Digital Bibliography

The Computers and Writing Conference for 2010 begins in a week, and I’ve started in earnest shaping my presentation. I’ll be presenting with Derek Mueller, Stephen Krause, and Brian McNely on “Virtual Mentorship.” In a relatively blatant ploy to get you interested, here’s a link to the C&W201o program, and our panel description:

Our work inquires into virtual mentorship by positioning its theory, history, and practice in relationship to digital, networked writing platforms. Self-sponsored online writing practices and the informal circuits of influence they make possible, we contend, invite us to reimagine commonplace approaches to mentorship.

And here’s the description of my particular portion of the panel:

[Trauman] will offer a theoretical framework for an historical analysis of contemporary mentorship structures. He argues that as material modes for transferring disciplinary knowledge and skill, mentorship practices evolve as technologies change. Speaker #1 will contrast his experiences as a potter’s apprentice with his current status as a graduate student learning disciplinary practices. He argues that while certain mentorship practices in Rhetoric and Composition have waned, their necessity has not. As a result, various digital technologies have structured more distributed and disembodied notions of mentorship.

I know that as part of the presentation, I’m going to end up speaking about my own personal experience as an apprentice to a potter in Boulder, Colorado (technically, Longmont, but only technically). I spent almost two years studying  with him before opening my own pottery on the same rural property.

But I also want to talk about my own experiences as a graduate student in Rhet/Comp, and as a young scholar in Computers and Writing studies. I’ve encountered three great mentors along the way, and their roles as mentors are also relevant to my presentation.

And for the last part of my presentation, I’d like to arrive at the topic of how digital, networked tools both problematize and allow us to reimagine what mentorship means in contemporary writing studies.

There are several factors I’m going to try to consider:

First, why does this topic matter? Is there an on-going conversation in the our scholarship that I can tap into and forward? I haven’t really run into anything by happenstance, but I’m going to have to look in the literature about administration and new teacher training (if anyone has some good places to look, let me know!).

Second, I’m the only graduate student on the panel, so that status, to some degree, aligns me most closely with the mentee/apprentice role. And that’s great, because I’ll likely at least mention how I’ve depended plenty on each of my co-panelists blogs to help me think through my own role as a graduate student in our discipline, as well as a blogger focusing on computers and writing.

Third, when I think about the topic of mentorship (i.e. passing on a knowledge from the experienced to the inexperienced, or the socializing/initiating of new members into a profession), I think of three basic structures: immediate-physical, differed-print-manual-handbook, and more contemporary methods framed within digital technologies.

Fourth (yeah, clearly there are starting to be too many topics to cover in my fifteen minutes), there’s a question about how the term “craft” might operate in our scholarly activities. Is our scholarship a craft? Our teaching? Our administrative work? And if we’re going to make that claim, then what exactly do we mean by craft? And how is it different that skill? I’d argue that there’s a significant difference, but I’m not sure how much I can go into that during this presentation.

Finally, as I’ve been reading, there seems to be one common factor that operates in different ways within each of these structures: intimacy. I know that the term might ring some alarm bells without further exploration, but that’s what I’m going with at the moment. It’s the best I can do at the moment, but I’ll also say that “intimacy” is a term that I’m hoping suggests a combination of privacy, honesty, trust, and risk, and safety.

And that’s where I’ll leave it for today. I’ll continue to work through this term in my next post.

(“Throwing 2,” Martin Cathrae, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license)

In yesterday’s post, I argued (ranted?) that “in order to understand the impact of digital technologies on The Book, it’s important to think through these questions in terms of non-digital/pre-digital books.” Yep. In a much more sober and reflective state this afternoon, I’m sticking with that one.

But how to do it? There are two ways that I’m thinking of today.

The first is to explore the history of the book. And I’m talking all that way back to scrolls. Then the codex. That transition (read: to pages) is what I’m considering as my working definition for the beginning of The Book. Lots of books, articles, and chapters dedicated to those sorts of pursuits, and I’m sure I’ll be commenting on them as I work my way through them. Read the rest of this entry »

In the spirit of my recently declared pursuit of craft-honing, I walked down my block to an abandoned lot where an art collective’s warehouse burned downed a couple of years ago. I brought my still and video cameras. Such a beautiful day, I wanted to try my first outdoor video self-portrait (part of my “Myself As Another” project here). But the real reason I was there was to learn at least one simple thing about my digital still camera. I’ve been reading a bit about photography composition and camera techniques toward different purposes. I’ve always known that cameras had tons of flexibility and room for creativity, but I’d never given myself the time to learn even the basics. I’ve always been at least okay at framing shots, but my technical knowledge has been embarrassingly inept. So down the street I went, camera-in-hand.

I wanted to learn at least a little about shooting in a aperture-priority mode. From what I understand, aperture is all about depth-of-field. Basically, the aperture is the little round part of the camera (sort of like our iris/pupil), which gets bigger or smaller, depending on how much light I want to let into the camera. But since the other major factor in taking a photograph is shutter speed, aperture is really more about how quickly I want to let light into the camera. I think. (If anyone wants to correct or adjust my thinking on this one, that would be great.) If you want to have a deep range of focus, you want to have your aperture (f-stop) as high as possible. (I guess f/64 is a very high value. Ansel Adams used it, and he basically had all elements of his photographs in focus. On the low end is something like f/2.8, and that will give you a very thin depth of focus. For instance, if you wanted to photograph someone’s face, but you wanted a blurry background and foreground, you’d use a very low f-stop value.

click here for larger image.

I put my camera into aperture-priority mode, and dialed the f-stop down to it’s lower ranges. I’m not going to get super technical here, because I’m just trying to learn and think about the principles to begin with. I’m leery of getting lost too soon in the details. To practice this mode, I wanted to look for things that might create some depth. Something close and something farther away that I could capture in the same frame.

The first thing I found was this great, rusted I-beam that had been twisted violently in the intense heat and pressure of the collapsing warehouse. (If you wanna try something new, click here for a “narrated reflection” on what I learned from taking this photograph.) I tried to make the “head” end of the beam my focal point, and let the rest of the beam trail out of focus behind it. Not for any particular reason. No metaphor or story here. Just wanted to see if I could make that happen, given my understanding of what I was trying to learn. I like how it turned out, but the intended effect AND the sense of balanced composition. I like the energy the curves in the head and body of the beam create, and how this energy sort of “peels off” in the two shadows in the upper-left corner and the right half of the frame. This energy seems to even intensify with the slightly diagonal lines of the bolt shadows on the head. The lines look like they are straining to be straight in comparison to the rest of the curves and rough textures inthe rest of the picture. I love the complementary colors of the beam (orange) and the shadow (blue). I like the variation in textures, too. The color-created texture on the smooth parts of the head. The green dots of the glass strewn about in the gravel. And although I like the balance that the piece of plastic offers in the lower left corner, I just don’t get the sense that it really “fits” this composition. Rats.

click for larger image.

But for some reason, I’m more compelled by the bowling ball I found in the tall grass surrounding the crumbling concrete slab. (Here’s another “narrated reflection” on what I learned from taking this photograph.) I love that it looks so much like a globe, but that it’s sort of been abandoned along with this burned-out lot. The composition isn’t really too bad, I think. The horizon line across the top is just slanted enough to give it a little energy and to cut the eye off before it trails off the page, and that line is broken nicely by the white figures on the right and the clumped stalks in the center and slight left. Then there’s the little brown twig on the far left to draw the eye down the side of the image, where it stalls at one of the three slightly-dark shadow patches in the grass. There’s a slight incline of tone leading back up to the bowling ball. I love the color combinations of the black and blue scattered blotches on the ball and the sharp, jumbled pick-up sticks of grass and twig filling the rest of the frame. And I really like the dominant, sort of out-of-focus light-brown blade of grass stretching up and across the center of the image peeling off away to the right of the ball. What I don’t really like about this photo, I guess, is that that the lower-right half of the image isn’t very interesting or stimulating. Noisy, but not in an energetic sort of way. More like static. Less kinetic. I have to say that I find the image itself, just on the merit of its content, sort of charming.