I struggled to write a post that encapsulated perhaps what cannot be so tidy/condensed: conference happenings. The shortform blog post was turning into an epitaph as soon as it was being written. If I could break the rectangular confines of this textbox, this list would appear more scattered. Perhaps on a seismograph, as constellations with varying intensity, as electricity passing through conductor points, as a comic with thought and dialogue bubbles, as areas of increasing/decreasing temperature on a heat map, or as a map of a territory in the making…As is, though, it is a [nested? network? worknet?] list:

thinking about the price of participation in the field (as the typecast poor graduate student)

search the Twitter conversations

attended: Resonance, Refinements, and Rip-offs (an awesome session by Jody Shipka and Mary Hocks) – condensed as keywords/phrases: sonic literacy, (social) resonance, thing power, agency as affectivity, embodied knowledge, auditory imagination, traces/tracing found artifacts, opening blackboxes through multimodal composing

attended: Multimedia and the Teaching of English, 1920-1970: A Distant Reading of English Journal and CCC (an awesome session by Jason Palmeri and Ben McCorkle) – condensed as keywords/phrases: pre-history of computers and composition, long history of multimedia and multimodality through technologies terms, distant reading sees field emerging, “what can we learn about new media by studying past moments when media were new?”, bar graphs, word clouds as “dated”, distant to close reading through data as heuristic

 

 

 

 

attended: Archives and Other Multi-Literate Practices (an awesome session by Claire Lauer and Colleen Reilly) – condensed as keywords/phrases: Digital Methods Initiative (DMI – coming from sociology and interest in Bruno Latour) and their tools wiki – particularly Issue Crawler (makes networks), take ownership over terms as a field, bar graphs, clusters of influence, MLA job info lists as data to mine/visualize

noticed (in the sessions I attended):

• distant reading and data visualization trending (?) – what is the exigence?
• prominence of bar graphs as data visualized (+/-: what is made visible/what remains unseen) – there were moments when the bar graphs felt like a gate to me (in my position); instead of making visible, they made me aware of that which I can not/do not see because I don’t know enough
• questions about what becomes of these visualizations/data sets – focus is on making visible and connectivity, but heard gestures toward “edited collections” (slow, black and white paper renderings) of work which seems counter-intuitive to the nature of the methodology

place/space/time re-presented: