The RHIZOME Project
_The RHIZOME Project_ (1988-91; @1991), co-authored with Tom I. Ellis, and created in Hypercard. _RHIZOME_ was a critical thinking hypertext which offered creative as well as rhetorical and logical heuristics for the writing of a range of undergraduate essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, and several articles were generated to explain its theoretical as well as pedagogical implications. Two other programmers, Stuart Selber, and Johndan Johnson-Eiola, worked briefly on the interface in 1991.
The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to... more
The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to model specific sequential (as in narrative and logic) and non-sequential (as in creative and associative) thought strategies to help students write academic and creative essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, including U Michigan, UC Berkeley, ASU, University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon U. Comprised of separate "stacks" each modeling a specific heuristic, these stacks included:
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.
Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).
Towards a multimodal literacy pedagogy: Digital video composing as 21st century literacy
Miller, S.M. (2010). Towards a multimodal literacy pedagogy: Digital video composing as 21st century literacy, pp. 254-281. In P. Albers & J. Sanders (Eds.) Literacies, Art, and Multimodality. Urbana-Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in... more
In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in schools. Scholars examining these trends in research have reached a clear consensus: facility with interpreting and designing multimodal texts will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital, global world of the 21st century. In this article I propose a framework and a method for drawing on these new social practices and developing performance knowledge for learning in schools. In a long-term project professional development a multimodal composing project provided point-of-need support for English teachers in workshops and in their classrooms to help them expand their beliefs about literacy and critically reframe their pedagogical practices. The focus on digital video composing provides teachers and students with multimodal learning in an authentic, high-status, social and media practice with powerful attention-getting qualities and expert models in the real world. Analysis of teachers successfully integrating DV composing for students in their classrooms revealed four principles representing the key changes needed for teachers to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms towards multimodal composing. The components that provide teachers direction toward this reframing include: (1) providing explicit multimodal design instruction and attention; (2) co-constructing authentic purposes for representing multimodal meaning for an audience; (3) designing multimodal composing activities that invite students to draw on their identity lifeworlds as resources; and (4) creating functional social spaces for mediating multimodal learning.
Download (.doc) All the World's a Link: The Global Theater of Mobile World Browsers
by John Tinnell
Published in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
Towards musical interaction: Sam Hayden's Schismatics for e-violin and computer (2007, rev. 2010)
by Sam Hayden
Published in Proc. of ICMC, 2011.
This paper discusses the evolution of the Max/MSP patch used in 'schismatics' (2007, rev. 2010) for electric violin... more This paper discusses the evolution of the Max/MSP patch used in 'schismatics' (2007, rev. 2010) for electric violin (Violectra) and computer, by composer Sam Hayden in collaboration with violinist Mieko Kanno. 'schismatics' involves a standard performance paradigm of a fixed notated part for the e-violin with sonically un- fixed live computer processing. Hayden was unsatisfied with the early version of the piece: the use of attack detection on the live e-violin playing to trigger stochastic processes led to an essentially reactive behaviour in the computer, resulting in a somewhat predictable one-to- one sonic relationship between them. It demonstrated little internal relationship between the two beyond an initial e-violin ‘action’ causing a computer ‘event’. The revisions in 2010, enabled by an AHRC Practice-Led research award, aimed to achieve 1) a more interactive performance situation and 2) a subtler and more ‘musical’ relationship between live and processed sounds. This was realised through the introduction of sound analysis objects, in particular machine listening and learning techniques developed by Nick Collins. One aspect of the programming was the mapping of analysis data to synthesis parameters, enabling the computer transformations of the e-violin to be directly related to Kanno’s interpretation of the piece in performance.'
La representación digital de la génesis del texto. Un caso de estudio
D. Fiormonte – V. Martiradonna, “La representación digital de la génesis del texto. Un caso de estudio”, in Aurélie Arcocha-Scarcia, Javier Lluch-Prats y Mari Jose Olaziregui (eds.), En el taller del escritor: génesis textual
y edición de textos, Bilbao, Servicio Editorial del País Vasco, pp. 147-176.
'The Text As a Product and As a Process. History, Genesis, Experiments
Co-authored with Cinzia Pusceddu. Originally published in E. Vanhoutte – M. de Smedt (eds.), Manuscript, Variant, Genese – Genesis, Gent, Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, pp. 109-128.
In the last ten years there has been a growing consensus among textual scholars that one of the main purposes of a... more In the last ten years there has been a growing consensus among textual scholars that one of the main purposes of a digital edition should be the presentation of a ‘mobile text’, in which each manuscript or witness – ancient or modern – can be read, compared and manipulated by various computing tools. However, is the concept of textual movement strictly related to the use of the computer? This paper argues that, not only is the idea of mobile text much older than the computer, but current digital tools and languages often seem inadequate to the task of representing the richness and complexity of such literary artefacts. The first part of this paper tries to reconstruct and discuss the birth of a new textual paradigm from its origins in the intellectual milieu of the 1930s, up to research into the writing process carried out in the 1980s. The paper then focuses on the theory of text as a ‘system’, as outlined by the Italian editor and philologist Gianfranco Contini. It follows a concise overview of the theoretical issues raised by genetic criticism in France, showing its connections with experiments carried out into the psychology of composition. The last part of the paper presents an ongoing experiment of genetic philology developed by the Digital Variants (www.selc.ed.ac.uk/italian/digitalvariants) team: the Magrelli Genetic Machine. Variant texts and brouillons d’écriture generously made available by the Italian author Valerio Magrelli are displayed through several interactive tools realised in Flash, and their original textual mouvance is reproduced by means of a dynamic display. This experiment involved a number of practical steps, but also raised some theoretical questions: how to convert a printed text and a manuscript in digital format; how to create a dynamic text which appears as an image, simultaneously comparing different choices made by the author, etc.; and, finally, how to show the writing process. It is undeniable that writing with a computer implies a loss of knowledge about the genesis of a text, as writers do not usually save earlier versions. Digital Variants, by asking writers to save their writing-stages, can allow users to examine a variant text from the author’s as well as the reader’s perspective, and thus stimulate reflection on how the digital dimension can blur the boundaries between ‘authorial’ and ‘editorial’ practices.
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Resisting the Lure of Technology-Driven Design: Pedagogical Approaches to Visual Communication
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Issue: Volume 40, Number 4 / 2010
Coauthored with Eva Brumberger
Technical communicators are expected to work extensively with visual texts in workplaces. Fortunately, most academic... more Technical communicators are expected to work extensively with visual texts in workplaces. Fortunately, most academic curricula include courses in which the skills necessary for such tasks are introduced and sometimes developed in depth. We identify a tension between a focus on technological skill vs. a focus on principles and theory, arguing that we subvert the potential benefits of an education if we succumb to the allure of software. We recommend several classroom practices that help educate students toward greater visual literacy, based not only on recommendations from the research but also from our experience as teachers of visual communication.
Mapping in Algorithmic Composition and Related Practices
This is an essay discussing many of my musical works and some papers and book chapters. It formed part of my PhD submission.
Intellectual Property and the Cultures of BitTorrent Communities
Computers & Composition, September 2010
In Technics and Time, 1, Bernard Stiegler (1998) challenged the prevalent philosophical distinction between tekhnē and... more In Technics and Time, 1, Bernard Stiegler (1998) challenged the prevalent philosophical distinction between tekhnē and ēpistēmē, arguing that humans are fundamentally technical beings. According to Stiegler, the industrialization of civilization led to a disequilibrium in the evolution of culture and the evolution of technics, with technics evolving more quickly than culture. Stiegler's discussions of technics, culture, time, and memory provide a useful theoretical framework for understanding some of the cultural implications of copyright issues, which are often viewed in terms of economics, legality, and/or ethics. In this article, I focus on the intellectual property debate as it pertains to peer-to-peer networks and the music industry. Drawing from Technics and Time, I theoretically frame these issues as a problem of temporality, memory, and a disconnect in the evolution of culture and technology. I then use small-scale/observational ethnographic analysis to examine a private torrent community to consider how torrent communities are cultural phenomena, the implications of this assumption, and how these considerations might inform or extend existing approaches to issues of intellectual property. More broadly, I ask, what are the affordances of thinking about these economic, legal, and political issues from a cultural framework?
New forms of hybrid musical discourse: an exploration of stylistic and procedural cross-fertilisation between contemporary art music and electronic dance music
(Forthcoming) Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2011)
The following paper will provide a brief overview of my hybrid compositional work, exploring stylistic and procedural... more
The following paper will provide a brief overview of my hybrid compositional work, exploring stylistic and procedural cross-fertilisation between contemporary art music and electronic dance music (EDM). Drawing on a series of examples, I will examine and discuss various compositional strategies for hybridising the two main genres under consideration, including formalisation of hybrid compositional procedures and exploration of established and newly developed forms of musical borrowing, which function as tools of negotiation in the transference of materials within my own creative practice.
An important part of my research has comprised looking in detail at the tools of production used in the creation of EDM by various artists. The output of this research into the functionality of the equipment and deliberate ‘creative subversion’ of its intended normative use has been used to develop a vocabulary of compositional techniques for use within my own work. These techniques will be discussed during the course of the paper.
Nexus and Stage: Computer-Assisted Class Discussion and the First-Year English Course
published in the journal "Computers and the Humanities" 35 (2001): 351-59.
Section Four, "Recursive Use of ENFI Transcripts Helps Students Write about Literature," gives specific,... more Section Four, "Recursive Use of ENFI Transcripts Helps Students Write about Literature," gives specific, useful suggestions about how to make online discussions an effective component of a literature class. The article also offers a short list of particular chat software features essential for good discussion.
Meeting Students Where They Are: Advancing a Theory and Practice of Archives in the Classroom
by Tom Sura
Co-authored with Christina Saidy and Mark Hannah. Published in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 41.2 (2011): 175-193.
This article uses theories of technical communication and archives to advance a pedagogy that includes archival... more This article uses theories of technical communication and archives to advance a pedagogy that includes archival production in the technical communication classroom. By developing and maintaining local classroom archives, students directly engage in valuable processes of appraisal, selection, collaboration, and retention. The anticipated outcomes of this work are the critical practice of making connections, the decentering of the self, the ability to work through noise, and the ability to imagine future users of the archive. The authors conclude that local classroom archives are one new means of meaningful instruction in the technical communication classroom and the local archive concept has great potential for further development.
Desktop MCing
This is a video project for the journal Kairos
Desktop MCs work in the space of the desktop, choreographing content using multiple applications. For the desktop MC,... more Desktop MCs work in the space of the desktop, choreographing content using multiple applications. For the desktop MC, new technologies allow for new combinatory forms of composition
Digital Images and Classical Persuasion
published in "Eloquent Images," Eds. Mary Hocks and Michelle Kendrick (MIT Press, 2003) pp. 117-136. Read it online at: http://www.uni.edu/fabos/seminar/readings/La%20Grandeur_Digital%20Imag
In the latter half of the 1990s the digital
image became prevalent, easy to manipulate, and consequently, easy... more
In the latter half of the 1990s the digital
image became prevalent, easy to manipulate, and consequently, easy to recontextualize,
meaning that now just about any image is available to any computer user for any occasion. To use Bolter's terminology, the "interpenetration" of textual and pictorial space in digital environments, especially on the Web, has increased
markedly, so that the predominance of the digital image now rivals that of the digital word. Indeed, a number of thinkers have noted the digital image's ascendancy in communicating
information via the computer. But how are we to think about, to analyze the rhetorical dimensions of these images? This essay focuses on using classical rhetoric 'as a way of
thinking about the persuasive power of computer-based images.
Splicing Ourselves Into the Machine: Electronic Communities, Systems Theory, and Composition Studies.
Published in: ERIC, March, 1998: ED 410 563.
Computer mediated communication (CMC) tends to erase power structures because such communication somehow undermines or... more Computer mediated communication (CMC) tends to erase power structures because such communication somehow undermines or escapes discursive limits. Online discussions seem to promote rhetorical experimentation on the part of the participants. Finding a way to explain disparities between electronic discussion and oral discussion has proven difficult. Those in composition studies have tried to theorize CMC by reference to postmodern theory, but another form of theory that might help in the investigation of the nature of online communities derives from cybernetics and from information theory. Cybernetics' wider implications have led to the advent of a second-order cybernetics or systems theory--self-organizing, self-making, or autopoietic. Reflexivity provides an implicit reason for the difficulty of controlling electronic class discussion. Third wave cybernetics can be used in conjunction with social applications of systems theory to think about what happens when machines, teachers, and students are all "spliced" into one grand system. It seems that traditional approaches to class discussion with the instructor controlling the flow and order make it natural for teachers to view electronic communities as the early cyberneticists did, as allopoietic mechanisms whose goals can be set and observed. Though control of a system with multiple, dynamic elements may be somewhat difficult, a lack of control does not, in terms of systems theory, preclude an instructor's valuable involvement in an online community.
Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface
In this article, we analyze the complex rationales—both transparent to us and, at times, made visible—underneath the... more In this article, we analyze the complex rationales—both transparent to us and, at times, made visible—underneath the instructional spaces in which we work and teach. To do so, we first situate space analysis in the larger, national conversations about instructional spaces and then through the work of computers and writing scholars. We conclude with an analysis of instructional spaces at our institution. These are spaces specific to our locale, but spaces we think are quite common at most institutions of higher education. Perhaps more importantly, we situate this space analysis on issues these spaces pose—issues of restricted movement, impaired ability to collaborate, sensory disruption, limited leadership ability, and functional/material constraints. We attempt to return to the roots of hacking and to situate hacking as a particular tool for negotiating and, at times, disrupting the assumptions built under, within, and across instructional spaces.