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Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary  had multiple different essays to choose from, I selected one by Jonathan Jones titled The Body in Electronic Literature. The essay took a path that I was not expecting. Thinking that this title was a metaphor for some piece of electronic technology that Jonathan Jones was going to educate me on I was quite surprised by the actual content. Jonathan Jones wrote an analysis on Shelley Jackson’s My Body — a Wunderkammer. 

My Body, Jackson

What exactly is a wunderkammer? I don’t know and didn’t learn through Jonathan Jones’s essay but I did learn some personal facts about Shelley Jackson’s climb into physical maturity. According to Jones, the website features:

A crudely sketched, black-and-white self-portrait of the author,  whose body is divided into separately labeled constituent parts, this work of “hyperfiction” thematizes the fragmentation of the body. By clicking on the various body parts, the reader is taken by hyperlink to other pages featuring textual anecdotes and meditations on a particular body part, new hyperlinks embedded in the text, and other coarse sketches of the author’s body.

Jones goes on to describe some of the stories that are linked to Jackson’s body parts, which don’t need to be shared here on my personal blog. I think the point that Jones was getting at is that the hyperlinks behind Jackson’s crude stories are impressive.

The way that Jackson was able to make one image link to multiple different images is quite innovative. To take the reader to a new site with the click of a different body part is a unique idea, a little strange, but the technology behind it is advanced and interesting.

Jonathan Jones’s essay was somewhat confusing and I couldn’t find a clear point in his writing but what I think he was getting at, being the multiple hyperlinks, was interesting and innovative. Perhaps it is fairly new technology that we don’t know much about yet and Jones displayed  all the information that he could gather. Jackson’s website is hyperlink craziness and the stories behind her links are very personal but the advancement in technology, I think, will prove to be very useful.

Dr. Ian Bogost

An article written by Dr. Ian Bogost called Rhetoric of Video Games, discusses the significance of gaming media. Dr. Bogost attended the University of Southern California where he received his undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature and Philosophy. He then went on to get his masters and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from UCLA. According to his personal blog, since school Bogost has accomplished many things in his career from the creation of video games including Cow Clicker and A Slow Year as well as a collection of other games, to co-writing the following pieces, “Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,Newsgames: Journalism at Play, How To Do Things with Videogames,Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.” Dr. Ian Bogost is a very successful designer and media philosopher.

Dr. Ian Bogost uses a video game called  Animal Crossing in his article. The game features many different aspects of the real world which Dr. Bogost believes to help train gamers for real life situations.

Animal Crossing is a game about everyday life in a small town. It is a game about customizing and caring for an environment. It is a game about making friends and collecting insects. But Animal Crossing is also a game about long-term debt. It is a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals. It is a game about the bittersweet consequences of acquiring goods and keeping up with the Joneses. 

Players of the game are faced with paying their mortgages and working in various stores as well as making social connections with other gamers. So does facing these real world situations on the computer screen help in the actual real world? According to Dr. Bogost this is exactly what is going on.

Animal Crossing has created their own community called ACC. This group is an outlet for gamers to discuss the game and they have even set up an adoption system where a veteran of the game can help a new member get started. Animal Crossing has gone beyond just the game. According to Dr. Bogost “the values of a video game community like ACC exist outside the game.” This game has expanded past just the game and created a whole community. Dr. Bogost says,

Video games are not just stages that facilitate cultural, social, or political practices; they are also media where cultural values themselves can be represented — for critique, satire, education, or commentary…In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.

The tie that Dr. Bogost makes between video games and the real world is valid in the way that he goes on to describe it in the rest of the article. Experiencing situations, such as being in debt, on a computer screen could help educate gamers before they are faced with the situation in real life. This being said, I don’t necessarily agree. Before video games existed humanity somehow managed to deal with everyday situations like paying the mortgage. While video games have the ability to teach you things, there are many other sources from which this information could be learned. Personal experience has led me to have a different outlook on video games.

Sims

As a kid I was a Sims enthusiast which is a game where you make your own family and basically control their lives; telling them to go to work, to eat, go to the bathroom and take a shower. People die and have babies, you have to pay bills and there are different salaries for every job. Its real life in computer game form. I played this religiously over many years and I can’t say that it taught me very much or that I took aspects of the game into the real world. I understand Dr. Bogost’s sentiment behind this idea but from personal experience I don’t think that video games should or do help prepare people for real life situations. I know there are people out there that disagree with me, Dr. Bogost being one of them, but a big part of my disagreement is that I don’t want to live in a world where our youth is learning real life experiences through a video game. Technology is advancing every second but there are some things that need to be learned through actually experiencing them in real life.

In the article, Writing in the Wild,  written by Bjork and Shwartz, the part that struck me the most is their belief that if we were to research or write in the location of the subject that our efforts would be more successful. I found this statement to be very loaded. You can look at it in many different views and apply it to many different things. Immediately, I looked at this statement with an artistic view, in terms of inspiration and when, where and how it hits you.

I’m not an artist by any means but we’ve all taken art classes over the years and inspiration is a key component to art. Inspiration can hit anywhere and anytime. Location does matter to some people while it has no affect on others. This article talks about how your environment can influence your writing and researching. This quote sums up the link between working on location and the quality of the work:

Assignments that require students to compose in situ using mobile technologies help them to achieve insight into the relationship between discourse and place

I think there are definitely benefits to working on location but not exactly in the respect that this article is talking about. If the research is being done on the computer then I don’t necessarily understand why it would matter where you were sitting while you were researching. Now, when it comes to art I completely understand.

Art

Recently in one of my other classes we had an artist come speak to us. One of his key points was that his work is much better when he is painting on location as opposed to painting from a photograph. The idea of researching and working in the location of the image being painted is obviously beneficial. But at the same time some artists have just as much success painting an image after a photograph. This topic is controversial in the way that it can be unique to every single person. Everybody has their own techniques when working on any project from art to scientific research therefore I don’t believe it necessarily matters where you are when working.

Designing Visual Language provides a full and detailed breakdown of a data display. In a sense, the article includes the who, what, where, why and how of a data display. The key to data displays, said in the introduction, is that “they greatly enhance our ability to compare numbers.” Bottom line, the purpose of a data display is to provide information through a visually pleasing yet informative way.

Ed Loeffler, member of a large nonprofit organization, goes through the detailed process of creating a data display in chapter 7. Ed begins by compiling the information on the organization’s membership over the past 10 years and fitting it into a table defined by age and year. Realizing that a table is not the most effective way to display his data he considers:

• audience
• purpose
• context

Line Graph

This leads Ed to format the data into pie charts, visually pleasing yet still not effective in displaying the data properly. Ed eventually lands on a multiple bar graph because it allows him to display the data in one chart and “his readers will appreciate the conciseness.” Ed later realizes that this format isn’t the easiest for comparing the data so he turns the bars horizontally. The chart still seems cluttered and Ed decides this still isn’t the most effective way to display his data so he moves onto a line graph. The graph represents his data in a clear, visually pleasing and concise way. The final step is to edit the graph itself by adjusting the lines, enhancing the clarity, placing labels and adding a title. Creating a data display can be a long and tedious process as shown by Ed. 

This chapter also provides the vocabulary list for data displays:

• textual elements (describes the data)
• spatial elements

1. pie charts
2. bar charts
3. line graphs
4. scatter plots
5. data maps
6. gantt charts
7. graphical matrix

• graphic elements (make the data visible to readers, brings the display to life, giving it form and substance)
• synergy of the coding modes (provides a rich vocabulary with which to display information)

Laying out the main elements of a data display breaks the process down into something simpler. Choosing the correct elements is the complicated part but the chapter goes on to explain the most efficient way to do that as well but that is not the part that struck me. The introduction to this chapter held some very key words. 

The three reasons that data displays are useful rhetorical tools:

Useful rhetoric tool

When reading through this, number 1 immediately struck me as describing myself. I’m not your typical reader of professional documents but when reading any document I would rather the numbers by displayed in a numerical form in a chart than read the numbers in text form. I thought of problems that I have been given in math classes over the years. The questions that always gave me trouble were the word problems. When the numbers are lined up in a simple problem format the problem is much clearer and easier to solve but add the complexity of words to the numbers and the problem immediately becomes difficult. It takes more time to decipher what the question is actually asking, to extract the numbers the numbers from the problem and then to actually solve the problem. Data displays and math problems are similar in the way that adding words to the numbers makes the actual data harder to understand and convoluted, not to mention it isn’t as visually pleasing as a data display.

Charles Kostelnick

An article written by Charles Kostelnick analyzes the different aspects of data displays in terms of visual rhetoric. The article called, Visual Rhetoric of Data Displays, examines different topics related to visual rhetoric including:

•  comprehension of the data
• rhetoric of science
• rhetoric of adaptation
• social rhetoric
• emergence of digital data design
• rhetoric of participation

The rhetoric of data display is different than the rhetoric we have heard about from Aristotle and Plato because it is visual rhetoric not written or spoken. More specifically it is the rhetoric of visual data such as graphs, charts and scatter-plots. 

First, Kostelnick touches on the comprehension of the data. He takes a quote from Tufte that covers all the bases for his impending article about the visual rhetoric of data displays,

“‘graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency’ that it ‘gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space’ and that it ‘requires telling the truth about data'”

Data displays are meant to give information in the most efficient of ways; they are perfectly concise. Data displays are created to be read easily and to provide a large amount of information. The thought process behind creating a successful data display is much like the thought processes in advertising. This idea becomes even stronger when Kostelnick goes on to discuss social rhetoric.

Taylor Swift, Covergirl Ad

Advertising is focused on catering to the interests of the public and in much of the same way so are data displays. Kostelnick frequently uses the word “popular” in this section of his article to stress the idea that the display needs to be visually appealing to the public. Advertising is always angled towards their audience, for example, this Covergirl ad features Taylor Swift. She is a country music icon and role model to millions of girls from a wide range of ages. By using Taylor Swift in their ad they are directing their products at an obvious group: teenage girls. In very much the same way, data displays are created for the public but with a slightly different purpose:

Circumscribing the designer’s available design choices helps enculturate readers into a finite group of familiar forms and thereby reduces the reader’s interpretive stress. In this way, data design software both enhances and constrains visual literacy, ensuring that a wide range of readers become enculturated in a certain genres…while at the same time limiting data visualization to those forms

Data displays are targeted towards the public in the way that the public can clearly understand the information that is meant to be taken from the display. It needs to be visually appealing and straightforward for the display to hold good visual rhetoric and for the message of the display to be read properly. Data displays are created for the understandability of the public just as advertisements are created for the appeal of their targeted audience.

William H. Janeway

William Janeway strongly believes in the technology of today and the need for advancement of our technology. In an article published in The New York Times written by Quentin Hardy, Janeway voices his opinions on our world’s technology. As opposed to the recent report we read by Richard Lanham called The Economics of Attention where he suggests that our world is too caught up with “stuff and fluff,” Janeway thinks that our technology needs more support. “There is lots of stuff we should be doing in basic technology research that isn’t being done,” says Janeway. Lanham criticizes today’s technology for making us lazier people while Janeway thinks that advancement in technology can greatly benefit our world.

William Janeway is a Cambridge University alum and one of the great tech investors. His doctorate was in economics but he branched out because Janeway lost faith in the economic world shown through this quote,

Mathematical models and quantitative techniques had taken over the analysis of business, finance, and the role of government.that quantification of everything, he thought, led to arrogant conclusions, bad policies, and a tragic loss of the real-world color and nuance surrounding our lives in the marketplace.

Doing Capitalism in the Inovation Economy, written by William Janeway

Instead Janeway made himself and others great fortunes by investing in technology. He worked at Warberg Pincus, invested in start-ups, buyouts and turnarounds, his firm helped create BEA Systems and he wrote his own book called Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy. Janeway took a $54 million investment and within six years turned it into a $6.5 billion payout sold the night before the Internet stock crash of 2000, which he luckily predicted through his expertise and knowledge of economics. In regards to his book it is “more than a memoir, however, his book is an example-rich theory of the necessary tensions that create innovation and growth” (Hardy). Janeway is now teaching his book back in Cambridge, England.

One of Janeway’s main arguments is that the government is not taking advantage of technology nor advancing it in the ways that they should. He is critical of the government for the shortage in technology advancement:

A bigger part of the problem is that a lot of people in government don’t seem to think government can play a positive role. You could construct an interlocking laundry list of things for the government to invest in. The government has to be empowered on both the production and the consumption side of energy research. But you can’t even have that conversation in Congress today.

Janeway thinks that if the government invested more into technology that they would have the ability to improve many things. He comes up with a list of ways in which the government can help with and through technology:

• Play a role in areas like natural language processing and machine learning
  
• It should be funding universities
• Giving contracts to big companies that can build things, like General Electric
• It should be buying and testing products

 Janeway sees the potential in the technology of today in many places. He says that this is the beginning of the “information technology revolution.” Start up companies are filling the Silicon Valley and now is the time to take those companies bigger. The government needs to not be so choosy with their support of these companies and they need to expand their support. Back in the 1950’s and ’60s the Department of Defense played a helpful role to the electronics industry, which Janeway believes needs to take place again. Now is the time to take the approximately 40 start-ups valued around $1 billion in Silicon Valley and make them into something beneficial for our world. 

The world of electronic text analysis is a lot more confusing and complex than I could have ever imagined. To be completely honest I don’t understand it at all from the first three chapters of Introducing Electronic Text Analysis by Svenja Adolphs. There was a lot of information regarding a corpus so I went to the glossary in the back of the book to help me understand corpora and this is what I found:

A collection of linguistic data, such as written texts or transcribed speech, that has been designed to be representative of a particular language domain or variety, with its size and content having been carefully taken into account. This careful design and consideration of representativeness differentiates corpora from other electronic text resources, such as TEXT ARCHIVES. Most contemporary corpora exist in a machine readable form so that patterns of occurrence of lexical and grammatical items can be derived through computer-aided analysis.

Upon reading this it became slightly easier for me to understand the reading. Amongst corpora, in this chapter Adolphs also discussed data representation and storage and gave an outline of contemporary electronic text resources.

In the next chapter, Adolphs presented some basic techniques in electronic data analysis. Those techniques include

• The calculation of basic information about a text or a collection of texts
• Word lists
• Keywords and key sequences

These techniques “inform the research process” by generating hypotheses, testing hypotheses and facilitating manual processes. The thing that I appreciated the most from the three chapters we read were the keywords. I thought it was interesting to see a list of words that are frequently used and to see how many times they are used. The health professional corpus had “the” at the top of their list appearing 156,229 times. Its obviously impossible but I think it would be interesting if somebody monitored my speaking and told me what words I used most frequently and how many times I used them. 

Keyword searches are very useful in my life. Its an amazing shortcut that aids everybody in so many ways. The search bar on my iphone is my greatest friend and in some ways it is similar to the keywords that Adolphs discusses, just not as complex as that. The search bar on my phone allows me to type in anything and it will search my entire phone for that word and if it isn’t found then it has the ability to take me to the internet to find it there. My iphone is my own version of a corpus and my search bar is my personal text analysis.

The beginning of this article brings on a sad realization and puts a very artificial spin on the population of our world. The obsession with material items has significantly increased over the years and as Richard Lanham suggests in The Economics of Attention, has become out of control. We are rapidly destroying the beauty in our world and replacing it with artificiality. People love stuff just too much but there is something beneficial to our increased need for stuff.

“There have never been so many art galleries, so many symphony orches- tras, so sophisticated a life for the senses and the sensitive. And never have the actual physical locations of the world been so venerated or visited.”

Our need for stuff has enriched our sense of beauty as well. People are taking advantage of the beauty of nature by taking trips into the unknown and discovering what the world has to offer. Tourism has significantly grown in the past few years. Vacation destinations are popping up all over the world in unexpected yet amazing places.The world is being experienced and appreciated in ways that it never has been before.

We all love vacations and beautiful locations and the advancement of tourism is great but that doesn’t excuse our excessive need for stuff. The advancement in technology is a major contributor to the increased need for stuff. It is hard for us to turn down the stuff when it has now become so easily accessible to us. Everything is too easy now.

“Actual physical location threatens to evaporate everywhere we look. In- formation, we are everywhere taught, has annihilated distance. Surgeons can cut you open from a thousand miles away. Facsimile Las Vegas casinos deliver Rome and New York on the same daily walk. You don’t have to go to the office to go to the office. You can shop in your kitchen and go to school in your liv- ing room.And, sadly enough, when you actually do go out shopping, one mall seems much like another.”

Why do we want all this stuff? Multiple reasons. Its fun, it makes us feel good and look good, its efficient and helpful, the list goes on and on but do we actually need all this stuff? No. Back in the day people lived happily without many of the things that we have now. A certain television comes to mind. There is a girl that can’t be much older than 12 saying to her younger sister how she is so lucky because she has it easy these days because she can watch movies on her tv wherever she wants and she had to watch her movies in the living room. The explanation is bad but the idea of the commercial is mocking our crazy advancements in technology and our need for new and innovative stuff. Our intake of stuff could be and should be cut down and the simpler things in life need to make a comeback.

To achieve the title of a great orator one must be a “good man.” Cato originally introduces the idea of a “good man” and Quintilian takes it and runs with it in chapter one of book twelve of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory  outlining the makings of a “good man.” The driving thought behind Cato’s “good man” is that a man filled with evil will only speak evil things that are damaging, not encouraging to the world. Quintilian takes it a step farther by saying that no man that is not “good” can be labeled with the title of orator because the makings of a man come out in his speech.

Quintilian wrote an extensive list of demands thata man must meet in order to be  called an orator. The idea of a “good man” is the overriding theme of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory because the characteristics of a “good man” cover every characteristic that Quintilian requires of a good orator. To be a “good man” he must expel all wisps of evil from his mind and “then, and then only, when it is free and master of itself, and when no other object harasses and distracts its attention, will it be able to keep in view the end to which it is devoted.” Quintilian strictly lays out the boundaries for an orator and in doing so he compiles a list of true orators and fortunately, Cicero was approved:

 As proofs of his integrity, may it be mentioned his consulship in which he conducted himself with so much honor, his honorable administration of his province, his refusal to be one of the 20 commissioners, and during the civil wars, which fell with great severity on his times, his uprightness of mind, which was never swayed, either by hope or by fear, from adhering to the better party or the supporters of the commonwealth.

He is thought by some to have been deficient in courage, but he has given an excellent reply to this charge when he says that he was timid, not in encountering dangers, but in taking precautions against them, an assertion which he proved true at his death, to which he submitted with the noblest fortitude

Quintilian speaks very highly of Cicero throughout his writing, admiring his “eloquence” and his finely tuned passages. Some of Cicero’s finest work is portrayed in Against Catiline. Cicero delivered these speeches in 63 BC to the Roman Senate.

The purpose of Cicero’s well-delivered and finely articulated words was to warn the Roman government of Catiline’s plan to overthrow them. At a time when eloquence and rationale could have been abandoned Cicero maintained the attributes of a “good man” and presented a fine speech. The Catiline orations are an attack on Catiline to expose his extensive plans to win himself a title and take over the government. Cicero subtly embarrasses Catiline by asking him, “do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it?” Cicero is carefully yet powerfully attacking Catiline and his evilness.

Cicero successfully lives up to Quintilian’s description of an orator, not only through his spoken words but also the actions that his words are taking. “As long as you, O Catiline, plotted against me while I was the consul elect, I defended myself not with a public guard, but by my own private diligence.” Catiline was proven an evil man, never fit to be an orator. Cicero caught Catiline in his acts and unveiled the evilness that he held within. Together, Cicero and Catiline, respectively, portray Quintilian’s idea of a “good man” and his idea of an “evil man.” Catiline did not make for an orator because evil thoughts filled his mind and the violence that he expelled in response to Cicero confirmed this. A man’s speech is defined by his personality and Cicero maintained his roll as a “good man” that Quintilian so believed in, “in speaking of Cicero, have often said, according to the common mode of speech, and shall continue to say, that he was a perfect orator.”

Two of the world’s greatest philosophers grapple with the workings of rhetoric to give it better meaning. Plato’s approach is more unique in the way that he stages a conversation between two characters, Socrates and Phaedrus, to hash out the characteristics of rhetoric in Phaedrus. Aristotle on the other hand has a more standard approach with three books on rhetoric each containing separate chapters. Although their approaches differ, their ultimate ideas regarding rhetoric are fairly similar.

Both philosophers relate rhetoric to different fields such as science and art to make the idea clearer. Rhetoric is put side by side with law and the justice system in both excerpts as well. Saying that a judge “must decide for himself all such points as the law-giver has not already defined for him.” Aristotle ties this into rhetoric by saying that the decision of successful rhetoric is very much the same as the decision that a judge makes. Meaning, there are rules to be followed but ultimately the decision between “important or unimportant, just or unjust” is left to the person at whom the issue is directed.

Aristotle also states that “the modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory.” To Aristotle, rhetoric is centered around the persuasiveness of the deliverer. Confidence and conviction can force somebody into the idea of rhetoric when it may not truly be present. Rhetoric must be taken with a grain of salt.

Plato’s take on rhetoric included many references to outside sources including Polus and Theodorus. The discussion being had between Phaedrus and Socrates is filled with ideas all across the boards. They jump from the rhetorician to medicine. Socrates links medicine to rhetoric in this way: “medicine has to define the nature of the body and rhetoric of the soul.” Rhetoric is to medicine as conviction or virtue are to health, and medicine and food are to words and training.

Plato and Aristotle present multiple different ideas on rhetoric throughout their analyses but their connections between law and rhetoric and medicine and rhetoric fairly accurately divulge the real workings of the main idea. Plato sums up rhetoric fairly accurately at the end of his excerpt:

“The conclusion: A man must be able to know and define and denote the subjects of which he is speaking, and to discern the natures of those whom he is addressing. Until a man know the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to divide them until they can no longer be divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul and discover the different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature – until he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading. Such is the view which is implied in the whole preceding argument.”

Ultimately the idea that both philosophers settle on is the strength of the persuasiveness of the deliverer of the rhetoric.

“A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium” written by Danah Boyd explores the meaning behind the word blog. She starts the article by giving the word blog multiple defintions including a formal definition, a mass media definition and a practitioner definition.