james.wiedner's blog

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

A Workshop from a Visionary about Data Visualization

james.wiedner — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:51:52 +0000

Source: Mark Andrew Goetz

About 2 months ago Austin was lucky enough to be among the handful of cities selected as a stop on a one-day presentation and workshop featuring Mr. Edward Tufte. What's more: The DWRL agreed that covering the cost of admission for a few of their staffers to be money well spent (thanks, Will Burdette).

For the uninitiated, Mr. Tufte is the granddaddy of all things related to visual representations of large amounts of data, complicated concepts, historical trends, and- quite literally- just about anything else you could think of. Hailed as “The Leonardo Di Vinci of Data," by the New York Times. Tufte was synthesizing massive amounts of information into beautiful visuals before the term “big data” had even pushed “the cloud” out of the way as the buzzword(s) of the moment.

In Tufte’s 2006 book, Beautiful Evidence, Tufte discusses at length an entirely new means of data visualization he called Sparklines (which, according to his workshop, he created in the mid-1990s). Sparklines can depict thousands of measurements in graphics that are generally small enough to fit within a longer piece of regular-sized text (like the one you’re presently enthralled by...yeah, right).

Source: Edwardtuft.com

As the above illustrates, sparklines are “dense, word-sized line graphs that can show, in less than an inch, the last 100 readings of a patient's glucose, a year's worth of stock activity or the win-loss record of a baseball team.”

So, Tufte’s Sparklines came along at a point when a new way to visualize the unprecedented amount of data people were being exposed to was sorely needed. Evidence of this can be seen in the proliferation of the handy little graphs that Tufte came up with. Sparklines have been incorporated into Excel for Windows and Mac. Google introduced sparklines into their API data products in 2007. As of this writing, a google search for “sparklines” returns nearly twice as many results as a search for “steve jobs” (106,000,000 vs 46,000,000; I chose “steve jobs” for the comparison because Tufte did the same thing in 2011, at which time he had merely twice as many returns as “steve jobs”).

And it’s not just massive corporations and data aggregation sites that are finding utility and compelling aesthetics in Sparklines. Just click here #sparktweets the next time that you’re going to go bouncing around twitter. Sparktweets are simple, Unicode sparklines, and so can be included in the body of a tweet). There’s even a Twitter Sparkline Generator out there!

Source: Data Driven Consulting

However, even though Tufte has embraced technology in creating his visual representations, to describe Tufte as a zeitgeist with an unequivocal belief that “newer is better” would be to miss his message completely. Although his presentation on Sparklines was an amazing demonstration of how we can make sense of seemingly infinite amounts of data in the digital realm, there was a larger theme underlying Tufte’s presentation that might temper any overexuberance for technological progress one would otherwise have. A point he kept driving at was that the latest isn’t always the greatest, and that new technologies should only be implemented when they actually better lend themselves to a particular function. He displayed a recent picture of NASA’s Mission Control room in Houston (not in a PowerPoint, of course), pointing out that the technology employed when sending people into space consisted largely of Windows 95-based computers and landline telephones (remember those?). Tufte said that the reason NASA was still employing these older technologies wasn’t because they couldn’t afford to implement the Next Big Thing whenever they so desired. Rather, the technologies of Windows 95 and landlines, because of their stability among things, were determined to be the best technology for the particular function they were employing it for.

Towards the end of his presentation, Tufte rendered the bibliophiles in the room awestruck when he pulled out an original copy of Galileo’s “Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari” (“History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and their Properties”). He left us all awestruck when he demonstrated the ways in which this 400-year-old book contained better examples of data visualization than anything we had seen on his projector or on our own laptops: to illustrate the movements of the earth that he had observed, he created a small movable, fold-out, 3-D cutout of the rotation of the earth around the sun, as he had observed it.

The computer screen, for all of the praise we give it, Tufte, hasn’t really taken us that far forward in our abilities related to visual representation than the book that preceded it. Further, the book had not really relieved us of the principle shortcoming of the scroll before it…or the slab of stone before that. Why? With all of them, you’re still only writing on and looking at a flat surface.

Tufte gave another shout-out to the actual, paper and ink book that we seem to be so desperate to abandon by showing us a book that was even older than Galileo…about 200 years older. Tufte said that, despite having been printed on the medium of paper that we presently see as unquestionably inferior to the digital medium, the pages of Euclid’s Elements STILL had better “resolution” than last season’s Dell Laptops.

The workshop didn’t end there, many more interesting facts, graphics, and visual demonstrations followed. I’m sure he had enough material to stay up there all day. Instead of doing that, however demonstrated first-hand one of his fundamental techniques for successfully conveying your message: Always end early. I enjoyed the hell out of the presentation, but ending unexpectedly was really nice!

(As a concluding aside, I did stay long enough to meet him after the lecture and to give him a DWRL t-shirt…which, I might add, he seemed to be genuinely interested in.)

Arnold Newman's Photos...And Some Photos Thereof

james.wiedner — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:20:53 +0000

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

On February 12th, the traveling exhibition Arnold Newman: Masterclass began a four-month stop at UT’s esteemed Harry Ransom Center. As Newman was a prolific photographer with a strong belief in the instructional potential of photographs, the chance to see his life’s work first-hand was nothing short of spine-tingling to those of us with an unusually strong interest in visual culture and artifacts, especially when they have pedagogical implications! (Pretty dorky, I know.)

Newman’s artistic output is as extensive as it is brilliant. His photos of ordinary folks, as well as those of the rich and famous all seem to demonstrate Newman’s singular ability to capture what I would call “authenticity.” He managed to capture the humanness of his human subjects. Along with the fact that Newman enjoyed photographing subjects spontaneously (especially his subjects of the celebrity variety) and without preparation or posing, Newman’s photos all feel like they have about a hundred small nuances to them, the sum total of which were photographs that seemed…real. That is, accurate representations of individuals and localities as they truly were. He dismissed outright any assertions during his career that the ease with which one could take- and duplicate- a massive quantity of photographs somehow detracted from the legitimacy of any particular copy as the “authentic” (that word again) work product. I suppose one can only speculate as to what Newman’s opinion would have been towards an age where photographs can be duplicated infinitely and effortlessly, and where such photos can be endlessly edited by just about anyone.

Another reason viewing Newman’s photographs conveys the feeling that one is viewing people and places “as they really are” is the fact that Newman frequently took many shots of the same subject. For example, the exhibit contained a series of photographs of Marilyn Monroe, in which she appears to be making her way around a party. She seems oblivious to the fact that Newman is studying her, which is precisely how he manages to produce photographs that seem so revealing. The sequence of photos depict Marilyn with the smiling, charming look on her face for which she was known (and with which she is still equated), as she moves from conversation to conversation among various, anonymous, partygoers. In the middle of his string of shots showing Marilyn schmoozing are several amazing shots where she has found herself outside of the crowd. It is in those shots that Newman manages to capture a profound sadness in her face that the rest of the room never noticed. If you’ll excuse my bright orange reflection in the glass, you’ll see what I mean below:

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

Each of Newman's photographs is a work of art in itself. Additionally, taking the sequence in its totality- watching the transformation in the face of his subject- creates the feeling that you are viewing a truly authentic depiction of his subject(s). Again, I’ve had to rely on my own photos of photos to illustrate this posting, but hopefully the below gives some idea as to the way Newman would take a long sequence of photos of a single subject, later looking at them in their totality (the handwritten editing notes are his).

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

To end by talking about the photo I began with (all the way up top), I was amazed by some of the evidence of Newman’s life and personality external to any of the photography he left us. The picture at the top of this posting is part of a two-year section of a detailed calendar and record of every photo shoot Newman undertook during his career. He was meticulous in his record keeping, with his calendar always with him. For a guy with a career covering nearly seven decades, I found his bookkeeping skills nearly as impressive as his photography.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Sure, Your eBook Looks Neat, But Can It Prop Open Your Door, Decorate Your Shelves, or Swat A Fly?

james.wiedner — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:14:44 +0000

Above: An example of books serving in Ancillary Capacity #422: "The To-Do List"

In his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb unapologetically and only somewhat jokingly points out some of the “superficial” benefits of the printed book versus the e-reader:

[I have realized] the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files…Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive- and on occasion, as with decorator books, the auxiliary function becomes the principal one. (Taleb at 319)

While the ability to impress your friends with your lofty collection might not be seen as a terribly compelling argument in the print/e-book debate, implicit in what he says is an acknowledgment of a separate, secondary (or tertiary, and so on) “meaning” that books can have that is entirely detached from the words written therein. Books, precisely because they are physical, tangible objects, lend themselves to a connection with the reader on multiple levels.

One of my law school textbooks- a behemoth entitled “Complex Litigation”- has spent much more time as the thing that saves my eyes and next by raising my laptop several inches off of my desk than it has spent as a research resource or as a source for pleasure reading. For that reason (among others), there is no way- even on a purely logistical level- that the electronic edition of “Complex Litigation” could ever serve the functions or exude the meaning that my individual copy has.

Even an identical print copy would fail to have as much meaning for me as my copy. A different copy wouldn’t function as a chronicle of my third year of law school. My copy is nothing short of a personal diary. The only difference being that, instead of strings of words, sentences and paragraphs, my reflections took forms such as highlights of things that struck me as important at the time, doodling and marginalia about nonsense that had nothing to do with law but which still bore significance to me, and scuffs on the cover that could only have come from carrying that goddamn thing around with me everywhere I went for about four months.

So, when I use an illustration such as my Complex Litigation textbook in support of my position that the e-book is not, and can never be, a substitute from the print book, am I missing the point? Many proponents of e-readers and the overall digitization of literature dismiss those clinging to the printed text of yesteryear as luddites who are over-romanticizing the past. Arguments pointing to the aesthetics and physicality of the print book are not merely dismissed. Rather, mentioning them actually serves to undermine one’s pro-paper stance in the eyes of those on the other side of the fence. At some point in the discourse, allowing “subjectivity” into your argument became tantamount to conceding its inferiority. (In his book, "The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future," intellectual rock star Robert Darnton acknowledges this same basic notion in a manner far more articulate than I just did. Check out page 39, for example.)

I suppose this shouldn’t be terribly surprising in light of the fact that the Western world at large has become so obsessed with placing the “objective” and empirical above the subjective, sense-based experience that the propriety of that hierarchy isn’t even questioned. But it heats my balls, nonetheless. I mean, I could prattle on for days about the ways in which these supposedly “objective” observations are anything but objective. But I won’t. Why? Because I think it’s absurd to draw these hard-and-fast distinctions between the subjective and objective; I think it’s even more absurd to take the position that one of these two designations have some sort of intrinsic superiority over the other.

It would, of course, be hypocritical of me to fault those readers among us who truly do not find any value beyond the actual words comprising a book. If the e-reader is what floats your boat, good for you! There are many smart people making very compelling arguments consistent with your own, and I am not trying to devalue any of them. All I’m suggesting is that individuals who still argue that there’s a continued worth to the printed texts shouldn’t be dismissed as improperly irrational until you’ve had a chance to see their kick-ass makeshift nightstand.

A New Version of the South's History for Students of "NewSouth"

james.wiedner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 03:39:23 +0000

Image Credits: Amazon.com

In researching and writing my last blog posting, which sought to explore the possible dangers associated with the expurgation of the literary classics we use in the school setting, I found myself digging a little deeper into a story from a couple of years ago that I was only vaguely familiar with. In that last posting, I focused upon the ways in which e-books were, by the nature of the medium, particularly susceptible to modification and/or censorship. But these concerns are not ones we should only ascribe to the digital; I wanted to demonstrate that modification of canonical works for the purpose of “protecting” people from any content that might be unpleasant to the modern reader’s sensibilities can and does happen with our “old-fashioned” paper textbooks, too.

With that intent in mind, I mentioned an incident a couple of years ago where a publisher put together an edition of “Huckleberry Finn” specifically intended for classroom use that had been substantively edited from cover-to-cover. To wit: NewSouth Books saw it fit to publish a copy of the American classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that had been modified roughly 300 times by “Mark Twain expert” Dr. Alan Gribben. Gribben took it upon himself to rewrite “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by replacing every instance of the word “nigger” with “slave,” “injun” with “Indian,” and “half-breed” with “half-blood” (cite).

Dr. Gribben, (who, incidentally, was a professor for nearly two decades at UT, a fact about which we should all be proud) composed an introduction to this new version of Twain’s masterpiece wherein he attempts to justify his rewriting; a portion of this Introduction is available on the publisher’s website. NewSouth describes Dr. Gribben’s introduction as one that “eloquently develops” the “bold move compassionately advocated by Gribben” to sanitize the book in a way that Gribben didn’t find so personally offensive.

Reading this introduction is nothing short of amazing in the arrogance, hypocrisy, and short-sightedness it depicts. To mention just one the introduction’s many stand-out moments (it would be impossible to go through them all), Dr. Gribben attempts to justify his decision to rewrite Twain’s canonical work by lamenting the “occasional efforts of rap and hip-hop musicians to appropriate [the N-Word].” The person who felt they were within their rights in determining how the “N-Word” can and cannot be used in classic literature is simultaneously wagging his finger at two overwhelmingly African-American genres of music for “appropriating” that word?

Seriously?

Frighteningly, Dr. Gribben created the new version of Twain with the specific intent that his rendition of Twain would be more appropriate in the context of the classroom. Apparently, maintaining literary integrity is not worth the White Guilt that comes along with remembering this shameful chapter of the past.

Even more frightening is the fact that there is no way the typical reader would know from looking at the textbook that it was anything other than Mark Twain’s words, as he wrote them. Neither Dr. Gribben nor NewSouth Publishing is making any effort to make the reader aware that what they are purchasing/studying/assuming to be authentic. A side-by-side comparison of NewSouth’s edited version and what is arguably the definitive version of the book can be found at the top of this post.

Is there anything that would make it obvious to any reader- much less a student- that the author’s text is respected in one, and revised in the other? It is precisely because the book is designed such that it could easily be mistaken for the Real McCoy that the actions of Dr. Gribben and NewSouth are so contemptible and dangerous. Below, I've suggested some edits to NewSouth's present cover that would help eliminate reader confusion between the altered and authentic versions. Even if the damage has already been done with NewSouth's first literary miscarriage, they will have a chance to do right when their follow-up edition is published. I, for one, can't wait to see all of the new things they decided to rewrite since the first edition!

I encourage you to read excerpts of Gribben’s introduction, which I’ve linked to a bunch of times in the above post-turned-rant. Excerpts from Dr. Gribben’s introduction to the publication of the classic American novel he saw himself fit to revise are so jaw-dropping in their hypocrisy that it is truly hard to believe that he’s being serious. It’s too bad that he was, because, had he had his tongue in his check, Dr. Gribben’s words would constitute the sort of satire and racial commentary that Twain himself might’ve been impressed by.

The Hype Cycle Is A Red Herring...Just Ask Tolstoy

james.wiedner — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:53:45 +0000

Credit for Eedited Image of Leo Tolstoy: Sean Ludwig

Educators and everyday people alike have spent (at least) the last half of a decade in a state of ever-increasing turgidity as they speculate as to all of the amazing feats the e-reader (usually, “e-reader” means “iPad” in the popular discourse, so I might use both terms below) will achieve in the context of public education. It is almost assumed that replacing every student’s bulky, quickly-dated paper textbooks with sleek, capability-rich e-readers is an unequivocally good, nay, downright imperative educational initiative.

However...

...I (generally) hate to poop on parades, and I’d agree that there’s nothing wrong with high hopes, but it would appear as though the e-reader, culminating in the iPad, has reached the point where expectations regarding a new technology have become so enormous in both quantity and scope, that there is no possible way they could all be met.

Image Credit: Gartner's Hype Cycle Research Methodology

One way to illustrate what I mean is to turn to Gartner’s somewhat-famous Hype Cycle, an illustration of which is above, this point is an inevitable stage in the life of any truly groundbreaking technology. If we were to endeavor to locate the collective attitude of educators towards e-readers at the moment in the terms that Gartner coined in conjunction with their cycle, I’d speculate that we've arrived at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. (As an aside, I realize that the above illustration is one of a curve, rather than a cycle. But, Gartner calls it a cycle, so I guess we will, too!)

If this is the case, maybe it’s time for the discourse to return to the reasonable, which would mean that we would have to at least entertain the possibility there might be trade-offs to all of the touted advantages of moving textbooks, etc. to a digital format. At the moment, even when problems regarding moving from codex to e-reader are mentioned, the issues that are raised tend to be relatively immediate- rather than long-term- in nature. Raising larger questions regarding the practical, legal, or- God forbid- philosophical pitfalls usually elicits nothing more than a few eye rolls and dismissive comments about paranoid delusions.

Maybe these rollers-of-eyes have it right. I'll be the first to concede that I am more reluctant to trust the powers-that-be than any rational person ought to be. Still, shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that a provider of school reading materials that has the absolute logistical power to provide information would also have the absolute logistical power to withhold or even take back information from a purchaser?

In a well-known example from a few years ago that isn’t specific to the educational context, Amazon removed a book from the kindle of every individual who had purchased it, without the buyer’s knowledge, much less consent. In an instance of irony that would be funny if it wasn’t so scary, the book reclaimed by Amazon was none other than the dystopian classic “1984.” As most already know, the book is about an all-pervasive government that is able to maintain its stranglehold on society because it- and only it- has the power to provide, withhold and rewrite the official history it propagates if it decides that it’s advantageous to do so.

This example is also frighteningly ironic to the extent that “1984” is a book that has been part of public school curricula since it’s publication, despite countless attempts to keep the book off of school syllabi. In other words, Amazon was able to take away reader’s access to material with the click of a button in a way that decades of organized protest movements could never achieve. But the scariest part of Amazon’s taking was the absence of backlash from the public. The story quickly fell outside of our collective attention span; their out-of-court settlements amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.

Why was this the case?

I don’t think the absence of public outcry regarding this sort of thing is indicative of an indifferent public. Rather, by the very nature of the digital medium, censorship and control over access to literature and other texts can be performed in a way that is more or less invisible and instantaneous.

If its degree of threat lay in its degree of insidiousness, however, the threat of having books taken off of our virtual shelves isn’t nearly as great as the threat of having the content of a books being subtly censored/altered.

Consider last year's quickly-fleeting story wherein a careful reader found that the copy of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" he had received as a gift for his Nook (Barne's and Nobel's e-reader) had been modified from the original text throughout, with instances of the word "Kindle" word having been replaced with "Nook," a brand name belonging to the company who had contracted with the e-book's publisher. Why did one of the world's largest booksellers think that it was "Ok" to secretly alter one of the pinnacles of world literature in the interest of increasing market share? Could anyone honestly have thought that no reader for the of time would ever notice a change in Tolstory's prose that produced sentences such as, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern," and "Nook in all hearts the flame of virture?" I doubt it. But they did it anyway, operating under the belief that nobody would really do anything about it when the changes were noticed. Given the almost total absence of public outcry over the incident, it would appear as though they were correct.

If the electronic medium allowed for the “cover-to-cover” alteration of one of the most revered and frequently studied literary works of all time to go undetected (and, to my knowledge, unpunished), it’s hard to exaggerate the ease with which subtle changes could be made on a few pages in one chapter in one standardized textbook among the thousands of standardized textbooks presently in use. More troubling, it's hard to exaggerate the collective apathy such changes would be met with, if recent history is any indication. Maybe we need to bring issues considering the control, dissemination, and alteration of the books we bring into the classroom (and anywhere else, for that mater), even if doing so will burst many of our bubbles about e-readers and the like...even if that sends us into Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment. I'll take disillusionment over misinformation any day of the week.

Rhetorical Collusion

james.wiedner — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:35:25 +0000

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester. Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Of the two aforementioned fears, the latter is always more menacing than the former for me (to the extent that you can actually separate them). This being the case, I was thrilled to find out before the start of the Fall 2012 semester (my first semester as a PhD student and as a UT Associate Instructor) that the book I would be engaging with my introductory rhetoric students was Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble."

The reason that this was such good news for me was that I had already read the book earlier in the summer for "fun." And this was no superficial reading, either; my paranoia and indignation over the sort(s) of information gathering and content filtering taking place on the Internet had led me to copiously annotate the book throughout. For the first time in my life, there was the distinct possibility that being a cynical alarmist would work to my advantage!

What's more, I was certain my students would be every bit as enthusiastic about the subject matter as I was. Hell, I thought to myself, they'll be far more knoweledgable in these areas than I am! I had better bone up on both the technical and cultural state of online affairs, 'lest their suspicions that their rhetoric instructor was a total douchemobile become certainties.

However, I soon found that, despite (or perhaps because of) their total immersion in the technology that drives our day-to-day lives, I knew more than they did with respect to the "ins-and-outs" of our digital lives. This was a dubious discovery: it meant that I didn't have to worry as much about sounding like a clueless Luddite on par with their parents, but I would have to really work to get them involved in the course materials.

But we forged ahead. There were times when I'd see signs of life, usually at those points in lecturing wherein I'd inadvertently get so worked up talking about these issues about which I was so emphatic, that they took my paranoia for passion, and there eyes would follow my flailing arms with what looked like rapt attention.

By week 3, however, I realized that I wasn't the impassioned, young, mind-opening instructor that I had fancied myself. Rather, I was the neurotic, old (yes, when you're 18, 34 is old) instructor that really needed to get a life if he was this excited about online marketing tactics. It was high time that I employ the incredibly advanced equipment in the classroom I was given to teach in by the DWRL.

I showed them a TED Talk given by Eli Pariser on the very subject he engages in his book:

They took in more during the first 5 minutes of Pariser's talk than they did the first chapters of his book. I don't mean this as any sort of criticism of Pariser's writing. To the contrary, the speech served as the spark that got my students to reallyread his book; seeing an actual person has added a face to the pages. The book transfomed from textbook to extended blog. They were now reading, digesting, and synthesizing the course materials, as was evidenced by the next essays they submitted.

Still, I could tell that they were looking at this whole thing in a "this is interesting, but they're not actually tracking me" sort of way. For them, "The Filter Bubble" was eye-opening, but they still weren't grasping the full extent of what this book was telling us. They weren't thinking about what it meant for a company to go past the anonymous tracking, to a point where somebody out their knew your name, address, hobbies, names of relatives, etc.

Wanted terribly to get them to that next step, I put together a lesson plan that was going to be multimedia in nature. I began with another TED Talk. This one was by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was unveiling a new Firefox add-on called "Collusion,"

Collusion was created by Atul Varma, who says that it was reading "The Filter Bubble" that inspired him to crerate the program. Collusion examines some of the websites that silently track visitors long after they've left a site. More unsettling, Kovac's visual representation revealed the groups collecting information and following their every move around the Internet were sites that they'd never even visited.

I encouraged them to download the Collusion add-on and see what they found. We all took a screen shot of our "Collusion charts" at the end of a typical day of Internet usage (my chart is at the top of this post; to be fair, my chart represents heavier Internet usage than typical), and posted them on the course wiki. As I did not wanted to be yet another authority forcing them to divulge personal information, this assignment was 100% optional, and they had the option to submit anonymously, if they so desired.

The chart illustrating the extent of sites gathering my information without my knowledge (much less consent) wouldn't completely fit onto my screen. Hence, they aren't completely depicted on the screen capture above, which is unfortunate, because one of the most unsettling aspects of these charts is the visualization of the extent to which the web sites collecting my data were several steps removed from any site I ever visited...and they were sharing with sites even further removed from any online activity I personally engaged in.

With the Collusion charts, students saw all-too-clearly what they had previously understood only in the abstract. So long as it remained an abstract notion, it was never going to inspire a feeling of having a vested interest in these practices. Now that they'd seen what was going on, they were mad as hell, and were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could articulate the reasons behind their opinions effectively.

However, after a day or two of almost managing to convince myself that it was my vast knowledge and dynamic classroom persona that had made the course materials "real" for my students, I finally embraced the fact that the kudos would be more appropriately directed toward the videos and interactive add-ons that we had incorporated into our class time.

(As an aside, I felt compelled to temper their newfound disdain for the entities engaged in the practices exposed in "The Filter Bubble" with editorials defending those practices. I (hopefully) conveyed to my class that there are always multiple sides to any issue, and that the ability to argue one's opponent's case was the hallmark of a skilled rhetorician.)

"The Family Circus" is NOT a Comic

james.wiedner — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:39:57 +0000

Image Credit: Self-Portrait by Scott McCloud, Google +

I realize that looking at the rhetorical aspects of comics (and the implications thereof) is well-trodden ground. However, I am of the humble opinion that there are still some pretty interesting things to think about in this area, as well as some already-propounded ideas that would seem to demand further (and continued) examination. Indeed, I believe that there is still much to be gained by looking at the (relatively) early texts examining rhetoric and comics. In support of this contention, I’d like to offer the musings of Mr. Scott McCloud as Exhibit “A.”

In 1993, Mr. McCloud published “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” The book consists of the author outlining some of his ideas in a 200+ page comic. The primary narrator is a comic version of the author, who is self-referential, speaking directly to the reader throughout the book. Frequently, the frames of the comic in which the narrator is positioned illustrate the concept(s) he is conveying at that point in the story.

And for McCloud, it’s essential that the images in his book are, in fact, telling a story. If the book consisted of individual illustrations, with each having no connection to those proceeding or following it, those images would cease to be comics. McCloud suggests that what we might call a single-panel comic, is actually just cartoons juxtaposed with words (he takes pains to explain that “comic” and “cartoon” are far from synonymous). So, for McCloud, “The Family Circus” is a cartoon, but it is not a comic (as an aside, the author of this blog would like to point out that “The Family Circus” sucks no matter what you want to call it). Here’s McCloud’s working definition of “comics:”

(kom’iks) n. plural in form, used with a singular verb. 1. Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. (“Understanding Comics,” p. 9).

With the crappy “The Family Circus,” out of the picture (forgive the pun, if you can), being relegated instead to the realm of the “cartoon,” it may sound as though McCloud is being a bit restrictive with respect to what can properly be defined as “comics.” However, following his own comic for just a few more pages, the reader (viewer?) finds that McCloud’s take on “comics” is far more expansive than any traditional (or contemporary, really) definition of the term.

Whether you want to teach rhetoric, per se, or to use a rhetorical device to teach another subject, McCloud’s definition doesn’t exclude any genre, subject matter, style, or medium. (Id. at 22).

Image Credit: Scanned from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics"

Most significantly, there is no part of McCloud’s definition requiring “words,” as we generally understand the term. McCloud’s point here is perhaps the most significant for the purposes of visual rhetoric. McCloud postulates (in a way that is brilliant in its brevity, but still too long for a blog post) that humanity is moving towards a universal language, and proposes that comics is a great contender for the vocabulary that would accompany this new, universal language. (Id. at 47). Equally interesting, McCloud depicts the way(s) in which the image and the written word are, in a sense, on a single continuum:

Image Credit: Scanned from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics"

Some pretty heavy ideas; not the kind we’d expect from what we traditionally understand to be “comics.” Which, of course, is exactly McCloud’s point. But I suppose that it’s a bit presumptuous of me to make such a definitive statement on Mr. McCloud’s behalf. If you want the next 17 minutes of your life to be well-spent, check out his TED Talk:

Rhetological Bingo, or, More Attempts at Teaching Fallacies to Bored Freshmen

james.wiedner — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:02:56 +0000

Image source: Dinosaur Comics

The bulk of my last posting was spent singing the praises of Mr. David McCandless; as anyone who has checked out any of his work before or since then can attest to, such accolades are/were more than justified.

Specifically, I loved his “rhetological” fallacies project, where he vizualized a colorful list of about 50 different rhetorical or logical fallacies, and created an unadorned yet arresting image to accompany each of them. Pretty cool stuff.

McCandless and his team from his amazing site, imformationisbeautiful.net, then demonstrated an exercise they called “rhetological bingo,” wherein he and his cohort listened to a politically charged speech, and identified each of the fallacies they spotted on the way by adding one of the colorful images to a layout that they described as a “matrix.” Visitors to the site are encouraged to download a high-res copy of the game to play themselves. Even cooler stuff, right?

As I finished writing the aforementioned blog, I thought to myself, “’rhetological bingo,’ why can’t I be that clever? You know what else would be really cool? If, instead of a matrix, rhetological bingo involved vizualized bingo cards? I could play a political speech/cartoon from You Tube on the big screen in the classroom, while all of my students, at their individual computers (or maybe in pairs) checked off rhetorical and logical fallacies as they spotted them on their respective bingo cards (Flash-powered, maybe?), until the inevitable ‘Bingo?!' At which point, the winning student(s) would run through their answers, explaining to all of us the portion of the speech that they thought constitued a fallacy?! Yes! That’d be awesome, and I totally rock for coming up with this totally new way to use these illustrations! Goddamn am I awesome!”

Then I googled “rhetological bingo” and scanned a few results down…

After a lifetime of coming up with great new ideas only to discover that they aren’t so new after all, you’d think I’d be used to the dejection that accompanies such discoveries, and that I’d cope accordingly. Nonetheless, this one took a little wind out of my sails:

Image credit: Graceavery Rhetological Bingo

Grace Avery has created a fantastic rhetological bingo platform, even better than the one I’d envisioned, utilizing the images and definitions from the McCandless project. Every bingo card comes up with different fallacy names and corresponding images in different orders; hovering over any of the images on any of squares causes a definition and example of the corresponding concept to pop up in an oh-so-engaging way!

My only criticism of this mashup would be that the attribution provided isn’t really as clear as it could be. A link to informationisbeautiful.com at the corner of the bingo card (see above) is the extent of her attribution (note that even that link only takes to you the site's homepage, where it's far from apparent that the rhetological fallacies project resides there). if I’d stumbled across Ms. Kelly’s game without prior knowledge of the original rhetological fallacies project, I would have assumed that the images and definitions were her own. Looking at her site in its totality, it's hard to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. But what do I know? Nothing, except that I am going to be able to parlay this into part of a kick-ass lesson plan…with all due attributions, of course. ;)

Rhetological is SO a word!

james.wiedner — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 23:14:02 +0000

Image Credit: Rhetological Fallacies

As an instructor teaching an introductory rhetoric course, I sympathize with my students, I truly do. I don’t mean this in some sort of self-effacing “so sad for them, they lost the instructor lottery, I suck.” To the contrary, when one considers the fact that I have to engage 18-year-olds at 9:30 in the morning on matters as dry as the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic notions concerning rhetoric, and/or the finer points of JSTOR navigation, I’d say that I do a halfway decent job.

However, “halfway decent” frequently falls short for my early-morning audience. Hell, I could be a Dewey Finn/Mr. Chips hybrid, and I’d still fail to grab them. But, like I said, I don’t place any sort of blame on them. To the contrary, I admire their temerity and- remembering the 8:00 a.m. French class I was blessed with my freshman year- I don’t just sympathize; I empathize. As if watching me draw some lame rhetorical triangle on the white board, they had a couple of days and reading assignments regarding rhetorical fallacies was in their not-so-distant future (unbeknownst to them).

I was almost as happy for myself as I was for them when I stumbled upon a page about something called “Rhetological Fallacies.” In short, this Rhetological Fallacies project added sharp, simple illustrations to about 50 rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies (not wanting to be restricted to the rhetorical nor the logical, they mixed them all together and created a new word to describe their finished product: rhetological). Here are just a few, which I picked at random:

“Rhetological Fallacies” was the brainchild of the absurdly talented David McCandless, on his thoroughly engaging website.

I saw a nice class exercise in the form of what McCandless calls Rhetological Bingo, wherein players search for faulty rhetorical or logical moves during a speech of a politician or other public figure. He provides an example of the matrix he came up with while listening to a speech on same-sex marriage from the U.K.’s most senior Catholic bishop.

He’s even kind enough to provide a cheat sheet for those of us (take me, for example) that might be a little rusty with respect to some of these terms.

So, I’m hoping my next class will provide my students with memorable illustrations of otherwise esoteric terms, which we will all apply together watching our politician of choice bullshit his or her way through another press conference. The only problem will be finding an example where the bullshit isn’t so prolific as to overwhelm them as they try to identify all of them.