DigitalPenny

Yesterday T**, my five year old asked me if she could use my computer to type the word "ant", which she had learned in school. She told me she had worked on the computer at school to spell the word, and now she needed more practice. Being the nurturer I am, I sat her at my desk, opened MS Word, asked her what color she wanted the alphabets to be ("PURPLE"), made the font size 48, and let her take control.

First she had a bit of trouble locating the letters, so I guided her just a bit. Afterwards, she was sitting here just chuckling and giggling in awe. She was extremely excited that she was able to use the computer at home. For her, this was more interactive than the pbskids website that she plays on sometimes, where most of what children do there is point and click.

So after typing the first "ant", she exclaimed, "How do I do it again?" I showed her the ENTER key. The cursor moved to the next line. "How do I erase it?" was her next statement. I showed her the BACKSPACE key. She urged me to go find something else to do, and I did. Upon returning, she had typed the word down three pages. She looked at me and said, "How do I print it?" Well, we had a small problem; we couldn't print from my printer because I hadn't loaded the software yet. So I suggested that we move the file and then print from the network. She seemed a little frustrated....Of course she would be, what was I talking about? "Network"? What does that mean to a five year old?
_________________________

Then she wanted to know whether she could take a copy to her teacher, Mrs. Grossman. I assured her that she could. But before we moved the file to print it, I asked if she wanted to type her name across the top of the first page. "Yea, sure!" she remarks. So she spent another five minutes locating the letters to type her first and last name. In her locating the letters of her name, she would look at the monitor, spell her first or second name aloud (whichever she worked on), look at the monitor for a missing letter, then hit the key of the missing letter. She repeated these steps until she had typed both her first and last name.

Afterwards, I saved her "ant" file to a home shared drive, and we ran to the basement to print. She was so energized after doing that, she had to eat a bowl of ice cream. I felt good because I had a chance to see a side of T** that I don't always get to see.

Now that's motherhood!

Posted by Digitalpenny at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The field of Technical and Professional Writing covers a wide range of topics. I've been looking around to see where the commonalities dwell. So here's a list of the different course topics I've seen that are offered at the doctorate level of course study:

• Document Design


• Instructional Design


• Organizational Communication


• Linguistic Analysis


• History and Theory of Rhetoric


• Documentation and Project Management


• Language Issues in International Communication


• Online Information Design


• Grammar and Editing for Professionals


• Textual Mediation


• Digital Literacy


• Media and Technology Policy


• Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum


• Visual Rhetoric


• Digital Culture


• Technical Communication


• Rhetoric of Technology


• Knowledge Management


• Cultural Differences in the Workplace


• Intellectual Property


• Indexing and Information Retrieval


• Computer Applications in Technical Communication


• Writing for Publication


• Research Methods in Technical Communication and Rhetoric


• Usability Testing


• Online Publishing


• Discourse and Technology


• Writing Proposals and Grant Applications


• Writing Manuals and Instructional Materials


• Organization and Administration of Writing Programs

Anyhow, that's just a few programs out there, and their numbers (programs offering a doctorate in technical and professional writing and rhetoric) are few. I just thought this was interesting.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 04:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are so many different things that affect the direction in which our lives move...people, objects, events, activities. They all count. I guess we have to locate those things that make us feel ardent and complete. We have to even locate places whether they are spiritual, physical, or emotional where we are comfortable enough to be ourselves. Jacqueline Royster acknowledges that

Afrafeminist ideologies acknowledge a role for caring, for passionate attachments.... [They] include concerns centered as well in our disciplinary and transdiciplinary needs to know in keeping with typical scholarly practices and pursuits. (2000)

Posted by Digitalpenny at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today it is cold and wet outside, and inside it's cold too. When I awoke this morning I had a bad feeling. I wanted to take everything I knew and owned and pack it under a rock. Often I feel like a rock, sitting in the middile of nothingness; as time goes past me, everything surrounding me changes, but I'm not changing, I'm just a rock, sitting there waiting for someone or something to pick me up and throw me so that I might feel alive.

Being alive is feeling the warmth of the sun on your face and the rays of sunlight all over your body, especially while walking along a beach front where the temperature is just right. The sound of the waves rolling back and forth along the shore and the sound of the seagulls flying overhead or nearby is what I want to hear. I want to be in a place where I can have peace mind and a tranquil spirit. I want everything to just stop stop for a moment, and I want to breath...to exhale. And I know that sounds cliche, but that's what I want. Often I refer to this as my needing a calgon moment, but I only shower; I don't take baths.

I just needed to tell somebody what I was feeling. This frustration is looming over me, and I just want to push it away. I really hate when I feel like this, but writing it down helps in more than one way.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I sat here at my computer to write a memo, which I will probably never pass on, concerning a course that I'm reading and writing about, it but hasn't been approved by certain members of the committee; thus, I believe this is why this course has not shown up on my scheldule of courses in which I am enrolled. See, I'm no longer clear about what my mission is for obtaining this particular doctorate because it seems that I've been tossed the fate of the "crab mentality." It is often said in the circles of Black folk that we are like crabs in a bucket. As I get older, I'm beginning to see that more and more. Are we out to help each other or damn each other. I sat out to get this degree for three reasons: 1) to get a job in academia so that I might help my fellow people of color transition from academe to business (doing writing), 2) to be satisfied in knowing that I would be the frist child of my father's nine children and of my father's brother's children to graduate with a higher education degree, and 3) to know that I would have served as a role model for my own children so that they might think about going to college, and someday to graduate not only with a degree, but to also understand that in life, we have to continue to educate ourselves. So, as I sit here contemplating whether or not to turn in this memo along with the "outstanding proposal," I'm wondering what's my agenda and goal for obtaining this degree, especially if its course has already been planned and paved for me. I mean...is it my decision what I study or someone else's? I have a goal in mind. I had a goal before I stepped foot on this side of the earth. But unfortunately someone has taken it upon themselves to committ road blocks, so that I might grow differently than my original planned path. I'm not interested in traveling down a road for which I feel that I have a nonconformist attitude about. I already understand that I am this color. I already understand that I am a woman. I've been a southerner all my life. I have not lived a life of riches nor wealth. I have what I've got because I've worked hard; I've labored. This has been my struggle. I'm getting too old to play games with people, and aside from that, life is too short. AND I have children, whom I want to watch them grow up. Every moment that I spend doing research or reading or in meetings or out socializing is a moment of time less that I'll have to spend time with my children. I am committed to that...to watching them grow. They will never be children once they grow up, and I need to be here for them. But I'd like to have a career too. My immediate family has sacrificed so much for me to be here; I can't turn back. So screw the committe and this policy of rewriting this proposal. Guess I'll never turn it in. I won't rewrite it until someone bitches a fit over it, and by that time, I will probably have moved on. Grade submitted or not.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning or should I say today is a good day. I was able to import all of my MT entries from a different blog into this one, AND my comments imported as well. I'm so happy that I didnt' lose anything. Isn't that wonderful?

I have been working on this off and on for the past two or three weeks. It's hard to get in computer time when you've got homework, reading, your kids homework, washing clothes, house cleaning, paying bills, and afterschool activities to do....oh, and did I forget, taking care of the husband. None of this includes taking time for myself.

Anyhow, if you are moving from MT to MT, what MT claims is that you only have to "transfer your export[ed] file to a directory called import in the MT application directory." Well, what they don't specify is that you should:

1. Create the categories that you want to import in your new weblog, before you import anything.
2. Ensure that the file you are importing is a text [.txt] file.
3. Break the import file, if necessary into several different category files.
4. Upload or FTP your text files to the import directory in your MT weblog. (Ok, so they do specify this one.)
5. Once you've uploaded the text file(s) into your import directory, check to ensure that the first line of each file does not have some kind of funky ascii text infront of the word "Author". If this is the case, delete the text, then save the file. Even if you don't separate the text files, this is the most important thing to check to ensure the files import properly.
6. On your MT publishing platform, import the files.
7. Rebuild your entire set of entries.

This is not a bible for exporting/importing from one MT place to different one, but it was what I did, and it worked.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

McCloud, Scott. “From The Vocabulary of Comics.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Bedford/St. Martins. SIU Press. (2004). 195-208

Summary:
McCloud seems to posit the idea that images, or icons as he would refer to them, are complexities that are drawn so well that they tend to imitate what we would consider real or realistic or reality. He argues that because our very existence hinges on the fact that we create everything to look like something else, we've seen or imagined, that we recall sketches or fragments of those things that are real (that we can touch, see, and feel). What gets lost in McCloud's theory is the attention that he gives to "voice." How real-like or real is the voice of the icon (character(s) illustrated within a comic)? He insists that the voice is established according to the simplicity or complexity of the illustration. That the voice that you hear while you read is just as much a part of the scene within a frame and is as much a part of the overall story, which enables the reader to unconsciously interact with the text. Yes, McCloud draws on the fact that cartoons are universal; that they evoke emotion; that the reader comes to it with a set of expectations; that the illustrator and story writer relies of the reader's experience. But how is it that McCloud gets his reader to read the text juxtaposing images? He attaches a simple drawing to a set of words that seem simple, but are complex in meaning.

Key Words:
icon (197); pictorial icons...meaning is fixed and absolute, invisible ideas, pictures...meaning is fluid and variable, abstract, real, real-life, realistic (198); amplification through simplification; essential meaning...can amplify (201); universality (202);

What Fascinated Me:
I just didn't realize that there was theory around cartooning.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Work Read:
Barry, Ann Marie Seward. "The Nature and Power of Images.” Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.

Summary:
All images embody a language; this is not a language that is man-made; instead, it is a language that is innate, evoked, sequential, and universal. This is the argument that Barry makes in this chapter, Chapter 3. She begins with cave art and comics, a discussion she continues with from Chapter 2. She warns that there is a problem when people assume that the visual needs the verbal in order for a person to construct meaning from the visual. Earlier, when I read Chapter 2, I felt that Barry argued that mentally, when we see an image, that image evokes emotion, which would not be as easily conjured, if we had not heard or read words (whether those words were abstract or concrete). Likewise, she argues that the more concrete the word, the better we are at envisioning an image. In this chapter, Barry takes up the theory of Scott McCloud from his, Understanding Comics (1993) and from Will Eisner’s, Comics and Sequential Art (1985). McCloud contends that icons or images impel a reader/viewer to make meaning of something that the illustrator has drawn to promote reality and simplicity. In other words, what is made simple for the reader/viewer tends to become a catalyst for meaning across universals because each reader/viewer, regardless of class, race, gender, or cultural preference, faces no boundaries when viewing or reading and attempting to create meaning based on what s/he sees in an image.

This is the first hint that the language of images is universal. She juxtaposes Eisner with McCloud by commenting that Eisner brings to this language a way of seeing sequences (as in the sequencing of picture frames that promote a beginning and end of one slotted movement within an overall film score), which demonstrates to the reader/viewer that delivery of the language has essence. This reminds me of a book that a past professor brought to a class to show how classical rhetoricians had once drawn examples of how to gesture and deliver messages when speaking; Barry creates this point as well by providing an illustration from Eisner’s book that captures, for example “anger” and illustrates about seven gestures that an artist uses to illustrate this meaning. Point being, the drawings are so simplistic that they carry symbolic meaning and evokes emotion in some shape or form for anyone who looks at it. What is important to note in this chapter too is the fact that Barry skillfully asserts that political and commercial motivation is used, especially through use of mediated images (120) to manipulate the reader/viewer.

Key Words:
Affective identification (111); perceptual activity, aesthetic perception, illetectual pursuit (112); perceptual principle of good continuation (114); proxemics [4 comfort zones: intimate, personal, social, public], mediated images, trust (115); deep structure, perceptual patterns, open system, perceptual logic, principles of organization (116); perceptual process [logic that seeks coherence] (117); types of assimilation: holistic-116, cultural-118, associational 118 (120); Eco-recurring typified perceptual processes digitized to skew perception (121); color-the “core to our entire being” (127); personal associations-color (130); light, angle, size, grain (134)

What Fascinated Me:
I was astounded to see reference to Eisner and McCloud, two authors that I’ve been reading as well. After reading Barry's third chapter, I feel that I'm on the right path for realizing how meaning is made for the reader/viewer of images. Also Barry provides a way for "seeing" (McCloud) the language of images as she explains how the "sound of visualizaitons" (119) are seen not heard in American Sign Language (ASL). That signers use certiain figures of speech like "synecdoche...metaphor...and symbolism" (119). That deaf poets, "who follow oral traditions of poetry based on acoustic values..." imitate sound patterns such as "rhyme, alliteration, assonance, tone, onomatopoeia...metaphors, similes, and the like..." (119). Barry is also interested in connections that form perceptual patterns and in how the sequencing of perceptual patterns are pieced together to form images.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (9530)

Work Read:
Barry, Ann Marie Seward. "The Nature and Power of Images.” Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.

Summary:
Because of the manner in which we perceive images via motion and affordances, those particular characteristics that we remember about an object or event because we find them either useful or dangerous, we become what we see. This is the claim that Barry makes in Chapter 2 of Visual Intelligence. She does this by discussing how Chaos Theory plays a vital role in one’s ability to recognize patterns and how affordances have provided us with the means to remember specific characteristics about an object or event because of the way we are able to distinguish one task or tool from another. Barry insists that the visual is dynamic and not static.

That we always see things consciously and unconsciously via images. It is the “visual metaphor” (71) which bring forth creative processes that allow us to see and reflect on images. We naturally see images as a way of establishing pictures in our mind. In doing so, we mentally connect patterns or we piece together images so that we are able to envision the whole image. Verbal and visual metaphors assist us in constructing images by association. Reader expectation, experiences, and emotions can all be captured when an image is placed before the reader.

Key Words:
Chaos Theory (71, 100); visual metaphors (71); verbal metaphors (74); bivalent logic (74); affordances (79); perception (86); interference pattern (95); presence of the interpreter (96); “Eiconics” [Kenneth Boulding] (99)

What Fascinated Me:
It was interesting to note how her description of Chaos Theory, which in this case was relative to visual imagery, reminded me of Genre Theory. What is chaotic is that there is constant, dynamic movement when viewing the image (whether mentally or physically), which is often initiated by the reader/viewer, that recurs. That this chaos can recur when the reader/viewer hears words that provoke thoughts of images, and the chaos can recur when the reader/viewer sees an image and recalls on memory to assist in forming the metaphor. This chaos is constantly recurring under social and situational contexts.

Barry also devotes a small blurb to comics and cave art. In it, she invites readers on a quest to recognize that the visual came before the verbal, and that images are apt to have the seer feel emotional concepts about the work before they are able to produce the words or even recognize which words can assist in them being able to verbally describe the meaning of the image.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Work Read:
Arnheim, Rudolph. “Pictures, Symbols, and Signs.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Bedford/St. Martins. SIU Press. (2004).

Summary:
Arnheim extends the assertions that I've read in Eisner, McCloud, Barry, Kress and van Leeuwen, and Mitchell. It is that we locate meaning in images based on our expectations, experiences, and emotions. Feeding his readers with what he clearly defines as two levels of "abstractions," which is how the viewer of an image completes the image by providing information (expectations, experiences, and emotion) to make the image seem more realistic, Arnheim posits that there are two levels of abstraction, "Image Scale" and "Experience Scale." No matter how abstract the image, there must be some "complexity of form" (150) in the image that allows the viewer to locate a realistic presence whereby the viewer can bring to the image his/her experience; this is representative of the Image Scale. In addition to that, the Experienc Scale enables the viewer to cognitively produce factual information so that the image becomes real; that it is not just realistic.

Key Words:
visual qualities (139); abstractness (139); perception (141); abstract patterns (144); pictorial analogues (147); Image Scale, Experience Scale (150)

What Fascinated Me:
What is not clear to me is how Arnheim, toward the end of the text (149), in his drawing/explaination of abstractions, drops the emotional part. Absolutly nothing in this essay fascinated me, aside from the fact that Arnheim references a picture, drawn by Rene Magritte. It is the same picture that Scott McCloud references in his essay, "From the Vocabulary of Comics." The difference is that McCloud actually analyzes the picture, and he translates the French. So if you had not a French vocabulary, or a mental image of the picture itself, what Arnheim says becomes completely foreign aside from the fact that he tells you that the image is a pipe with an inscription, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or as McCloud translates it, "This is not a pipe." I'm not sure why Arnheim begins his discussion by separating pictures, signs, and symbols; he all but drops references to these words after moving to the second subheading, "Images to Suit Thier Functions," after which, he takes up the word image.

Arnheim also has a way of using language to provoke sexual references when discussing images. My belief is that he wants to exploit, in some way, how images might conjur emotion, but he does not give enough attention to this.

Posted by Digitalpenny at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)