Jamie "Skye" Bianco , University of Pittsburgh Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/dogwalking ( Published: March 15, 2013 ) On [Creative Critical Compositional] Method ....................click to play

Introduction Computers & Writing 2012, ArchiTEXTure Meagan Kittle Autry , North Carolina State University Ashley R. Kelly , North Carolina State University Articles To Preserve, Digitize, and Project: On the Process of Composing Other People’s Lives Jody Shipka , University of Maryland, Baltimore County Attaining the Ninth Square: Cybertextuality, Gamification, and Institutional Memory on 4chan Vyshali Manivannan , Rutgers University Expanding the Available Means of Composing: Three Sites of Inquiry Matthew Davis , University of Massachussetts Boston Kevin Brock , North Carolina State University Stephen McElroy , Florida State University The Role of Computational Literacy in Computers and Writing Alexandria Lockett , Pennsylvania State University Elizabeth Losh , University of California, San Diego David M Rieder , North Carolina State University Mark Sample , George Mason University Karl Stolley , Illinois Institute of Technology Annette Vee , University of Pittsburgh Composing in the Dark: The Texture of Light Painting Jennifer Ware , University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Designing Digital Texts in/for the Classroom Sarah C. Spring , Winthrop University Keynotes Composing Objects: Prospects for a Digital Rhetoric Alex Reid , SUNY Buffalo Knowledge Cartels versus Knowledge Rights David Parry , University of Texas at Dallas Performance Silent Beacon Thomas Stanley, George Mason University and Erica Benay Fallin, George Mason University Reviews The Insect Technics of Rhetoric: Review of Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media Jeremy Cushman , Purdue University Remaking the Future of Multimodal Composing by Examining its Past Jenna Pack , University of Arizona Losing the Heart: Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together Bradford Hincher , Georgia State University (A Much Needed) Spotlight on Delivery: A Review of Ben McCorkle's Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse Mariana Grohowski , Bowling Green State University

Tamika L. Carey , University at Albany – SUNY Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/rhetorical-healing-as-reeducation ( Published: January 16, 2013 ) In The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas , motivational speaker, spiritual teacher, and self-help author Iyanla Vanzant describes one of her purposes for writing her best-selling 1996 book. She says: Black women do not understand there is no wrong in being human. There are only lessons. No matter how outlandish, ridiculous, or irresponsible our behavior may be at any given time, know, accept, love. There is nothing wrong with you. There is, however, always room for improvement and change… Self-knowledge is not about picking your scabs, beating up yourself, feeling bad about your wounds or weak spots. It means that you recognize you have them, make a commitment to nurture and strengthen them, and leave them alone to heal. (75) Such affirmations and calls for self-reflection are common features within the numerous African American self-help books and inspirational guides published for women since the nineties. The majority of these books “promise” to teach readers insights and strategies for overcoming the dis ease of past trauma or alleviating the dis content with challenges in their present lives. Readers and writers alike have found these self-help texts beneficial. For women like Brenda Sheffield, who claims that self-help books are “springboard[s] to discussing and healing [her] life and those of people [she] knows,” the benefit in reading them is learning, or re-learning, ways of being, knowing, or acting necessary for resuming one’s intended life path (Houser). For Vanzant, and other popular and profitable writers in this genre, activism is an incentive. Through writing books containing their testimonies, observations, and teachings, they pass on the ways of knowing they consider essential for the survival of their communities. Scholarship on self-help literature critiques…

Devin Garofalo , Vanessa Lauber , Laura Perry , and Peter Ribic , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/our-narcotic-modernity ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) The following project, designed in the spring of 2011 as an exhibit proposal for an envisioned Museum of the Humanities, addresses both visually and textually the addictive undercurrents in cultural history. The proposal begins with an introduction to Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania , then moves to a sketch of a museum exhibit based on her text. The exhibit is intended to implicitly evoke the experience of grappling with such an experimental text as Crack Wars as well as explicitly respond to the theoretical and juridical challenges raised by Ronell. The accompanying video attempts to translate the experience of the proposed museum installation into the visual and aural. The video’s arrangement imitates the fluid structure of Ronell's book, wherein an alternative history of drug innovation and criminalization emerges with references to the criminalization of Madame Bovary and pivotal events in the history of narcotics. Viewers should come to realize that literature itself is a drug that induces various kinds of addiction, some forms of which are culturally accepted and others that are especially dangerous to normative social agendas and thus monitored and controlled. "Our Narcotic Modernity," a description of a proposed museum exhibit space [PDF] master Download video: Ogg format | MP4 format

Steel Wagstaff , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/essays-into-silence-noise-and-john-cage ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) I present here the results of "The {Silence} Project," a multi-part creative research project that engages with ideas of chance, silence, and noise through the work of John Cage, the American avant-garde composer. The project began with an experimental prose essay that borrowed the formal structure of Cage's famous 'silent' composition 4’33” to examine the importance of silence and noise in Cage’s thought and speculate about the poetic implications of Cage’s use of constraints and chance operations in his composition practice. As part of a graduate seminar taught by Jon McKenzie, over the next four months I submitted this essay to two substantial remediations which drastically altered the form, content, and argumentative thrust of the original essay. I converted the prose piece first into “{Sile / nce},” a graphic essay produced with Adobe InDesign that attempted to imitate the look and feel of a large, visually rich, and typographically varied glossy magazine. Next, I remediated the piece a further time, creating “The Silence Film: Essays into Noise, Silence, and John Cage,” a short film loosely structured around the conventions of Pecha Kucha, a fixed-duration presentation format that features twenty images shown for 20 seconds each. In each case, the project underwent significant revisions, changing shape and adopting radically different content in order to explore the properties of the media in which it was composed and the software tools I was just beginning to use (primarily Adobe InDesign, Audacity, and iMovie). In each specific case of remediation, the structural properties and representative capabilities of the selected forms and formats offered both interesting opportunities and significant challenges, especially when it came to depicting the implications of Cage’s subversion of common…

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-revelations-of-drKx4l3ndj3r ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) In March, 2011, I was invited by Austrian artist Ralo Mayer to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue to accompany his first major solo show, Obviously a Major Malfunction/KAGO KAGO KAGO BE . Mayer’s interest in experimental, performative research had led him to my book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance , especially its eccentric second half, whose trajectory begins with the NASA Challenger disaster. This event had had a profound effect on the artist, as it had on me, and he asked if I could reprise some of my book for the catalogue. I soon discovered that Mayer had already remediated certain disastronautic elements of Perform or Else into his multi-medium conceptual art. As his research borders on speculative fiction, I decided to compose a gay sci-fi text remixing his work back with my own, while also stirring in a reading of certain passages from Nietzsche’s Nachlass. The result was the cosmographic text “The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r,” bilingually published in German and English in Obviously A Major Malfunction by Ralo Mayer (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Linz, Austria). As I had recently been invited to give a keynote presentation at a Performance Design conference in Santiago, I decided to create a multimedia version based on “Revelations.” I narrated the text into my iPhone, imported it into GarageBand, and began mixing in music and sound effects to create the audio. I also invited Mayer to contribute by recording some of his own texts and emails, which would allow me to slice in his voice as well as his imagery. As I completed each audio section, I began designing with visuals, starting in Keynote and finishing in Final Cut Pro. Since my Santiago audience would be overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking, I also had the text translated and the entire video subtitled. I presented a full, though…

Alexis Brown , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-algo-numeric-daughter ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) Click this image to read Alexis Brown's "Algo-Numeric Daughter" This comic attempts to allegorize the relationship between myself and my algo-numeric double. I examined the effects of orality, literacy, and numeracy in the context of familial relations, with each character drawn directly from the results of my signature, or the results that a Google search of my name generated. I wanted to examine whether my parents could legitimately connect with me through my algo-numeric double. For instance, what is the relation between me and my algo-numeric double, and how much control over it do I have? Does it represent some facet of me, or has it been so abstracted by numeracy that the information connected to my name now bears almost no connection to me at all? And in an age where information now exists in a realm of its own, could my algo-numeric double in some sense replace me? Could it be manipulated by others through algorithms to create some better version of myself? This project appealed to me in part because it was very different than my usual work in the English department. Instead of implementing theoretical concepts to analyze literature, I used them to provide framework for what might almost be termed creative writing. At the same time, this project also made the theories of Scott McCloud, Eric Havelock, and others more personal—I found myself examining the connections between these theories and my life.

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/smart-media ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) This special section of Enculturation features four sets of experimental media projects produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, three by English students enrolled in different courses I have taught over the past several years and one recent experiment of my own. As indicated in the short descriptions provided by their producers, these projects vary in content, form, medium, and function, but all can be understood as emerging scholarly genres—or what we’re calling at UW-Madison smart media . At a time when bookstores are closing, when the MLA is questioning the monograph as the dominant model for dissertations, a time when academic publishers are grappling with the many challenges posed by the web, it is little wonder that smart media such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and interactive installations have emerged. Smart media supplement the traditional scholarly genres of book, article, and conference paper, adding elements closely identified with new media: digital images, video, and sound, as well as interactivity. These emerging scholarly genres mix ideas and affects, logos and graphe . If, as Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer, and others have long argued, logocentric writing marginalizes graphe , smart media turns on the high-res display, cranks up the volume, and plays with the inputs and outputs. Writing in no way disappears: it remains a crucial though reinscribed track in a multimedia composition—or rather, design . For design is to digital media what composition is to writing: a craft that can be learned and taught, one that has a long history yet still produces surprises, amazement, and, admittedly, at times clichés and boredom. At UW-Madison, I direct DesignLab , a new design support center for student media projects that works closely with the Libraries (where it is institutionally situated), our central IT…

Michael MacDonald , University of Waterloo Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/martial-mcluhan-2 ( Published: June 26, 2012 ) Editor’s Note: This is part two of an essay published in Enculturation’s special issue on Marshall McLuhan, “McLuhan @ 100.” In “Martial McLuhan I: Framing Information Warfare,” Michael MacDonald argues that McLuhan’s basic theoretical frame for understanding media was rhetoric. This rhetorical focus allowed McLuhan to see that war is about both the destruction of physical infrastructure and the shaping and reconfiguring of bodies and brains, affects and attitudes. In “Martial McLuhan II,” MacDonald uses McLuhan’s understanding of media ecology, embodiment, and information environments to examine military theory. That analysis presents a detailed account of how Info War strategies take aim at the body and brain by using information as a “soft kill” weapon. In On War , Carl von Clausewitz argues that every battle revolves around a “central hub” of activity—a center of gravity or “heavy point” ( Schwerpunkt )—that forms the nodal point of the enemy’s material military power. Info War, however, makes civil society itself the center of gravity. Info War targets not only the physical infrastructure of information (nodes, cables, links, servers, towers, routers, electricity grids) but also the decision makers, “human or automated,” plugged into the grid. “The friendly or adversary personnel who make decision and handle information,” notes the Joint Publication on Information Operations , “constitute a critical component of the GII [emphasis added]” (Glossary GL-6). According to McLuhan, the “sheer inclusiveness” of information as a medium and as a concept expands both the field of battle and the semantic field of war. “Real, total war has become information war,” notes McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage , “it is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly” (138). Building on The Mechanical Bride…

Alexandra Hidalgo , Purdue University Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/national-identity ( Published: June 18, 2012 ) THE SHRINKING B Figure 1: Toy store advertisement Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1980s, I knew that the greatest accomplishment for any woman would be winning the Miss Venezuela beauty contest. I didn’t dare dream I would ever compete, however. My legs were too thick and my “potato nose,” as my cousin disdainfully called it, was bound to outrage the judges. By the time I became a teenager, the list of anatomical crimes committed by my body could cover a few pages of rampant (and I’d later learn nonsensical) dissatisfaction. However, my breasts never made it on the list. Sure, as a B-cup I didn’t turn heads with my cleavage, but it didn’t matter. So few of my classmates had any cleavage to speak of. B-cups were the norm in my school, and we had other things to obsess over, like split ends and slightly protruding bellies. Things that could actually be altered. In 1993, when I was 16 years old, I moved to Dayton, Ohio, and have since returned home every other year to find that my breasts are shrinking. It started slowly, but about 12 years ago it exploded. Cs and Ds and other letters I’d never heard of in relation to bras were parading up and down the streets, making my Bs look incongruously small. The unalterable was being altered everywhere I looked. One by one my dearest friends chose to have breast implant surgery when none of my American friends would dream of it. Figure 2: Beer advertisement Something happened in my native country, and living abroad I failed to both be part of it and understand it, which is why when I purchased my first video camera, I booked a ticket home and made Perfect: A Conversation with the Venezuelan Middle Class About Female Beauty and Breast Implants , a 25-minute documentary shot in English and Spanish 1 . In this essay, I will use the 13 participants’ responses to analyze the rhetorical…