Friday, January 30, 2015
"What is the Digital Humanities?": A Comic Strip
Below you will find a short comic strip that meditates on the question, "What is the Digital Humanities?" I recommend expanding the comic strip to full screen, as it's much easier to see and navigate that way. I know that this is a somewhat unorthodox forum for addressing this matter in presentation form, but I hope it inspires a laugh or two and maybe deeper insights into the pedagogical implications of not only relating information about the digital humanities to students, but also expecting them to engage in projects in the digital humanities as well. Enjoy!
Friday, January 23, 2015
Do You See What I See?
In Kimberly Christen-Withey's (formerly Kimberly Christen) "Does Information Really Want to be Free?: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness," she tempers the "celebration of openness" in the context of sharing information within digital media with the notion that it only provides "a limited vocabulary with which to discuss the ethical and cultural parameters of information circulation and access in the digital realm" (2874). This "limited vocabulary," in Christen-Withey's estimation, generally favors uncritical and unbridled uses and reuses of digital information over and above those engagements with digital information and information writ large which take into consideration the material implications of extending information and cultural artifacts into various media--digital or otherwise.
To be clear, Christen-Withey's concerns in "Does Information Really Want to be Free?" relate directly to the cultural heritage of indigenous tribes and how that knowledge might be protected in a manner that befits and honors such indigenous tribes on their own terms. This blog entry seeks to extend this conversation about protecting cultural heritages and other related knowledge to the Cuban people--inside and outside of Cuba proper. I would specifically like to consider photographs and digital artifacts that offer a lens into Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today. While there are dozens of digital archives related to Cuba--many of which are listed on The University of Texas-Austin's Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC)--I would like to focus on the National Geographic's Web site for a 9-day expedition to Cuba.
Much of the National Geographic Web site simply extols the virtues of not only visiting and engaging with the culture of the Cuban people, but it also includes a small photo gallery. Generally speaking, these photographs and the information that surrounds them seem relatively harmless and banal on the surface. Baseball in the streets . . . a mural of Che Guevara on a city wall . . . a well-maintained Studebaker. Cuba: "The Place Where the Past Meets the Present." Amidst these celebrations of Cuban culture and tourism, though, National Geographic perhaps ignores the prickliness of matters of Cuban identity, politics, and, perhaps most important to the thrust of this blog entry, property.
By invoking matters of "property" in the context of visual representations of Cuban lives and residential areas I harken to some of the more "conservative" worldviews espoused by Cuban refugees who were generally among the first wave of Cubans to leave or be forced out of Cuba after Fidel Castro took power. My intention here is not to paint this first wave of Cubans with a broad stroke, because my own family on both my mother and father's sides were part of this group. But I'll perhaps get to that later.
It becomes clear in this unique and difficult history that the manner in which the Cuban population regarded themselves in the aftermath of this diaspora communicated a particular politics towards the nations that hosted them (the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, just to name a few examples) as well as the nation--their home--they left behind. These terms play an important role in Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America, a memoir written by Gustavo Perez Firmat about his family's flight from Cuba and their struggle to strike a balance between two cultures. One of the debates that occupies much of Perez Firmat's project in Next Year in Cuba, is whether to regard himself as an "immigrant" or an "exile." In Perez Firmat's estimation, to identify oneself as an "immigrant" was not only to resign yourself to one culture, but to leave your rightful culture behind you. To be an "exile," though, implied a more liminal and indeterminate space in which the prospect of return was kept intact.
And there's the rub. Return? Return to what? Having left virtually every bit of property and capital they owned in Cuba, these resources were generally appropriated by the Cuban government or re-distributed to others (not necessarily family or close relations) who remained in Cuba. In Next Year in Cuba, those who remained in Cuba and claimed these resources are regarded as "squatters" on the "rightful" property of the "exiles" who lie in wait to return to Cuba to re-claim this property once the Castro regime is dispensed with.
While this example from Next Year in Cuba is not necessarily a microcosm of how all Cuban refugees/exiles/immigrants necessarily feel or think, it does offer a lens into the sorts of stigmas and anxieties that surround matters of property for Cubans inside and outside of Cuba proper. I mean, if some Cuban exiles have taken inventory of their "rightful" property and capital, it might be said that there are certainly stakes involved in representing Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today in digital media.
With the United States and Cuba recently beginning serious talks about lifting the embargo and relaxing travel restrictions to Cuba by United States citizens, these issues of "return" are perhaps reaching fever pitch. And with many prominent Cuban American voices--like that of Marco Rubio, the Republican Senator of Florida--actively and vehemently resisting diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Cuba that in any way extend or support the Castro regime--whether Fidel, Raul, or any other Castro enthusiast--one has to wonder what "return" actually means for Cubans inside and outside of Cuba proper in the 21st century.
I realize that I have spent much of this blog entry not really addressing the matter of actually including photographs of Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today within digital media, but I guess that's my point. Indeed, it becomes very unclear how, specifically, these images and visual representations are being used by different audiences. With a majority of Cuban citizens within Cuba not having material or free access to the Internet and other digital technologies, it begs the question: For whom are these digital archives actually designed? And while I would not necessarily propose that these issues with Cuban identity, politics, and property ought to foreclose on the prospects for representing the Cuban people as they exist today within projects in the digital humanities, I would suggest that these issues should absolutely play a role in the development of an ethical and methodological framework for such projects. For my own purposes in the project that I am developing (please see my blog post from January 18, 2015, for more information about this), there is a great deal of value and currency in employing these sorts of lenses in projects in the digital humanities, considerations, however, that I have not necessarily seen enough of in archives and sources about Cuban lives as they are lived today.
To be clear, Christen-Withey's concerns in "Does Information Really Want to be Free?" relate directly to the cultural heritage of indigenous tribes and how that knowledge might be protected in a manner that befits and honors such indigenous tribes on their own terms. This blog entry seeks to extend this conversation about protecting cultural heritages and other related knowledge to the Cuban people--inside and outside of Cuba proper. I would specifically like to consider photographs and digital artifacts that offer a lens into Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today. While there are dozens of digital archives related to Cuba--many of which are listed on The University of Texas-Austin's Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC)--I would like to focus on the National Geographic's Web site for a 9-day expedition to Cuba.
Much of the National Geographic Web site simply extols the virtues of not only visiting and engaging with the culture of the Cuban people, but it also includes a small photo gallery. Generally speaking, these photographs and the information that surrounds them seem relatively harmless and banal on the surface. Baseball in the streets . . . a mural of Che Guevara on a city wall . . . a well-maintained Studebaker. Cuba: "The Place Where the Past Meets the Present." Amidst these celebrations of Cuban culture and tourism, though, National Geographic perhaps ignores the prickliness of matters of Cuban identity, politics, and, perhaps most important to the thrust of this blog entry, property.
By invoking matters of "property" in the context of visual representations of Cuban lives and residential areas I harken to some of the more "conservative" worldviews espoused by Cuban refugees who were generally among the first wave of Cubans to leave or be forced out of Cuba after Fidel Castro took power. My intention here is not to paint this first wave of Cubans with a broad stroke, because my own family on both my mother and father's sides were part of this group. But I'll perhaps get to that later.
It becomes clear in this unique and difficult history that the manner in which the Cuban population regarded themselves in the aftermath of this diaspora communicated a particular politics towards the nations that hosted them (the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, just to name a few examples) as well as the nation--their home--they left behind. These terms play an important role in Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America, a memoir written by Gustavo Perez Firmat about his family's flight from Cuba and their struggle to strike a balance between two cultures. One of the debates that occupies much of Perez Firmat's project in Next Year in Cuba, is whether to regard himself as an "immigrant" or an "exile." In Perez Firmat's estimation, to identify oneself as an "immigrant" was not only to resign yourself to one culture, but to leave your rightful culture behind you. To be an "exile," though, implied a more liminal and indeterminate space in which the prospect of return was kept intact.
And there's the rub. Return? Return to what? Having left virtually every bit of property and capital they owned in Cuba, these resources were generally appropriated by the Cuban government or re-distributed to others (not necessarily family or close relations) who remained in Cuba. In Next Year in Cuba, those who remained in Cuba and claimed these resources are regarded as "squatters" on the "rightful" property of the "exiles" who lie in wait to return to Cuba to re-claim this property once the Castro regime is dispensed with.
While this example from Next Year in Cuba is not necessarily a microcosm of how all Cuban refugees/exiles/immigrants necessarily feel or think, it does offer a lens into the sorts of stigmas and anxieties that surround matters of property for Cubans inside and outside of Cuba proper. I mean, if some Cuban exiles have taken inventory of their "rightful" property and capital, it might be said that there are certainly stakes involved in representing Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today in digital media.
With the United States and Cuba recently beginning serious talks about lifting the embargo and relaxing travel restrictions to Cuba by United States citizens, these issues of "return" are perhaps reaching fever pitch. And with many prominent Cuban American voices--like that of Marco Rubio, the Republican Senator of Florida--actively and vehemently resisting diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Cuba that in any way extend or support the Castro regime--whether Fidel, Raul, or any other Castro enthusiast--one has to wonder what "return" actually means for Cubans inside and outside of Cuba proper in the 21st century.
I realize that I have spent much of this blog entry not really addressing the matter of actually including photographs of Cuban lives and residential areas as they exist today within digital media, but I guess that's my point. Indeed, it becomes very unclear how, specifically, these images and visual representations are being used by different audiences. With a majority of Cuban citizens within Cuba not having material or free access to the Internet and other digital technologies, it begs the question: For whom are these digital archives actually designed? And while I would not necessarily propose that these issues with Cuban identity, politics, and property ought to foreclose on the prospects for representing the Cuban people as they exist today within projects in the digital humanities, I would suggest that these issues should absolutely play a role in the development of an ethical and methodological framework for such projects. For my own purposes in the project that I am developing (please see my blog post from January 18, 2015, for more information about this), there is a great deal of value and currency in employing these sorts of lenses in projects in the digital humanities, considerations, however, that I have not necessarily seen enough of in archives and sources about Cuban lives as they are lived today.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Breaking Ground on a Prospective Project in the Digital Humanities
After reading Trevor Owens' blog on where to start on research questions in the digital humanities, I felt it might be useful to at least begin to articulate the sort of digital humanities project I am interested in engaging with in the near and/or distant future. Indeed, Owens' views on projects in the digital humanities are generally predicated on the notion that the process through which research questions are developed and concretized is, first and foremost, iterative. In saying as much, Owens seems to encourage those engaging in projects in the digital humanities to embrace a more pensive, reflective, and layered approach to actually defining what they are working on.
Owens elucidates upon this approach by harking to Joe Maxwell's ideas about the interactive components of research design. Maxwell's approach, as Owens indicates, involves five distinct moves/stages/elements:
1) goals, which clarifies the purpose for doing research;
2) conceptual framework, which refers to the specific literature(s), field(s), and experience(s) one is drawing on;
3) research questions, which clearly disseminates the statement(s) and question(s) one is working with in their project;
4) methods, which provides insight into the ways in which one will address and/or answer the aforementioned statement(s) and question(s); and
5) validity concerns, which address the limitations and biases that might inform one's approach to the project.
I propose to use these interactive components of Maxwell's approach to research design in order to draw on my own approach to my own project for ENGLISH 595, a course on "Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities" that I am taking at Washington State University during the Spring 2015 semester. As I am sure the diagram that follows will convey, I am still quite "green" in terms of my background in the digital humanities as well as the subject for my project. My hope is that this course will help me develop both the vocabulary and the acumen for taking on this difficult project in the near or distant future. I welcome any and all feedback on what I have included in the Prezi presentation below.
Owens elucidates upon this approach by harking to Joe Maxwell's ideas about the interactive components of research design. Maxwell's approach, as Owens indicates, involves five distinct moves/stages/elements:
1) goals, which clarifies the purpose for doing research;
2) conceptual framework, which refers to the specific literature(s), field(s), and experience(s) one is drawing on;
3) research questions, which clearly disseminates the statement(s) and question(s) one is working with in their project;
4) methods, which provides insight into the ways in which one will address and/or answer the aforementioned statement(s) and question(s); and
5) validity concerns, which address the limitations and biases that might inform one's approach to the project.
I propose to use these interactive components of Maxwell's approach to research design in order to draw on my own approach to my own project for ENGLISH 595, a course on "Critical Theories, Methods, and Practice in Digital Humanities" that I am taking at Washington State University during the Spring 2015 semester. As I am sure the diagram that follows will convey, I am still quite "green" in terms of my background in the digital humanities as well as the subject for my project. My hope is that this course will help me develop both the vocabulary and the acumen for taking on this difficult project in the near or distant future. I welcome any and all feedback on what I have included in the Prezi presentation below.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Blog Post #7: Shades of Access
In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam J. Banks illustrates the ways in which access to technology is immersed in issues of race and racism. For Banks, existing discourses around access to technology fail to account for more systemic considerations about race and racism insofar as these discourses assume that proximity or material access to technologies is effectively all there is to understanding and practicing access. In giving more dialogic space to these systemic considerations within conversations in and about access to technology, Banks calls for more critically informed approaches to such conversations, approaches that ultimately problematize the notion that African Americans are somehow fundamentally "non-technological" (12), and contest the sort of "user-friendly racism" (45) that is programmed into the very foundation of what comprises technology access and use. In this sense, Banks calls for more studied, inclusive, and robust considerations of "African American rhetoric" and "Black Digital Ethos," considerations that promote a "larger, macrolevel awareness" (67) of design components that structure and overdetermine race relations inside and outside of various technological interfaces. Ultimately, a focus on such design components, in Banks' estimation, not only reveals underlying assumptions and prescribed uses and abuses embedded in technologies, but also provides more space to individuals to position themselves against overbearing and totalizing systems and structures that support and enable tacit racist activities in both the real world and cyberspace.
In an effort to provide a better understanding of Banks' project and overall argument in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, I have selected three quotes that might help flesh out the critical ground he is attempting to navigate throughout the text:
1) ". . . more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations." (10)
2) "All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1986), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used." (23)
3) "These debates all carry assumptions about what constitutes access to computers, the Internet, or any digital technology that, even when guided by the best of intentions, threaten disaster if not addressed. This danger exists because those assumptions will guide legal, corporate, and educational policies that can trap Black people into roles as passive consumers of technologies rather than producers and partners, and worse, lead to continued electronic invisibility and economic, educational, and political injustice." (31)
While Banks certainly raises a number of important issues in these quotes and throughout Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, there were two issues in particular that really stood out to me during my reading:
1) In an effort to provide a more potent and substantive vocabulary for engaging in discourses in and around access to technology, Banks references four prospective lenses through which to understand the shades and dynamics of access: material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Meaningful access refers to the prospects for "equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse" (41). Functional access refers to "the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [technologies] effectively" (41). Experiential access refers to a brand of access that "makes the tools [technologies] a relevant part of their lives" (42). Critical access refers to the ways in which individuals might engage with technologies in such a way that they become "intelligent users and producers of technology," a position through which access comes to "mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal" (42). Insofar as these lenses provide a more robust and inclusive vernacular for discussing issues of access to technology, they serve as valuable mediums through which to further complicate and nuance matters of access beyond traditional emphases on proximity to technologies.
2) In placing a particular emphasis on alternatives to proximity to technologies in discourses in and around access to technologies, Banks locates a measure of liberatory potential in the design components of the technologies we use and navigate on a daily basis. In this sense, Banks suggests that "the most important work we can do on behalf of our students is not knowledge work or critical work, but design work, work in creating the spaces in which they will communicate" (84). By keeping design components at the forefront of considerations about access to technology, Banks frees students up to visualize and enact the prospects for freely navigating and contesting the systems in which they are embedded.
"B.O.B.B.Y." by RZA
In an effort to provide a better understanding of Banks' project and overall argument in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, I have selected three quotes that might help flesh out the critical ground he is attempting to navigate throughout the text:
1) ". . . more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations." (10)
2) "All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1986), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used." (23)
3) "These debates all carry assumptions about what constitutes access to computers, the Internet, or any digital technology that, even when guided by the best of intentions, threaten disaster if not addressed. This danger exists because those assumptions will guide legal, corporate, and educational policies that can trap Black people into roles as passive consumers of technologies rather than producers and partners, and worse, lead to continued electronic invisibility and economic, educational, and political injustice." (31)
While Banks certainly raises a number of important issues in these quotes and throughout Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, there were two issues in particular that really stood out to me during my reading:
1) In an effort to provide a more potent and substantive vocabulary for engaging in discourses in and around access to technology, Banks references four prospective lenses through which to understand the shades and dynamics of access: material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Meaningful access refers to the prospects for "equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse" (41). Functional access refers to "the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [technologies] effectively" (41). Experiential access refers to a brand of access that "makes the tools [technologies] a relevant part of their lives" (42). Critical access refers to the ways in which individuals might engage with technologies in such a way that they become "intelligent users and producers of technology," a position through which access comes to "mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal" (42). Insofar as these lenses provide a more robust and inclusive vernacular for discussing issues of access to technology, they serve as valuable mediums through which to further complicate and nuance matters of access beyond traditional emphases on proximity to technologies.
2) In placing a particular emphasis on alternatives to proximity to technologies in discourses in and around access to technologies, Banks locates a measure of liberatory potential in the design components of the technologies we use and navigate on a daily basis. In this sense, Banks suggests that "the most important work we can do on behalf of our students is not knowledge work or critical work, but design work, work in creating the spaces in which they will communicate" (84). By keeping design components at the forefront of considerations about access to technology, Banks frees students up to visualize and enact the prospects for freely navigating and contesting the systems in which they are embedded.
"B.O.B.B.Y." by RZA
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Blog Post #6: Dis(abilities) and "AccessFirst Design"
This past week the readings for class pertained to the ways in which individuals with disabilities are or are not served and/or represented in online and classroom spaces. Though the readings by Yergeau et al. and Dolmage were certainly robust, engaging, and accessible, I will focus on Slatin's "The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities" in the blog post that follows.
Slatin's main argument revolves around the idea of "AccessFirst Design." Within this idea, he is primarily concerned with issues of accessibility as they intersect with the organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Throughout the essay, Slatin places an emphasis on how the very foundation of Web pages and digitized, Internet-based information, is structured in such a way as to exclude and foreclose upon participation by individuals with disabilities. Many Web-based resources fail, in his estimation, because issues of accessibility were not addressed or considered at the nascent stages of the Internet's emergence nor in the subsequent stages in which the Internet gathered steam and acquired users without significant disabilities or obstacles. Slatin therefore proposes "AccessFirst Design" to remediate upon issues of narrow and prejudiced accessibility, a potent lens and discursive framework through which to rightfully expand the scope and reach of Web-based resources.
In my reading, I found three quotes/references to the text particularly important for understanding Slatin's project and overall argument:
1) "Rhetoric is all about knowing your audience, understanding what information audience members are likely to possess already, what beliefs they hold, and what might move them to the action or the change of belief we're calling for. Underlying all this is the fundamental conviction that members of that audience can read and understand and make appropriate responses. We also should extend that expectation to audience members who have disabilities." (7)
2) "Why should accessibility have to be hidden? When I say that good design is accessible design, I mean that it's not enough to make a site "look good" and then "add accessibility": That's like adding wheelchair ramps to existing buildings where it's convenient for the architects and engineers, not the people who need to go in and out. It's good to have that ramp, but for a person in a hand-propelled chair it's a whole lot better if the slope meets the specifications in the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG): one inch of rise for every foot of length (the ADAAG is available on the U.S. Access Board Web site; specifically, see http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8) - ). And it would be even better if the ramp led to the front door instead of going in through the loading-dock. Accessibility isn't additive: it's integral." (11)
3) "The first item in both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards calls upon Web-authors to provide "equivalent alternatives" for all visual and auditory material on a site. For images, this typically involves adding an ALT attribute to the HTML image (IMG) element; the ALT attribute specifies a short text--a phrase or perhaps a sentence--that replaces the image for people who can't see it (whether because they're blind or because they're using a text-only display). For richer, more complex images such as photographs, works of art, charts, or graphs, it may be necessary to use an additional attribute, LONGDESC, to provide a "long description" of the image as well as the ALT attribute that provides an "equivalent" for the image or the function that the image serves." (24)
From anticipating an audience's existing values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses; to ensuring that structures and design components are more accessible and inclusive; to making it a point to provide "equivalent alternatives" to individuals with disabilities; the ideas that emerge from the aforementioned quotes and Slatin's project and overall argument continuously touch on two issues in particular:
1) Web-based resources that are designed for and with individuals with disabilities in mind are liable to be just as (if not more) effective and aesthetically rich for such marginalized populations as they might be for others. In making this claim, Slatin is responding to prospective counter-arguments against "AccessFirst Design" that might balk at fundamental and structural modifications to existing Web-based resources. Indeed, modifications of this magnitude will demand active and incessant social, cultural, political, and economic commitments that serve as obstacles for those charged with the task of integrating the tenets of "AccessFirst Design" into their Web-based resources as well as those who navigate these Web-based resources. Which is to say that those individuals who freely and easily navigate existing interfaces and Web-based resources might not initially see the value of "AccessFirst Design" if it does not necessarily serve their interests. I mean, at the front of "AccessFirst Design" is the idea that basically every interface and Web-based resource, and thus basically every familiar and "neutral" medium for communication, will be subject to change and overhaul. I do not say this to cast my lot against "AccessFirst Design." Rather, I merely seek to articulate the scope of the changes and modifications that Slatin is suggesting in his essay and the potential windfall these changes and modifications might bring forth.
2) Regardless of the sorts of evaluative and self-serving objections that might emerge from "AccessFirst Design," a salient point in Slatin's project and overall argument, is the fact that it is our ethical and legal obligation to attend to the ways in which the Web-based resources we use and make available, are or are not accessible to the students we are supposed to be serving inside and outside of the classroom. Slatin's references to such ethical and legal implications elucidates upon the fact that individuals with disabilities are a prominent and indelible population within the classrooms that we construct and navigate on a daily basis. The stakes are therefore rather high in terms of how, not when or why, we actually serve individuals with disabilities. I am grateful to Slatin for his brevity and economical approach to representing and fleshing out the intersection between issues of accessibility for individuals with disabilities and organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Ultimately, Slatin was equal parts concerned with selling the reader on the merits and virtues of "AccessFirst Design" as well as the ethical and legal obligations that demand that we as instructors attend to such merits and virtues.
Disability, Art, and the Age of the Internet: Jes Sachse at TEDxTrentUniversity
Slatin's main argument revolves around the idea of "AccessFirst Design." Within this idea, he is primarily concerned with issues of accessibility as they intersect with the organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Throughout the essay, Slatin places an emphasis on how the very foundation of Web pages and digitized, Internet-based information, is structured in such a way as to exclude and foreclose upon participation by individuals with disabilities. Many Web-based resources fail, in his estimation, because issues of accessibility were not addressed or considered at the nascent stages of the Internet's emergence nor in the subsequent stages in which the Internet gathered steam and acquired users without significant disabilities or obstacles. Slatin therefore proposes "AccessFirst Design" to remediate upon issues of narrow and prejudiced accessibility, a potent lens and discursive framework through which to rightfully expand the scope and reach of Web-based resources.
In my reading, I found three quotes/references to the text particularly important for understanding Slatin's project and overall argument:
1) "Rhetoric is all about knowing your audience, understanding what information audience members are likely to possess already, what beliefs they hold, and what might move them to the action or the change of belief we're calling for. Underlying all this is the fundamental conviction that members of that audience can read and understand and make appropriate responses. We also should extend that expectation to audience members who have disabilities." (7)
2) "Why should accessibility have to be hidden? When I say that good design is accessible design, I mean that it's not enough to make a site "look good" and then "add accessibility": That's like adding wheelchair ramps to existing buildings where it's convenient for the architects and engineers, not the people who need to go in and out. It's good to have that ramp, but for a person in a hand-propelled chair it's a whole lot better if the slope meets the specifications in the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG): one inch of rise for every foot of length (the ADAAG is available on the U.S. Access Board Web site; specifically, see http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8) - ). And it would be even better if the ramp led to the front door instead of going in through the loading-dock. Accessibility isn't additive: it's integral." (11)
3) "The first item in both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards calls upon Web-authors to provide "equivalent alternatives" for all visual and auditory material on a site. For images, this typically involves adding an ALT attribute to the HTML image (IMG) element; the ALT attribute specifies a short text--a phrase or perhaps a sentence--that replaces the image for people who can't see it (whether because they're blind or because they're using a text-only display). For richer, more complex images such as photographs, works of art, charts, or graphs, it may be necessary to use an additional attribute, LONGDESC, to provide a "long description" of the image as well as the ALT attribute that provides an "equivalent" for the image or the function that the image serves." (24)
From anticipating an audience's existing values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses; to ensuring that structures and design components are more accessible and inclusive; to making it a point to provide "equivalent alternatives" to individuals with disabilities; the ideas that emerge from the aforementioned quotes and Slatin's project and overall argument continuously touch on two issues in particular:
1) Web-based resources that are designed for and with individuals with disabilities in mind are liable to be just as (if not more) effective and aesthetically rich for such marginalized populations as they might be for others. In making this claim, Slatin is responding to prospective counter-arguments against "AccessFirst Design" that might balk at fundamental and structural modifications to existing Web-based resources. Indeed, modifications of this magnitude will demand active and incessant social, cultural, political, and economic commitments that serve as obstacles for those charged with the task of integrating the tenets of "AccessFirst Design" into their Web-based resources as well as those who navigate these Web-based resources. Which is to say that those individuals who freely and easily navigate existing interfaces and Web-based resources might not initially see the value of "AccessFirst Design" if it does not necessarily serve their interests. I mean, at the front of "AccessFirst Design" is the idea that basically every interface and Web-based resource, and thus basically every familiar and "neutral" medium for communication, will be subject to change and overhaul. I do not say this to cast my lot against "AccessFirst Design." Rather, I merely seek to articulate the scope of the changes and modifications that Slatin is suggesting in his essay and the potential windfall these changes and modifications might bring forth.
2) Regardless of the sorts of evaluative and self-serving objections that might emerge from "AccessFirst Design," a salient point in Slatin's project and overall argument, is the fact that it is our ethical and legal obligation to attend to the ways in which the Web-based resources we use and make available, are or are not accessible to the students we are supposed to be serving inside and outside of the classroom. Slatin's references to such ethical and legal implications elucidates upon the fact that individuals with disabilities are a prominent and indelible population within the classrooms that we construct and navigate on a daily basis. The stakes are therefore rather high in terms of how, not when or why, we actually serve individuals with disabilities. I am grateful to Slatin for his brevity and economical approach to representing and fleshing out the intersection between issues of accessibility for individuals with disabilities and organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Ultimately, Slatin was equal parts concerned with selling the reader on the merits and virtues of "AccessFirst Design" as well as the ethical and legal obligations that demand that we as instructors attend to such merits and virtues.
Disability, Art, and the Age of the Internet: Jes Sachse at TEDxTrentUniversity
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Article Conversation #3: Embodiments vs. Cyborgs
In my last blog post, I explored the dynamics of N. Katherine Hayles' project in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In this blog post, however, I will put Hayles' project in conversation with that of Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto," placing a particular emphasis on the ways in which their conceptualizations of the human body converge and/or depart from one another.
Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.
For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.
Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.
For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).
Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).
Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.
Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.
For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.
Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.
For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).
Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).
Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Blog Post #5: Embodiments are Soooo Random
In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles articulates the ways in which emerging digital technologies have transformed the shape and scope of knowledge and information to the extent that the very foundation of what constitutes and comprises "subjective human experience" has become something else altogether. This "something else" might be referred to as the posthuman, a significant cultural and intellectual position through which human beings assume the role of an "informational pattern" of sorts, a codified husk unmoored from materiality writ large.
For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."
By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."
While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).
Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).
PS3 Robot Demo
For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."
By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."
While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).
Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).
PS3 Robot Demo
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