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Showing posts from March, 2019

Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities

Sharing digital resources for research is a kind of gift. It's also a way of embracing and expressing the infinite reproducibility of digital resources that doesn't apply to physical ones. For those who might be interested, I just came across Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities . It's available free digitally and has entries on History, Principles, Applications, and Production, Dissemination, and Archiving.  I hope you find it as helpful as I am!

Updated Post - The Problem/Potential Solutions of Academic Textbooks

          The question that I try to answer here is “what can writing studies do to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” and “what can we do as teachers to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” I see these questions as worth answering because, basically, academic publishers damage public good in a direct exchange for higher and higher profit margins. When I first decided to get involved in this battle, I didn’t realize it, but there are two separate and distinct fronts on which the battle is being fought: the first front is academic textbook publishing, and the second is scholarly article and book publishing. Though similar, both fronts on this battle have their own separate problems and potential solutions. This paper will focus on what instructors can do to combat detrimental publishing practices in relation to academic textbooks.             Regardless of whether open-access textbooks are viable, clearly, something needs to be done about the current US college textbook sy

Design from/for Systems of Boundary Objects

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Design from/for Systems of Boundary Objects: Retrofitting Obsolescence & Encounters at Interfaces This post traces the development of my term project, through in-class planning, an encounter with seemingly obsolete research media, a discussion of digital rubbish, applications of the concept in ideas and pedagogy, some theoretical groundings, and a brief view forward. As I've stated in a previous post , my project this semester centers on the idea of retrofitting obsolescence. In simplest terms, this is an attempt to understand not just how technology and technology use changes over time, but specifically how users encounter old and seemingly useless technology in new an innovative ways. If retrofitting is a way of troubleshooting and engineering to give old objects (and possibly ideas) new meaning, and obsolescence is the state of being outdated or no longer useful, then retrofitting obsolescence is a special kind of creativity. It is a kind of giving that breathes new life