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Gideon Burton

Writing About Literature in the Digital Age : Gideon Burton, Alymarie Rutter, Amy Whita... - 1 views

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    The link to where we can download our eBook: Writing about LIterature in the Digital Age
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    This page archives and makes the many formats available for Writing About Literature in the Digital Age
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Belle de Jour's history of anonymity - 0 views

  • In the internet age, we have become increasingly concerned about the effects of anonymous online commentary. Anonymous bloggers can have enormous global audiences. "Trolls" can bring criticism straight to the computer screens of the people they disagree with. These trends are solidly in the tradition of literary anonymity - from unsigned political tracts to biting satirical graffiti, we've seen it all before.
  • the effects of anonymity are more important for the anonymous writer than they are for the audience. We'd still be dotty over Jane Austen's books if, like her contemporary audience, we never knew her name. The writing has enough authority and detail to carry us along in her inner world. Knowing her name, where she lived, and seeing the piecrust table where she painstakingly wrote out her manuscripts is interesting, but it's trivia. It's not what makes her novels sing.
  • Anonymous is one of our greatest writers. "From the medieval period to the modern period there have been authors who have enjoyed playing with and experimenting with anonymity, and it never really goes out of fashion," says Marcy North, author of The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England.
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    "Anon was, as Virginia Woolf noted in one of her final unpublished essays, "the voice that broke the silence of the forest". Elsewhere she suggested that "Anonymous was a woman". For anonymity has definitely been widely used by women throughout the ages, whether they're writing about relationships, sex or anything else. Without Anonymous, there are so many classics we would not have had - Gawain and the Green Knight, virtually all of the Bible and other religious texts. Anon is allowed a greater creative freedom than a named writer is, greater political influence than a common man can ever attain, and far more longevity than we would guess. Obviously, I'm a great fan of Anon's work, but then, as a formerly anonymous author, I would say that, wouldn't I?"
Krista S

6 Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games - 1 views

  • Women in many MMOs perceive the game culture rather than the game mechanics to be the primary deterrent to poten-­ tial female gamers
  • On average, respondents spend twenty-­two hours each week in an MMO. The median was twenty hours per week—the equivalent of half a workweek. There were no significant gender or age differences in usage patterns; players over the age of forty play on average just as much as players under the age of twenty
  • While about 27 percent of female players were introduced to the game by a romantic partner, only 1 percent of male players were introduced in this way.
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  • Overall, about 25 percent of players play an MMO with their romantic partner. Female players are more likely to be playing with a romantic partner than male players (see figure 6.1). About two-­ thirds of female gamers are playing with a romantic partner, while less than one-­fifth of male gamers are
  • Men are allowed relatively free access to online games, but a woman’s presence in an online game is seen as legitimate only if it occurs via a relationship with a man.
  • It isn’t the case that women play only for socializing or that men play only to kill monsters. On the other hand, there are gender differences in these self-­identified motivations. Male players score higher in the Advancement, Mechanics, and Competition motivations, while female players score higher in the Relationship and Customization motivations. There were very small or no gender differences in the other five motivations—Socializing, Teamwork, Discovery, Role-­Playing, and Escapism.
  • In a recent survey, I asked female gamers about what they saw as potential deterrents to female gamers in the MMO they played. Almost every respondent cited the proportions and clothing options of the female avatars as problematic.
  • To a certain extent, this encourages players to think about women as token spectacles rather than actual players.
  • More important, many female players have learned that it is danger-­ ous to reveal your real-­life gender in MMOs because they will be branded as incompetent and constantly propositioned; In other words, they must either accept the male-­subject position silently, or risk constant discrimination and harassment if they reveal that they are female
  • Also, there are very few other places (in physical or virtual worlds) where high-­school students are collaborating with professors, retired war veterans, and stay-­at-­home moms
Nyssa Silvester

The Business Rusch Publishing Series | Kristine Kathryn Rusch - 0 views

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    For anyone who wants to get an extended analysis about the effects of the Digital Age on publishing, this is a great place to start if you have the time.
Krista S

Motivations for Play in Online Games - 0 views

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    While these results seem to confirm stereotypical assumptions of gendered play styles, the variation in the achievement component is in fact better explained by age than gender. Also worth noting is that there is a gender difference in the relationship subcomponent but not in the socializing subcomponent, although these two subcomponents are highly related. In other words, male players socialize just as much as female players, but are looking for very different things in those relationships.
Gideon Burton

HASTAC | Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory - 0 views

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    HASTAC ("haystack") is a very important initiative in the digital humanities, including blogs, contests, projects, and people who are engaged in the cutting edge of moving literature and learning into the digital age.
Stacie Farmer

Texas School Board Set to Vote Textbook Revisions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "By sheer force of its population size, Texas has long held outsize influence on national textbook publishers, some of whom sent curriculum writers to take notes in the boardroom. That influence has waned somewhat in recent years, with the digital age allowing editors to tailor versions of their textbooks to individual states. " Is the ability to "tailor versions of their textbooks to individual states" going to affect the way students are learning? How effective is this really?
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
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    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
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    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Gideon Burton

Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy - 1 views

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    A potential outlet for publishing material related to writing about literature in the digital age.
Audrey B

Digital Zapatismo and the Threatened Persecution of Prof. Ricardo Dominguez (UCSD) | Ca... - 0 views

  • The EDT and other Digital Zapatistas succeeded in furthering the message of the EZLN and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but they never physically harmed anyone or anything, in spite of the government violence directed at them.
    • Audrey B
       
      nonviolent electronic civil disobedience
  • As an artist, Dominguez has always looked to open “disturbance spaces” inside our contemporary communication platforms. He is a former member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists and activists whose focus is “the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.” Later Dominguez helped found the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) which sought to expand the work of the CAE into cyberspace. They developed the idea of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), which just as the name suggests is an electronic extension of Thoreau’s old idea.
  • With black tape across their mouths, surgical masks marked with X’s, and holding signs that read “Art is not a Crime,” and “Academic Freedom,” over 200 students gathered on Thursday, April 8th at the Silent Tree on library walk.
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  • In 2009 Dominguez was named by CNN one of its “Most Interesting People” for his work in developing the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT
  • Professor Dominguez’s work, first with Critical Art Ensemble and then with Electronic Disturbance Theater, has been highly cited, and he has been invited to lecture on the work across a host of important international venues…The esteemed status of Professor Dominguez’s field-defining work has been duly noted by the external referees, who include major international intellectuals working in performance art, new media and globalization.
  • EDT illuminates a new set of possibilities for understanding the relation between performance, embodiment, and spatial practice in cyberspace. Unlike a number of other performance artists, who have explored the relation of the body to technology through the literal encounter of individual physical bodies to machines, those working at EDT have placed the very notion of “embodiment” under question. Rather, they have sought to understand the specific possibilities for constituting presence in digital space that is both collective and politicized.
  • taking known forms and then augmenting or subverting their messages in order to provoke thought, discussion and emotion. What made the EDT different is how they applied these age-old principles of artistic expression to “new” media and digital technology.
  • performances and interventions were based upon questioning (but never fully answering) contemporary social problems and injustices.
  • Members of the EDT, including Dominguez, contributed to the artistic front of the EZLN’s fight for the indigenous people of Mexico. They crafted themselves as Digital Zapatistas, “attacking” the websites of the Mexican government and the agencies of the US government, which were supporting the oppression of the people in Chiapas. But the “attacks” were never effective… only affective.
  • developments of EDT was FloodNet — the technology behind Virtual Sit-Ins such as the one against the UCOP website for which Dominguez is now under investigation.
  • EDT’s goal was to take the long respected tradition of a peaceful sit-in to the virtual space of a website.
  • And, just like an embodied sit-in, to be effective the virtual sit-in must be open and transparent.
  • There are key differences between the virtual sit-in and a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack,” which Dominguez has been accused of launching. With the latter, computers of unknowing individuals become conduits to increase traffic to a particular Internet address, therefore rendering it inoperable, threatening the potential crash of the system itself. In this type of attack the identity of the perpetrators remains obscured in a prolonged assault usually motivated either by retribution, financial gain, and/or attempts to censor free speech.
  • In contrast, with the virtual sit-in, the goals of the action are stated, grievances described, participants known and once it is over no physical damage is done. FloodNet is a Java applet that is the code equivalent of going to the target website and constantly clicking the “reload” button. It also allows the participants to leave messages in the server’s error log by looking for non-existent URLs in the target server, which will then generate error messages. For example, a search for “human_rights” will generate an error message “File not found. ‘human_rights’ does not exist on this .gov server.”
  • by the same administration, which is now threatening him.
    • Audrey B
       
      So let me get this right, basically UCSD hired him after they knew that he co-founded EDT, had participated in ECD, and they knew what he was capable. So they were fine with him "attacking" the Mexican government. But when he and students non-violently protest through a virtual sit-in, because it is aimed towards them, they get mad and are now trying to take his tenure away? Hello, Dr. Dominguez is a professor teaching ECD. Are they going to fire him and take him to court for something he teaches their students?
  • Also among his scholarly and artistic accomplishments cited as reasons to grant Dominguez tenure were the various uses of FloodNet technology to conduct virtual sit-ins on websites run by governments, international finance organizations, anti-immigrant sites and even UCOP’s website.
  • In the hour to come Professor Dominguez would frame his encounter with the administration “Zapatista style,” transforming a closed meeting, the purpose of which was to conduct “fact finding” in relation to his March 4th actions, into a collective meeting or “consulta.”
  • Rejoining the crowd of supporters he sat quietly listening to faculty and students as they read letters that spanned the globe, and which voiced solidarity, alliance, and outrage at the administration’s criminalization of his work.
Krista S

Average Net user now online 13 hours per week | Digital Media - CNET News - 0 views

  • Those who surf the Net spend an average of 13 hours per week online, but that figure varies widely. Twenty percent are online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are there for 24 hours or more.
  • The age group that spent the most time online per week: 30- to 39-year-olds, at 18 hours.
becca_hay

The Effects of Family and Community Violence on Children - Annual Review of Psychology,... - 0 views

  • Children are potentially quite vulnerable to the effects of violence because violence exposure may alter the timing of typical developmental trajectories (Boney-McCoy & Finkelhor 1995). That is, violence initially may result in primary effects, such as anxiety, depression, or PTSD symptoms, which cause secondary reactions by disrupting children’s progression through age-appropriate developmental tasks. For example, exposure to violence in young children can result in regressive symptoms, such as increased bedwetting, decreased verbalization, or separation anxiety (Osofsky 1995). These symptoms secondarily may affect children’s socialization skills or ability to concentrate in school. Moreover, at a time when children may have difficulty with typical developmental tasks, exposure to violence can result in having to acknowledge and cope with adult issues. As Garbarino and colleagues note, “in Western culture, childhood is regarded as a period of special protection and rights” (1992:1). The home and the neighborhood, generally considered the primary safe havens for the child, lose those protective and comforting qualities in the aftermath of family or neighborhood violence
Katherine H

pdf of The English literature researcher in the age of the Internet - 2 views

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    This article talks about the effects that the Internet is having on English professors and researchers. It mentions the increased research and publishing possibilities, the opportunities provided by email, and the opinions of academics - many of whom were reluctant to accept these new technologies as equal to traditional methods.
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    Hopefully the link works - I'm not sure since it's a download of the pdf.
Derrick Clements

Writing about Literature in the Digital Age - 2 views

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    Our eBook is published! Here is a possible website we can use as home base.
Nyssa Silvester

Things Publishers Fear | Green Lamp Media - 0 views

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    Another blog about the change in publishing with the rise of ebooks.
Bri Zabriskie

Egypt Revolution 2011: A Complete Guide To The Unrest - 0 views

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    can't find the original post with the tweet list but this is a cool example of the format news takes in the digital age. LOOK at all those links and it's short and concise with lots of little lists and such.
Rachael Schiel

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR - 1 views

    • Rachael Schiel
       
      This paragraph is so powerful. The idea that we are incapable of experiencing all of humanity's greatness is an indicator of our collective success. If you will forgive this sidestep into the realm of things religious--it makes me wonder if we will ever, through eternity, be able to experience all of humanity's greatness.
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    Article about all the information that we can't possibly consume (especially pertinent in the digital age) and the different perspectives we can take about this fact.
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    Rachael, you should post about this! I want to hear more of your thoughts about it. :)
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