Digital Rhetorics

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Digital Rhetorics

• E-literacy

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todays menu

• Working with the blog
• Practical info kompendium, course plan updated
• Digital rhetorics eliteracy
• Lanham (ST)
• Zappen (Maj)
• Intro to literacy (ST)
• eliteracy (all)
• Next week

http//ddrtE06.blogspot.com/
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Powerpoint is Evil (Tufte)
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Introduction to literacy

• Writing with letters (Kress)
• Ability to use language (speak, read,write)
• Importance of illiteracy
• Linked to education
• Historical evolution beyond mechanisms of
  reading and writing and into social-cultural
  situations (literacies of everything, i.e. Media
  literacy)
• Information gap

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eliteracy

• We can define eLiteracy simply as referring to
  the awarenesses, skills, understandings, and
  reflective approaches necessary for an individual
  to operate comfortably in information-rich and
  IT-enabled environments. (...)
• Much of the existing debate over eLiteracy has
  focused on these aspects, and has been driven by
  IT specialists or librarians, the former coming
  from very practical concerns with computer and
  later IT literacy, the latter influenced by the
  evolution from the 1980s of bibliographic
  instruction and user education into
  information literacy. Much of the debate has
  concentrated on rather narrow questions
  concerning competing lists of competences of
  either IT or information literacy.
• Editorial by Martin, A and Ashworth, S (2004)
  Welcome to the Journal of eLiteracy!.

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eLiteracy

• first, to mean those reading and writing
  processes specific to electronic texts (by texts,
  I mean a whole range of digitally encoded
  materials -- words, sounds, pictures, video
  clips, simulations, etc.)
• second, to signify eliteracies as in those
  socio-economic elites whose interests might be
  served by electronic literacies of one sort or
  another
• Kaplan, N. (1995) E-literacies Politexts,
  Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the
  Late Age of Print http//www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/
  1995/mar/kaplan.html

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Literacy changes with time

• Conventions develop, no natural
• A brief history of reading (http//www.liveink.com
  /whatis/history.htm )
• Observable in early writing of children (ex.
  about not separating words, writing as it
  sounds, etc.)
• Each system has particular affordances
  (alphabetic writing the most studied writing on
  a screen less understood, image dominates)

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An example the sentence (Kress)

• One of the units of language that you can study
  and need to understand, together with for example
  the word
• Subject Object Verb
• XVII century, in English writing was in the
  social-cultural making, printing press ubiquitous
  in big cities

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Our example Miltons Areopagitica

• Good and evil we know in the field of this World
  growup together almost inseparably and the
  knowledge ofgood is so involved and interwoven
  with the knowledgeof evill, and in so many
  cunning resemblances hardlyto be discernd, that
  those confuse seeds which wereimposd on Psyche
  as an incessant labour to cull out,and sort
  asunder, were not more intermixt. It wasfrom out
  the rinde of one apple tasted, that theknowledge
  of good and evill as two twins cleavingtogether
  leapt forth into the World. And perhaps thisis
  that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good
  andevill, that is to say of knowing good by
  evill.

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Our example Anna Trapnells religious tract

• I am Anna Trapnel, the daughter of William
  Trapnel, Shipwright, who lived in Poplar, in
  Stepney Parish my father and mother living and
  dying in the profession of the Lord Jesus my
  mother died nine years ago, the last words she
  uttered upon her death-bed, were these to the
  Lord for her daughter. Lord! Double thy Spirit
  upon my child These words she uttered with much
  eagerness three times, and spoke no more I was
  trained up to my book and writing, I have walked
  in fellowship with the Church-meeting at
  All-hallows (whereof Mr. John Simpson is a
  Member) for the space of about four years.

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Sentence

• It is a socially produced tool
• Means different things for each of them
• MIlton to show learnedness, hugely complex
  clause-structure not derived from daily
  interaction, highly special environment, educated
  elites mixed the grammar of Greek and Latin with
  the English structures of public oratory
• Trapnel lower class-English, speech of the
  parents, speech of the priest, close to speech,
  no training in classic grammar

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Sentence

• is shaped by the need of the textual structures
  which fulfil the social
• A sentence cannot just be described in
  grammatical terms, language is always socially
  produced
• We still can see the inheritance of both styles
  in our current writing
• my assumption is that syntactically and
  textually writing may be becoming more
  speech-like once again, while in its
  visual/graphic/spatial dimensions there is a move
  in the opposite direction, away from speech.
  (73)

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Sentence online

• Lets see an example

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For next week

• You need to begin thinking about the academic
  writing genre from now on and relate it to your
  own processes, the lecture will be about this, to
  get ready you can read
• This is Not an Article - Just Some Food for
  Thought on How to Write One, by Carsten
  Soerensen (http//se.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/r
  esearch/scientific_work/notart.pdf)
• Introduction about Research Papers at
  http//www.writing.ku.edu/students/docs/research.s
  html
• For the exercises we will work with Social
  Software. Is it a new kind of literacy? Read
  Bryan Alexanders article (http//www.educause.edu
  /apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp?bhcp1 ) and get
  familiar with some social software if you arent
  already (i.e. make and account and browse for a
  few days in flickr, myspace, Albino Gorilla, etc.)