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Jessica Pressman is a visiting scholar in the Literature Department at UCDS and a Lecturer in Sixth College’s Culture, Art, and Technology Program at UCSD, and a holder of the ACLS Collaborative Fellowship for 2012-2013. As she says in her “About Me”  webpage, her work examines how technologies affect our understanding of aesthetics and reading … Continue reading »

In 1958, an American physicist named William Higinbotham was sitting in his office at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he worked. He was pondering of a way to cure the boredom of visitors who come to the laboratory, when he realized that one of the computers there could calculate ballistic missle trajectories. He used this … Continue reading »

Technology is advancing at a remarkable rate especially in the area of mobile computers and devices.  We are able to carry these devices on us throughout our daily activities creating an unfathomable amount of opportunities. In addition to being able to access an almost unlimited amount of information, these devices also allow for people to document … Continue reading »

Chapter seven of the textbook Designing Visual Language discusses the impact of data displays on a readers’ ability to conceptualize information. When I first read the term “data display” I immediately pictured a table or graph full of complex numbers and information that would probably take a good amount of time to interpret. A couple paragraphs into … Continue reading »

Svenja Adolphs is a professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham and also the Associate Director of the Center for Research and Applied Linguistics, the Director of Research for the Faculty of Arts, and the Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Studies. Her main interests are  in corpus linguistics and discourse analysis … Continue reading »

The languages that humans have created throughout our continuous evolution have become vast and complicated over time. It is quite fascinating the think that at one point we communicated through grunts and body motions, yet know we have thousands upon thousands of words that form the basis of our communication with each other. To make … Continue reading »

Anyone who has conversed with a grandparent, old friend, or individual who lived a long time before this day and age can get a feeling that their lives were quite different than ours. I have been lucky enough to have been able to live with my grandma while I was growing up. Countless afternoon I … Continue reading »

Discussions, debates, and arguments are fundamental human  interactions that have been scattered throughout our history. Are these confrontations between people a phenomenon that has grew from our original evolutionary roots? Or rather, have they been provoked through another means such as moral character? Marcus Fabium Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician who writes about what it takes to be a … Continue reading »

Rhetoric is an art form that is used by everyone but understood by few. For those who understand how to use it, they have the ability to either display the truth or conceal it for some malicious gain. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato pondered this idea of Rhetoric because they understood the … Continue reading »

Do blogs have a generic definition accepted by society? Or are blogs a representation of the individual writing them and therefore can only be defined through their terms? Danah Boyd tries to  discern what a blog is in her 2006 article “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium,” published in the online journal … Continue reading »