Class Two: Defining Digital Rhetoric
What is rhetoric?
Andrea Lunsford collects a lot of definitions.
Silva Rhetoricae has one answer
Aristotle has another answer in his full text: means of persuasion (logos, ethos, pathos), kinds of occasion (deliberative, juridical, and epideictic), and opposition to dialectic
Burke's Pentad presents another way to think about rhetoric
Studying social media and serious games.
What about the rhetoric of our class website?
What are some websites you've liked? What are some websites you didn't like and why?
Would you want something with tabs or something with tables?
What about something like this?
The Readings
Jay Bolter - Seeing and Writing
From the time we are children we are "looking through the printed page rather than at it" (680)
Time to stop dismissing "the visual history of writing" (680)
Why is the concept of "writing space" important?
How is "graphic rhetoric" something that extended from scientific graphs to 3D computer-generated images? (688-690)
(This site on "information aesthetics" takes this even further.)
Is Bolter's thinking too shaped by the culture of print and the page? Does he focus on hypertext and ignore cybertext?
Ian Bogost
How does Bogost interpret a game like Tenure (1-3)?
How does Bogost interpret a game like Tax Avoider (51-52)?
How does Bogost define a procedure? (3-11)
How does Bogost define rhetoric? (15-28) How is "visual rhetoric" or "digital rhetoric" important?
What's the difference between a "persuasive game" and a "serious game"? (54-59)
What's the difference between "persuasive games" and "persuasive technologies"? (59-62)
Lev Manovich
A film studies perspective - Cinema as New Media
Pre-histories of New Media
Principles:
- Numerical Representation and "not units of meanings in the way morphemes are" (27-30)
- Modularity and a "fractal structure" (30-31)
- Automation - ability to generate poetry and fiction (32-36)
- Variability: databases, interfaces, menus, etc. - like selection in postindustrial society (36-45)
- Transcoding - the computer layer affects the cultural layer - computer's "ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics" - programmability makes it unlike print (45-48)
What New Media is not (49)
"The Myth of the Digital" (52-55)
"The Myth of Interactivity" (55-61)
The Rhetoric of Information Science 1945-1949
Today's Assigned Readings:
"As We May Think" (1945)
History of publication
The analog computer of Bush's time
Technology: dry photography, facsimile machine (television, microfilm more dated)
Optical vs. magnetic technology
"we are being bogged down today as specialization extends"
Human limitations that later studies would confirm: the 50 bit-per-second figure (input or output)
Arithmetic and formal logic as computational tasks that can be outsourced to machines
"Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine." (42)
Storage capacity diminished as a problem . . . or is it?
Interface prediction can be difficult to do
"Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose." (37)
The example of Mendel
"Two centuries ago Leibniz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use." (38)
Preserving the Past
The Memex
"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, 'memex' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk." (45)
Embracing complexity
The role of selection
"Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker." (43)
"There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, then only to a subclass of this given by the second digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station." (43)
Trenton, NJ Spanish speakers vs. Fingerprint analysis
Gender Analysis (to which will return later)
"The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to." (40)
Licklider "one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type."
Image from The Office Museum
But what about these local women who programmed computers for JPL?
For more see Nurturing the Network: Women and the Communications Industry
