeing, ways of writing – a conversation

The following discussion about a proposed exercise for a high school or college class began in an email exchange yesterday with Bob, Virginia Kuhn and Karl Stolley (Virginia and Karl are both teachers of rhetoric and composition and great intellectual partners of the institute). We thought it was getting interesting so we decided to slap it up here on the blog as a thought experiment. Please join in the discussion in the comment stream.
Bob Stein wrote:
karl and virginia:
this is an idea for an exercise for a high school or college class. i’m wondering if you think it would be interesting/valuable for both students and for those of us interested in understanding the relation of different media types.
*Ways of Seeing, Ways of Writing*
class is divided into four sections. one given pad and pencil. one given digital still camera. one given audio recorder. one given video camera*
the class is asked to “write” about a place (local historical site, downtown street corner, mall, supermarket, cemetary, etc. etc. )
or asked to “write” a response to a question, e.g. “was the response of the federal govt. to the rescue of New Orleans residents affected by the fact that the people needing rescue were mostly poor and black.”
each group “writes” their description of the place or answer to the question using the particular media assigned to their group.
the class reviews all responses, then each group is asked to make a synthesis piece using media captured by all groups.
*if resources aren’t a problem, it would be great if each of the groups with electronic capture devices has more than one.
Karl Stolley replies:
Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.
The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).
Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.
Bob replies:
karl,
thank you for your very thoughtful reply. before make specific comments, perhaps i should explain the origin of the idea.
ashton (girlfriend) and i try to spend as much time at her godmother’s place in sardinia as possible. one of the big draws is an island, actually a big hunk o’ dolomite – two miles long and 1500 feet high- that dominates the view from the shoreline. because tavolara’s rockface is mostly white and gray it changes color all day with the sun. (a few photos from recent vist here.) i literally can sit and watch it for hours. it’s been a dream to bring a group of artists to capture its beauty. this year i was thinking that it might be interesting to bring a writer (think someone like john mcphee), a painter, a photographer, a video artist or filmmaker, and an experimental interactive artist like mike naimark or josh portway and let them all have a go at it. my guess is that each would be inspired and the results while quite different would all get at some aspect of the beauty.
at the same time i was thinking about capturing tavolara in various media, i was thinking a lot about the increasingly nettlesome text vs. image (especially moving image) debate. i’m pretty sure the solution is not to give up words in favor of images, but rather begin to appreciate the value of all media and work toward new forms of _expression which call on different media types at different points or which merge them in useful new ways. i was also thinking about how the insitute might start to play a more active role.
thus the idea of coming up with a series of exercises that might be used in college and high school which helped students begin to understand the relative value and utility of different media types and also begin to experiment with how to use them together.
Specific comments:

Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.

i think a better kitchen analogy would be giving everyone the same ingredients (in the sense that tavolara or a question is the same ingredient) but ask one group to use a grill, one group to use a pan on a stove, one group to use only a cuisinart etc. but anyway, the pedagogical reason to get the students to use one media type is so that they can appreciate its properties on its own.

The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).

my instincts are that one of the problems with “multimedia” is that few of us really understand the components, that is we don’t really know what the different types can do on their own. i guess i don’t think we are so far advanced that we can conceive of a new media type which is multimedia. e.g. i don’t think people intuitively grasp how impt. sound is to a movie until it’s pointed out and they have an oppty to focus on it.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.

i’m not wedded to my schema, but it still seems like there would be some fantastic discussions in the classroom as students look at the different results and debate the advantages and disadvantages. it seems that experience would be helpful when they later start to create full multimedia projects.
and then of course there is the issue of interactivity which complicates everything exponentially.
b.
The conversation continues in the comment stream.

The 2005 Computers and Writing Conference

Stanford University hosted the 2005 Computers and Writing conference this past weekend. Each session was rife with “future of the book” food for thought. This is an informal summary, with apologies to all the fabulous presentations that I don’t mention (sorry, being only one person, I could not attend them all). Some of the major themes (which dovetail nicely with issues we are exploring at the institute) included: Open Source, new interpretations of literacy and “writing,” the changing role of the teacher/student, performance, multimodality, and networked community. It is important to note that these themes often blur together in a complicated interdependence. This thematic interplay was evident in the pre-conference workshops which included instruction in open source tools and applications like Drupal that allow for multimodality and the creation of communal authoring environments. Workshops in “Reading Images” and “Using Video to Teach Writing” addressed multiple modalities and new concepts of writing.
I was excited to see that the Computers and Writing community understands the potential of, and imperative for, Open Source. It’s practical advantages (free and customizable) and it’s philosophical advantages (community-based and built for sharing rather than for selling) make it ideally suited to the goals of the educational community. Open Source came up over and over during the presentations and was featured in the first town hall session “Open Source Opens Thinking.” The session challenged the Computers and Writing community “to consider a position statement of collective principles and goals in relation to Open Source.” Such a statement would be useful and productive; I’m hoping it will materialize.
The changing role of the teacher and student was evident in several presentations: most notably, the pilot program at Penn State (see my earlier post) in which students publish their “papers” on a wiki. The wiki format allows for intensive peer-review and encourages a culture of responsibility.
There was a lot of speculation about how writing will evolve and how other modalities might be incorporated into our notion of literacy. Andrea Lunsford‘s keynote speech addressed this issue, calling for a return to oral and embodied “performative literacies.” She referred to Tara Shankar’s MIT dissertation “Speaking on the Record,” which confronts the way we privilege writing above other modalitites for knowledge and education. She says: “Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression.”
Shankar calls for new practices that embrace oral communication. She introduces a new word: “to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking “on the record” that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself.”
The need for a multimodal approach to writing was addressed in the second Town Hall meeting “Composition Beyond Words.” Virginia Kuhn opened by calling for a reconsideration of “writing,” and the goals of visual literacy. Bradley Dilger reminded us that literacy goes beyond “the letter;” we need multiple interfaces for the same data because not everyone looks at data the same way. Madeleine Sorapure pointed out that writing with computers is determined by underlying code structures which are, themselves, a form of writing. She quoted Loss Pequeno Glazier, “Code is the writing within the writing that makes the work happen.” Gail Hawisher, talked about the 10 year process of incorporating multiple modalities into the first-composition courses at the University of Illinois. Cynthia Selfe addressed this struggle, saying: “colleges are not comfortable with multiple modalities.” She advises the C&W community to “think about how to give professional development/support to resistant colleges in ways that are sustainable over time.” Stuart Moulthrop also offered some cautionary words of advice. In addition to faculty and administration, Moultrop says students are resistant to multimodality. Code, for example, is fatally hard to teach non-programmers or visually oriented people. “There is a political problem,” Moulthrop says, “we are living through a backlash moment. People are very angry about how fast the future has come down on them.”
Some participants delivered “papers” that attempted to demonstrate these new multimodal imperatives. Most notably, Todd Taylor‘s presentation, “The End of Composition,” which asked, “Can a paper be a film?” Todd argues “yes” with a cinematic montage of sampled and remixed clips along with original footage, which was enthusiastically received by the audience (alt. review in Machina Memorialis blog.) Morgan Gresham‘s Town Hall presentation was a student-produced video and a question to the audience; is this just a remake of a bad commercial, or is it a “paper”? Christine Alfano‘s presentation experimented with a hypertext, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” style that allowed the audience to determine the trajectory of the talk. Once the selection was made, she dropped the other two papers/options to the floor. The choice, unfortunately for me, eliminated the material that I most wanted to hear about (Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl). Additionally, “virtual” presentations were delivered during an online companion conference called: Computers and Writing Online 2005 When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration This interactive online conference served, “as an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work.” CWOnline 2005 made both the submission and presentation process open to public review via the Kairosnews weblog. Despite some flaws, I thought these experimental presentations pushed at the boundaries of academic discourse in a useful way. They reminded us how far we have to go and how difficult the project of putting ideas into practice really is.
Finally, the conference highlighted ways in which computers are being used to cultivate community across cultures and institutions; and between students, teachers, and scholars. Sharing Cultures, a joint project of Columbia College Chicago and Nelson Mandela University Metropolitan University, in South Africa “creates two interconnected, on-line writing and learning communities…the project purposely includes students who traditionally have not had access to, or have been actively marginalized from, both digital and international experiences.” Virginia Kuhn approached computers and community at the local level, with a service learning class called, “Multicultural America,” which asked students to write an ebook documenting local history. The finished work is part of an ongoing display at a Milwaukee community center. This project inspired an interesting reversal; community members who worked with students on the project are now (thanks to a generous grant) coming to the University of Milwaukee for supplemental study. Within the academy there are also exciting opportunities for computer-based community-building. In her Town Hall presentation, Gail Hawisher said that literacy on campus is, “usually taken care of by first year composition.” If we are to incorporate visual literacy into our definition of literacy then, “Perhaps we should be looking to art and design for literacy instead of just the English dept.” This is an incredibly smart idea because, short of requiring composition teachers to have degrees in art, film, AND writing, collaborative efforts with other departments seem to be the best way to ensure a deep and rigorous understanding of the material. I had an interesting conversation with Stuart Moulthrop about this. We imagined a massively-multi-player game environment that would allow scholars from around world to collaborate on curriculum across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, if someone who wanted to teach an odd combination like, film/biology/physics, could put a course scenario into the game where it would be played out by biologists, film scholars, and physicists. In other words a kind of life-time learning environment for the experts, a laboratory for the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and place to weave together different strands of human insight in order to create a more complete “picture” of the universe.