Discuss with someone in class the following elements:

Arrangement
Title(s)
Theme(s)
Purpose(s)

Posted: April 28th, 2008 under daily notes, in-class activity.
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A sacred place is a site that has a spiritual significance for a nation, a people, a community, or even an individual. Sacred places often inspire awe, mystery, and a reverential connection with a charismatic figure or with a key moment of history. Some sacred places are well known in major religions, such as the holy cities Mecca to Muslims, and Bethlehem to Christians. Some public sites become sacred to a community because they were the scene of an enormous catastrophe, such as the site of the destroyed World Trade Center or the battlefield at Gettysburg that Lincoln regarded as hollowed ground; or the scene of a great moral achievement, such as the site of Martin Luther King’s 1965 civil rights demonstration in Selma, Alabama.

One person’s sacred space may be far different from another’s–for example, one person may feel a sense of awe in visiting Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, while another may experience a similar emotion in visiting Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. But sacred places need not be public sites. They can be places we privately consider sacred–where we go for solace, serenity, transcendence, or perhaps sheer isolation from the world.

Read Stephen Dunn’s “The Sacred.” And then think of your own sacred space, a place that has the beauty, and mystery of a poem. Perhaps it is a place where you achieved an epiphany. Describe your own sacred space(s). Why is this your sacred place? Have you ever photographed this place? What part of the sacred space would you photograph if you had to choose?

Posted: April 21st, 2008 under daily notes.
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MEMO
TO:DEVON FITZGERALD
FROM: GROUP MEMBERS
RE: UPDATE ON BOOK COVER

DATE: April 16, 2008

Description: Describe book cover, explain the various elements: image, text, color, font, any other details like blurbs, barcodes, etc. How did you decide on this design? Why this design? How do you think the design will make readers want to read the book? What themes from the text are you using in your design? BE SPECIFIC!

Group Dynamics: How has the collaborative effort worked? Were specific roles assigned to group members or did you collaborate on everything? Explain how this worked. In what ways have the group members contributed?

Process: Briefly describe the process of designing the book cover. Did you start with theme, with image, with color, with metaphor? Where did you go from there? How did you make your ideas come to life?

Other: Mention any particular challenges or successes you faced with this project. Or anything else you’d like me to know.

Posted: April 16th, 2008 under daily notes.
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Please note: the collaborative project has changed! It is now known as the collaborative book cover project as you will be designing book covers for if on a winter’s night a traveler. See Collaborative Project for more details!

Groups so far: Christina, Jamey, Kevin, Katie
Megan, Sam, Victoria
Marcus, Keely
Robert, Chris, Ed
Jovana, Saoirse, Lorraine, Krista

Posted: March 31st, 2008 under daily notes, multimedia in action.
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If on a winter’s night a traveller
Outside the town of Malbork
Leaning from the steep slope
Without fear of wind or vertigo
Looks down in the gathering shadow
In a network of lines that enlace
In a network of lines that intersect
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Around an empty grave
What story down there awaits its end?

For the sake of simplicity, let’s refer to each of these openings as a chapter. On the surface, each chapter seems completely different from all the other “chapters.” However, a closer look reveals that there are themes, ideas, symbols, imagery, etc. that recur from chapter to chapter. In other words, the chapters are not so different as they may first appear. As you continue to read think of the chapters relate to one another. Go beyond focusing on plot connections and concentrate on deeper connections. connections of ideas, symbols, themes, imagery, etc.

Posted: March 26th, 2008 under daily notes.
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“The novel I would most like to read at this moment,” Ludmilla explains, “should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves…” (92)

Somewhere the complete volume must exist; you look around, seeking it with your gaze, but promptly lose heart; in this office books are considered raw material, spare parts, gears to be dismantled and reassembled.  Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, from which there is nothing to be removed. (115)

The first sensations this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort. (132)

I asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her.  She said no, because here she doesn’t have a computer at her disposal.
She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. “That way I can have an already completed reading at hand,” Lotaria says, “with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggestions to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don’t pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book.” (186)

“No matter. The place where you’re going now is a model prison; it has a library stocked with all the latest books.”
“What about the banned books?”
“Where should banned books be if found if not in prison? (215)

Posted: March 26th, 2008 under daily notes.
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In the nineteenth century, household work–considered women’s work–was burdensome, inefficient, and stifling. In 1874, William Blackstone, a merchant and manufacturer of corn planters, from Bluffton, Indiana invented a washing machine for his wife. Within five years his invention became big business but it was the Industrial Revolution, which had succeeded in transforming the workplace that was the real impetus for transforming domestic work, the home itself and women’s roles through the introduction of household appliances, like the washing machines pictured below. Appliances helped liberate women from the isolation of the home, and it was believed these time-and-labor saving devices could provide women with greater access to the larger world.

Washing Machine Advertisements. 

However, household labor largely remains women’s work today. Look at the images from popular washing machine manufacturers’ websites. Click on the screenshots to visit the websites. What messages are being conveyed through the images? Do you think the “role of liberator” is still being used to sell appliances?

Posted: March 4th, 2008 under daily notes, multimedia in action.
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Identify one everyday technology and think about how it affects your daily life. Because one goal of this exercise is to help you begin to notice technologies that we usually take for granted, the object you choose should be non-electric and nonelectronic. Make a list of every technology you use during the day. Review your list and choose one object that surprises you the most. Write about this object using the following questions as guides:

What makes this object a technology?

How does it impact your daily life?

Why is it surprising to think of it as a technology?

How does this everyday object affect how you define a technology?

What makes something a technology?

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under daily notes, in-class activity, journal entry.
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What do you think of when you hear the word technology? Most people think of computers, cell phones, microwaves or cars. Yet an object does not have contain a motor or computer chip to qualify as a technology. We often take for granted many of the technologies that we use every day. Consider, for example, the zipper.

Before zippers came along, clothes and footwear were either laced up or held together by hooks and eyelets. According to Advertising in America what we know as the “zipper” was invented in 1893 by Whitcomb L. Judson. His design arranged hooks and eyes so that a slider could, with some difficulty, open and close them. With businessman Lewis Walker, Whitcomb formed the Universal Fastener Company and hired a young Swedish engineer, Gideon Sundback, to improve the original “clasp locker” design. In 1913 Sundback came up with a reliable zipper that he named the “hookless fastener.” Hookless fasteners gained popularity only after 1923, when the navy installed them on its flight suits and the B.F. Goodrich Company, which coined the term “zipper” began using them in boots.

To begin investigfating the impact of technology on our culture, we need to first become aware of the ordinary technologies that exist all around us and have been created to meet human needs. Beginning to see these technologies will help you respond to the key question of this project: How do technologies shape or define human activity? That is, how do technologies impact human life? Although we may not think much about the zipper, it is an innovation that has influenced the design and use of many products.

Posted: March 3rd, 2008 under daily notes.
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Identity Project Due w/Reflection

Convergence Culture One Presentation

Calendar/Schedule Update

Photo Essay Check-in (Questions, Due Dates etc)

HOMEWORK:

Posted: February 28th, 2008 under daily notes, schedule.
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