Jobtalk 2014 - multimodality, DH

How to be other than you are

Multimodal scholarshipwalk-in books& the digital humanities

Helen J Burgesspolyrhetor@gmail.com

A translation of the world

“Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly.”

-- Donna Haraway

It’s all about the tents

Small tent: TEI, working with manuscripts and archives, digitizing

Big tent: data and text mining, visualization, electronic scholarship and editorial

work

Circus tent: e-lit, art installations, critical

making, experiments with electronics

Digital work

Editorial work

Technical & advisory editor, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. [ rhizomes.net ] Editor, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. [ hyperrhiz.net ]

Multimedia Work

Red Planet: Scientific & Cultural Encounters with Mars. 2000, DVD-Rom. Biofutures: Owning Body Parts & Information. 2008, DVD-Rom.

Highways of the Mind. 2014, interactive iBook.

They’re not really that different. Really.

Medium: (nonneutral) transportation mechanism for conveyance of information. Concerned with technological underpinnings of expression.

Modality: mode of expression (what senses are you engaging? Touch? Vision? Aural?). Utilizing multiple media but also concerned with process & composing choices.

Multimodalities: New London Group, 1997

Our machines are talking back

“… we’re entering a time when sound, light and movement are equally important parts of the creative palette. Everyday objects whose expressive elements have long been static will now glow, sing, vibrate and change position at the drop of a hat.”

(NYT, Carla Diana, “Talking, Walking Objects,” Jan. 26 2013.)

Key questions for DH

Small tent - how can it be preserved?

Big tent - how can it be interrogated?

Circus tent - how can it be other?

Questions for a cyborg scholar

How can scholarship be “other,” using multimodal techniques?

How can a text be “other” than what it is?

Research

A multimedia (not multimodal) book

The Futurama ride: 1939-1940

The Carry-go-round

The polyrhetor: “twenty tons of voice”

Voice of the Polyrhetor

(Edgar Barrier of Mercury Theater, the voice of the Polyrhetor. Who wouldn’t trust a voice that looked like that?)

The new odology

A Turing Machine (sort of).

Artist’s model of a “Turing machine,” Mike Davey

Learning is best on an empty mind

“Presumably the child brain is something like a notebook as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets. (Mechanism and writing are from our point of view almost synonymous.)”

[Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460.]

We need more tape.

Highways, multimedia iBook

Enhanced iBook

Each chapter contains four threads: Context Chronotope Specters Machines

Read by chapter or by individual thread

Highways, multimodal installation

Context

-- documents and film showing the world’s fair and futurama exhibits-- 3D printable model cars from the exhibit

Specters

-- model of the Polyrhetor, sound recordings-- chair and speaker to simulate the oral experience

Chronotope

-- maps and diorama models of the spaces of the fair-- Google API maps of the interstate system over time

Machine

-- electronic workbench for assembling different interactive devices

Skēnē (skee-nee)

UVic Maker Lab: “kits for culture”

Tell me about your work

“Significantly, what artists say and write about their own work remains an area of considerable controversy, especially among practicing artists: the modernist proposition of art speaking for itself lingers as a deeply-held, shared assumption for many, even those working within a postmodern aesthetic.”

-- W.F. Garrett-Petts and Rachel Nash

Teaching

Googleography

Search online for information about yourself and your demographic; create a meaningful biography from that information.

Skills:1) Content analysis2) Narrative & metaphor3) Distal (far) and proximal (near)

sources

Life as a game

Open book/GoodReads

Life as a series of hurdles

Wordless Biography

The assignment: create a biography of a famous person using no words.

Key concept: “dimensionality” (Edward Tufte).

Skill: layering and separation of information into different dimensions in the project.

Genre of writing: ekphrasis.

Johnny Unitas

Tennessee Williams; Shirley Temple

Ronald Reagan

Two Monet solutions

Edgar Allan Poe

Sonnet sequence: translation & procedural rhetoric

A four-part assignment sequence in which a Shakespearean sonnet is reinterpreted in various forms according to the prompt:

1) Visual imagery2) Sonnet structure & scansion3) Encoding and decoding with a key4) A “kit” for assembling a version of the

sonnet with a program, recipe or other kind of instructional document.

Sonnet #14

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,And yet methinks I have astronomy;But not to tell of good or evil luck,Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,Or say with princes if it shall go wellBy oft predict that I in heaven find.But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,And, constant stars, in them I read such artAs truth and beauty shall together thriveIf from thyself to store thou wouldst convert: Or else of thee this I prognosticate, Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

#1: imagery. Alternate fortunes inside a creepy face box. Don’t ask.

#2: scansion. Molecular Shakespeare.

#3: lossy encoding. String.

#3: lossless encoding. Color-coded Braille.

#3: encoding. Postal code letter poem.

#4: algorithm. Sonnet burger.

#4: algorithm. Jenga tower.

Sonnet construction is happening here.

Next steps: multimodal projects

Installation project on cryptography and secret writing: “The Numbers Stations.”

Hyperrhiz 13: Special Issue: “Objects.”

Teaching: implementing “kits for culture” in the classroom.

That’s all folks.