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Kathi Inman Berens
New Media Curious
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METADATA CHALLENGES TO BOOK DISCOVERABILITY

Posted by admin in Book Publishing | Tagged amazon, book industry, book
marketing, books, digital marketing, diverse books, diversity, metadata | Leave
a comment
28June2018


WHY CAN’T PEOPLE FIND CHILDREN’S BOOKS FEATURING NON-WHITE CHARACTERS?



Metadata Challenges to Discoverability in Children's Picture Book Publishing:
the Diverse BookFinder Intervention from Kib4slideshare


PROJECT DESCRIPTION

37% of the U.S. population is non-white, but 90% of the books published for
children during the last twenty-four years contain zero multicultural content.
This discrepancy has been called “The Diversity Gap” and, more starkly, the
“Apartheid of Children’s Literature.”

This talk examines the role of book metadata in children’s picture book
discoverability. It discusses BISAC codes, algorithmic overfitting, book
publishing workflows, and Amazon’s unique metadata practices.

It presents two boutique book discovery recommendation systems, OurStory from
the grassroots group We Need Diverse Books and Diverse BookFinder, a research
collection and database helping librarians diversify their collections.

Presented by Prof. Kathi Inman Berens (Portland State University) and Christina
Bell (Digital Humanities Librarian, Bates College).

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MLA 17 // BOUNDARY PLAY

Posted by admin in Electronic Literature, MLA | Leave a comment
2January2017


FEMINISM IN AUGMENTED REALITY, VIDEOGAMES AND ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

THURSDAY, 5 JANUARY, 5:15–6:30 P.M., 401-403, PHILADELPHIA MARRIOTT
#S151 #MLA17

KI Berens, Caitlin Fisher, Jessica Pressman. Not pictured: Anastasia Salter.
Photo by Leonardo Flores.


SPEAKERS: PROFS. JESSICA PRESSMAN, KATHI INMAN BERENS, ANASTASIA SALTER
RESPONDENT: PROF. CAITLIN FISHER

Our panel presents research about the role of feminism in contested borders of
printed books, electronic literature and videogames. We will keep to strict time
allotments to permit a robust and vigorous QA.

JESSICA PRESSMAN
San Diego State University
Oculus Rift virtual reality headgear is usually donned to kill dragons or
multitudes of soldiers, to explore far off places and feel superhuman. But
Pressman argues that the VR and augment reality [AR} work of Canadian digital
artist Caitlin Fisher confronts expectations about digital media, games, and
electronic literature by employing such technology to tell women’s stories and
to pursue feminist storytelling. Pressman examines how Fisher’s AR work Circle
(2012) embeds multimodal vignettes about three generations of women onto little
domestic objects, which Pressman designates “feminism in action,” specifically
in the aesthetic enactment of its female-centered subject matter and its formal
glitch aesthetics. More specifically, Pressman aims to show how Circle performs
the central concerns of Material Feminism: an investment in illuminating how
materiality and context-based relationality are central elements of experience
and meaning-making. This short work about women and things insists on the
relationality of animate and inanimate objects and, in so doing, it provides an
opportunity to critique such philosophical movements as Object-Oriented
Ontology. Moreover, the ways in which Circle achieves this critique promotes
investigation into the larger and more central intersections between the
technologies of AR, VR and feminism.

Me reading an AR poem, and being read as an object AR poetry is projected onto.
Photo by Jeremy Douglass.

KATHI INMAN BERENS
Portland State University
“Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular
pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of
two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster
motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with
device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad
“playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this
presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios,
which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a
best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames,
80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction
in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80
Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the
World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the
original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock. Interactions with
NPCs [non-player characters] in 80 Days unlock information essential to win;
respect and cultural sensitivity are procedurally rewarded. This resists the
original novella’s racist depiction of nonwhite “others.” My paper suggests how
80 Days‘ emergent game attributes interrupt our readerly drive to “master” a
text.

ANASTASIA SALTER
University of Central Florida
Electronic literature exists at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and
STEM: an acronym that itself defines a contested battleground of technical
skills. The lack of diversity in STEM has received considerable scrutiny, and
computer-related fields particularly suffer from a lack of diversity. Salter
notes that this has contributed to the rise of “brogrammer” culture in
disciplines with strong computer science components, and with it a rhetorical
collision of programming and hypermasculine machismo. Brogrammer culture is
self-replicating: in technical disciplines, the association of code with
masculinity and men’s only spaces plays a pivotal role in reinforcing the status
quo. Given this dramatic under-representation of women in computer science
disciplines, the privileging of code-driven and procedural works within the
discourse of electronic literature is inherently gendered. The emergence of
platforms friendly to non-coders (such as Twine) broadens participation in
electronic literature and gaming space, but often such works are treated and
labeled differently (and less favorably) from code-driven and procedural works
that occupy the same space. Salter argues that electronic literature communities
must be aware of the gendered rhetoric and socialization surrounding code, and
be vigilant against the tendency to value code (and, by extension, male-coded
labor) over content when evaluating works in this form.

CAITLIN FISHER, Respondent
York University
Dr. Caitlin Fisher, co-founder of York University’s Future Cinema Lab and
founder and Director of its Augmented Reality Lab, will respond to the papers as
both scholar and artist. Since Pressman is analyzing one of Fisher’s AR works,
the intersection between critical making and scholarship will be a key vantage
in Fisher’s response. She will also facilitate questions from the audience.

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PLAYABLE BOOKS ON IPAD

Posted by admin in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
14July2016


SLIDES FOR MY TALK AT THE 2016 DIGITAL HUMANITIES CONFERENCE IN KRACÓW, POLAND
14 JULY 2016.




















Playable Books on the iPad by Kathi Inman Berens is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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MY HOLOLENS 1-DAY TRAINING

Posted by admin in Transmedia | Tagged augmented_reality, Hololens,
mixed_reality, Oregon_Story_Board | Leave a comment
9June2016

FOUR Hololens headsets. That’s how many devices are in-house at Oregon Story
Board, the nonprofit story-and-technology accelerator in Portland, Oregon’s
mobile-dev-rich Pearl district. This is a coup for Portland-area tech
innovators. Microsoft might have released as little at two thousand units
globally, though Microsoft isn’t publicly releasing numbers. Even if that number
is a great as ten thousand, we’re still talking about a technology that’s very
new. It may not to be in the hands of consumers for another three-five years.

You’ve definitely seen a hologram. The most famous is Princess Leia beaming out
of R2D2: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

Everyone has seen a hologram. This is the most famous one.

Hololens is an elegant, lightweight headset that allows viewers to see
holograms, that is, 3D images, and hear “spatialized” sound. By 3D, I mean the
holograms are pinned to a particular location, and you can walk around them and
see them from all sides. Unlike virtual reality (VR), holograms and sounds are
overlaid over the real world. Microsoft is getting behind the term “mixed
reality” to capture the way holograms and real life mesh into one. The other
term you’ll hear to describe it is “augmented reality.”

Personally, I like MR (AR) better than VR. I like being able to talk with other
people around me as I’m playing with holograms. The social dimensions of MR make
it alluring. What’s “reality” after all? Isn’t it wherever your friends are?

I HAD A BLAST playing with Hololens. Here’s what I did:

I selected and placed a still, animated hologram that looked liked Saturn. I
walked around it and looked from all angles.

I placed on a table a live action ballerina pirouetting to the
Nutcracker
, and walked around her.

I explored the galaxy using Galaxy Explorer, an interactive map. Anything I
selected was animated, and a voice explained facts. The sun was a little buggy
and wouldn’t deselect.

I talked with someone using Skype. Hololens wrote a Skype plugin, which
basically gives people the ability to draw on the screen display. This could be
useful if you were reviewing documents. The pen function is still pretty
primitive, like a kindergartner holding a crayon in her fist.

You open the menu by blooming your hand open, and select by pinching thumb and
forefinger. Image: Cora Wigen.

What uses do people have for holograms popping into and out of the ordinary
world?

Plenty, if you ask me.

Yesterday, OSB Director Shelley Midthun invited me and ten other Portland
designers, business people, and story experts into OSB to pilot their one-day
Hololens Training. Our goal? To play with the gear and then figure out
applications pertinent to our organizations.

Led by Thomas Wester and Ben Fischler, this training gave us a clear technical
overview of how Hololens works, what kinds of programming and assets it
requires, and how images and other objects are stitched together. We then
reviewed four test cases of potential use, including automotive (Volvo),
interior design and collaboration (Skype), building construction and
architecture (Trimble) and education (Case Western Reserver University). Then we
brainstormed and formed into into small, project-specific groups and prototyped
a use case. We came up with very cool stuff! Not sure if I’m allowed to share
them, but suffice to say that I’m convinced this technology will be as important
a shift in how we do business as mobile has been.

And that’s saying a lot, because I think mobile is the most relevant shift in
computing since the invention of the personal computer!

I could envision several educational uses. Medical and other kinds of technical
training are obvious wins, but even the humanities would benefit from MR.
Imagine an art history class where you’re not watching 2D slides in a dark room,
but walking around a sculpture, even an enormous kinetic Calder. Or a literature
class where the spatialized sound recreates the Dylan Thomas reading in a
cathedral. In short, education can become more experiential and embodied as we
move forward into technologic creations that shrink the distance between us and
the historical objects we study. Museums and cultural heritage organizations
could do a tremendous amount with this technology, delivering a walk around the
Roman Colossesum, for example.

Microsoft Hololens is funding experiments in commercial and public service uses
for Hololens. Oregon Story Board won, along with its partners Intel and
Clackamas Community College, a $100K grant to develop an application for
teaching transmission gearing in CCC’s automotive department. Led by Thomas and
Ben, they are building Hololens app that will let students play with a 3D model
of a transmission. Because these digital objects are scalable, even tiny valves
can be made large for further examination. (The other four winners of the
Microsoft Research Grant were U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth and
Virginia Tech. Way to punch above your weight class, CCC!)

Microsoft is offers a hologram design academy for developers to start making
cool stuff. I believe it’s now possible to develop for play with holograms using
all kinds of devices, including Kinect. Hololens devices cost about $2000 or
$3000 (I’ve seen documentation for both figures). Developers can load emulators
for free.

If you’re in the Portland area (or you’re not, but you want to visit PDX and
touch the hologram future), consider registering for Oregon Storyboard’s one-day
Hololens training, which will be available starting next week (June 13) for
$995.

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REVIEW OF VIRTUAL REALITY FILM FESTIVAL

Posted by admin in Electronic Literature | Leave a comment
23August2015

Kaleidoscope Virtual Reality Film Festival Portland, Oregon 22 August 2015.

Yesterday I attended the one-day Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival [KVRFF], which
kicked off its 10-stop North American tour in Portland, Oregon. It presented 20
featured “films” or experiences, plus some business applications such as “social
VR”–which entailed meeting in a virtual room with a guy in Redwood City–and
branded experiences by Nike and Chrysler. I played the Nike experience, which
put me on a professional soccer field, guys coming at me with powerful kicks,
the players speaking rapid Spanish or Italian and the fuzz of the stadium noise
all around me. It was exciting. A little glitch when I was adjusting the volume
popped a menu screen onto my gameplay that wouldn’t go away. It broke the
illusion. Such things happen. But the volunteers were generally great about
getting everybody oriented and seeing stuff. I viewed most works through Samsung
goggles, which allow a phone to slide into the headset and run the experience
off of that. The Oculus is more technologically responsive because it uses a
camera and a computer to track one’s physical movements and adjusts the illusion
based on those movements.

About 200 or 250 people, racially mixed and mostly in their twenties, tested out
new experiences and talked as we waited in the longish lines.

VR is made by stitching together 360-degree film frames, so it makes sense to
call this a “film festival” at a technical level. But it’s also a PR gesture
too. Réné, the Director of the KVRFF, said in his opening remarks that cinema
was the dominant entertainment platform of the 20th century, and predicted VR
will be the the signal entertainment platform of the 21st. Calling KVRFF a “film
festival” legitimizes VR as the next big thing. Palmer Luckey, inventor of the
Oculus Rift system being featured on the cover of Time Magazine attests to the
mainstream media’s belief in VR’s potential for broad appeal. Facebook is
betting on this. It bought Oculus for gigantic wads of cash (2 billion dollars,
was it?) and aims to roll out Oculus to consumers in time for the 2015 Xmas
buying frenzy. Whether that deadline is even a little bit reasonable remains to
be seen. Even if the devices are market ready (a big “if”), what kinds of story
and empathy experiences will get people to stay in virtual reality? That’s what
the rest of my post is about.

Almost all of the experiences at KVRFF were less than ten minutes, most in the
2-3 minute range. In several of the works, I needed a minute or so to grok the
entire experience. I had hopes that the “Documentary” group might be different
because the works would aim to build an argument. The one I viewed (“Welcome to
Aleppo” about the Syrian Civil War, 2:45 minutes) was a fairly predictable
testimony about a city destroyed by war, with images of its former vibrancy
interspersed onto 360-degree images of a street of chaotic rubble. “Being there”
in the Samsung goggles didn’t really deepen my feelings about the despondency
caused by that war. My hopes for narrative and empathy — for the unique build
that VR might offer — wasn’t answered by this experience.

By contrast, the four experiences put together by Condition 1 moved me, probably
because they were less ambitious and could deliver on the premise which was
simply: be here now, look at this. I watched a SW Native American woman weave
and hum to herself in what I take to be a traditional room; a blonde American
looking directly into the camera to guide meditation on the beach (I looked away
from her and checked out the waves instead, which were mesmerizing); three SW
Native American women and one little girl, all in native dress, dancing on a
plateau high up in red rocks. I spun my head and saw the three Native men in
ordinary street clothes who were banging the drum and chanting the music to
which they danced. That was rewarding, the contrast in their dress, and the fact
that I got something “extra” for moving my gaze away from the “main event.”
Finally, I watched a white cowboy, also in the SW, lead three horses along a
trail. It was just a tiny moment in time, but it was satisfying to be there,
watching the small dot become the man and horses, watching them pass away
outside my sight.

Video Player
http://kathiiberens.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Brad-vr.m4v

00:00
00:00
00:07
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.



Brad Berens, above, views an experience. He’s @bradberens on Twitter.

The best “cool toy” experience was Tana Pura, an experimental film by Mike
Tucker with music by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. It was fantastic, a
synaesthete’s fantasia of spare piano/violin music moving through a light show
animated like schools of fish. It was great, really hard for me not to dance. I
probably stuck my arms in the air.

There was one really great moment when the VR demonstrated a story capacity that
winked out beyond the “what a cool toy!” feeling. Tyler Hurd, a longtime game
developer, made a silly piece called “Butts.” He showed the 2D version of it
during a brief artist’s talk, and it left me neutral. But in VR, there was one
moment where I burst out laughing: the VR surprised me (even though I knew what
was coming!) and delivered something the 2D couldn’t. When the animated men fly
into the air propelled by the confetti coming out of their butts, and it rains
down upon the viewer: it was magical. I felt connected to the characters. Their
joy spread to me. All the other elements (vibrant colors, facial expressions,
cartoon classical music soundtrack, Gershwin-inspired soaring) felt earned and
appropriate.

If storytellers can use the VR to impart feelings that can’t be delivered
otherwise in our crowded mediascape, then people will be incentivized to buy the
devices and hang out in these experiences. There are only so many times the
thrill of a roller coaster or the excitement of world exploration will keep
people coming back.

Books and electronic literature moreso than film might be the tech analog for VR
artists to check out. In books and e-lit, we wander. Those freeform imaginative
experiences could aid artists who come from a film background and think primary
through the camera’s gaze. In Butts, Hurd did a good job of triggering the gaze
where he wanted people to look, but I took real pleasure in peering around the
animated men’s bodies to get a different angle, to subvert what I was being told
to look at. Hurd’s background as a game dev seems apt here.

There was no beginning/middle/end to several of the experiences. This was true
of Bright Shadows (which didn’t move me), The Night Cafe and Der Grosse
Gottlieb. The Night Cafe was a mashup of Van Gogh paintings one could wander.
“But don’t go into the basement,” the KVRFF volunteer told me. “I mean, you
could go there. Everybody wants to go there. But there’s nothing in the
basement.” I spent my time in a bathroom just outside of Van Gogh’s Bedroom in
Arles trying to open a locked blue door. I was stuck on the door frame of the
adjacent green room, and I couldn’t quite back out of it enough to use my gaze
to trigger the blue door. This was the only experience in the entire KVRFF where
I experienced nausea. For the most part, the Oculus and Samsung goggles systems
were very responsive and not laggy. Nausea is caused by a mismatch between input
from your inner ear (physical balance) and your eyes. Later, in line for a
different experience, I met a guy who’d also got stuck in the bathroom. The blue
door had tantalized us.

Der Grosse Gottlieb solved the “where are you” problem inventively. In the
experience, you’re perched atop a gigantic ladder of chairs in what looks like
the Alps. You’re higher than the other mountains in the distance, and snowy wind
and clouds blow by you. Peer down, and a chair from the ladder dislodges and
falls into the abyss. To your right, a Vitrola plays opera music, a half-drunk
glass of wine awaits you, an unlit match teeters in the wind atop a box of
matches. Handwritten letters written on fine paper, most of them sealed with a
red wax stamp, blow down into the abyss. The trick of implacement? A steel fan
blows cool air on the back of your neck when you’re in the experience. The wind
all around you is felt by your skin and moves small hairs on your neck and arms.
Because the viewer was not meant to go anywhere in the piece, there was no
mismatch between where I was perched and where I wanted to go. It was lovely: a
mood, an atmosphere. No story but what you projected onto it.

I left the KVRFF exhausted. I’d been looking at works and chatting with people
in line for three hours. Though it was still open for one more hour (til 8PM)
the room had cleared out by 2/3, I’d estimate. It was cognitively demanding. And
exciting. As I said to some friends on Facebook, I felt when viewing my first
experience of the day (Condition 1) that I was experiencing a threshold moment
in a new medium, like the people sitting in the darkened movie theater 100 years
ago, screaming as the train in the tunnel thundered toward them.

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MY DIGITAL ECO-POEM INSTALLED IN BERGEN, NORWAY

Posted by admin in Electronic Literature, Transmedia | Tagged e-lit,
electronic_literature, hypertext | Leave a comment
12August2015


“RESTORATION: KALFARLIEN 18” INSTALLED IN BERGEN, NORWAY AT “ENDS OF ELECTRONIC
LITERATURE” MEDIA ARTS SHOW AUGUST 5-28 2015

E-waste sculpture made of decommissioned university computer screens and
peripherals. Guests interact with it by lifting the iPad and seeing themselves
reflected in the waste.

What does an e-waste sculpture have to do with a 100 year old villa on Bergen’s
Kalfarlien street on the slope of the mountain Fløien?

See our description on the “End(s) of Electronic Literature” Festival site.

Read the hypertext poem and view the documentation site here.

“RestOration: Kalfarlien 18” is a digital art installation in four parts: an
interactive e-waste sculpture, a soundscape, a tablet game and a hypertext poem.
All are inspired by the villa Kalfarlien 18, where the four women artists met.

Guests enter the installation. Sound from Eva Pfitzenmaier’s haunting soundscape
emanates from the library shelves and the LP turntable playing sounds of wind
and rain. A web kiosk features the ecopoem “RestOration,” which features the
poems of Alicia Cohen and the prose of Kathi Inman Berens. Kathi built the
hypertext, which allows readers to navigate branching paths. An audio track of
the poets reading is “Echo” to the “Narcissus” guests become as we see ourselves
in the pool of e-waste. The sculpture makes visible what we throw away.

Hypertext is a branching platform of reader choice. In this poem, readers can
choose one of four paths from any given lexia.

We artists juxtapose the “remodel” culture of quickly “obsolescent” technology
against the “repair” culture of the gently decayinig Kalfarlien 18. We in the
global north throw away machines and literally “remodel” — buy the next
iteration of the device. Those discarded devices and peripherals are dumped at
gigantic e-waste sites in the global south, 80% of the time illegally. Children
melt the precious metals from the machines and incinerate the west. Photographer
and activist Valentine Bellini [http://bitrotproject.com] has called it a “toxic
inferno.”

Anastasia Salter featured “RestOration: Kalfarlien 18” in her “Ends of
Electronic: A Report from ELO 2015” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kalfarlien 18 villa design by Einar Oscar Schou, one of Bergen’s eminent early
20th century architects.

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MEDIEVAL POST-SECRET

Posted by admin in Uncategorized | Leave a comment
7January2015

The intensity & depth of the etching on this rune from 1170 struck me. I found
the translation: “I love that man’s wife so much that fire seems cold! And I am
that woman’s lover.” Early mobile writing. Medieval post secret.

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WANT TO “SAVE THE HUMANITIES”? PAY ADJUNCTS TO LEARN DIGITAL TOOLS

Posted by admin in Digital Pedagogy, MLA, Teaching | Tagged #s448, adjunct,
adjuncts, DH, digital humanities, disruption, edutech, humanities, MLA, MLA15,
Modern Language Association, online, pedagogy | Leave a comment
5January2015

Image: Morgan Stone Grether. Used with permission. instagram.com/grether

Higher education is experiencing its Napster moment, its Amazon moment, and
administrators are implementing online learning modules to compete.
Disintermediation: what iTunes did to record stores and Amazon did to
bookstores, textbook companies are beginning to do to residential university
classrooms. University of Southern California Annenberg journalism professor
Gabriel Kahn reported in Slate last September that universities’ rapid uptake of
online classroom modules is a plug-and-play solution for entire courses that
universities used to design and implement themselves. Kahn notes:

> Companies such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Wiley—the heavies of the college
> textbook market—have produced bundles that are basically a turnkey solution
> for basic chemistry or econ 101 and dozens of other classes, most at the
> introductory level. These courses feature content vetted by experts, slickly
> produced videos, and a load of interactive tests and quizzes. Some are so
> advanced that they can simulate a physics experiment, engage a student in a
> developmental psychology exercise, or even run software that grades an
> 800-word essay. They provide pretty much the entire course experience, without
> much interaction with a professor and without the hassle of showing up to
> class on time—or, for some instructors, the hassle of teaching.

Having taught for three years predominantly in an experimental classroom that’s
both live and virtual, I know that on-demand interactive modules don’t yet
approximate a seminar’s communal, improvisational dynamic. Synchronous classroom
meeting software (I used Elluminate and then Adobe Connect) is still in its Ed
Sullivan days. Software is good at facilitating standardized data collection of
learning outcomes across the disciplines. Such affordances might look alluring
as more instruction moves online.

Online learning modules are the opposite of what the digital humanities seek to
foster. Julia Flanders notes that digital humanities should generate “productive
unease,” the “irritation that prompts further thought and engagement. . . .
[W]here that sense of friction is absent — where a digital object sits blandly
and unobjectionably before us, putting up no resistance and posing no questions
for us — humanities computing, in the meaningful sense, is also absent”
(paragraph 12).

Interfaces are not neutral. They are sufficiently nuanced and political that the
Terms of Service can be dozens of pages long. People usually notice interfaces
only when they stop working– when an app shuts down, or loses connection to the
Internet, or the phone drops a call. Interfaces are designed to be
“frictionless,” to adapt Flanders’ term. Software updates make computational
processes more invisible, more “intuitive,” as Apple calls it. Algorithmic
anticipation might be nice for turning up a furnace. It might even be great for
working through engineering problem sets. But it’s stupefying as a critical
learning environment.

Digital humanists make many of their resources open, public and freely
available. DHers’ moral commitment to public good is also an efficient way to
diversify the field. Generosity is evolutionarily advantageous.

But how many teaching-only faculty can afford to take up DHers’ offer of free
tools and training?

What if “time” and most faculty members’ inability to defend against its
appropriation prevents teaching-only faculty–the majority of the
professoriate–from integrating digital tools into their work?

Free tools might be a necessary but insufficient condition to provide access.

Digital humanities extends “our oldest inherited pedagogical belief as
humanists. We don’t teach answers,” Paul Fyfe observes. “We teach students how
to ask better questions.” The forthcoming Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
book, to be published by MLA in 2016 both open access and in print, curates the
best 500-550 teaching resources focused on fifty keywords. (I curated the
“Interface” entry.) Universities are charged to increase student digital
literacy. But how to ensure the digital literacy of teaching-only faculty who
have little to no support for professional development?

Here’s my provocation: Don’t just make tools freely available. Pay adjuncts and
other teaching-only faculty for their *time* to learn them.

Academics accept overwork as a condition of our lives. We work weekends, defer
sleep and rest, “catch up” on grading during spring break, make “vacations” out
of conference travel. But it’s a mistake to universalize the culture of
overwork. Overwork on the tenure line is an investment in professional
promotion. Overwork among adjuncts is just the condition of keeping one’s
job(s).

Feudal appropriation of adjuncts’ time is a DH issue. Last month Arizona State
University decided to increase the teaching load of its first-year comp
instructors by 25% without any increase in pay. Arizona State mandated that
these instructors, many of whom are Ph.D. alumni of Arizona State, add a fifth
class to their teaching load, putting their teaching load at 5/5, 125 students
per term. Tenured and tenure-line faculty retain a 2/2.

It’s quite possible that as digital humanities shifts the disciplinary landscape
not just of research but also of the teaching of writing, writing faculty may be
expected to integrate digital tools even if they have no paid support for doing
so.

Who will pay adjuncts to learn the digital tools that DHers make available?

Financial commitments from the Modern Language Association, the National Council
of Teachers of English, the American Historical Association, the Allied Digital
Humanities Organizations and other professional bodies should pay adjuncts and
other teaching-only faculty to get digital training. Such organizations are
mostly run by tenured faculty who have historically not seen alignment between
adjuncts’ needs and their own.

But there’s a self-interested motive in fortifying adjuncts with digital tools.
Harvard Business School professor and “disruption” expert Clay Christensen, who
keynoted the prestigious EDUCAUSE conference September 2014, predicts that
tenured faculty might find less demand for their services as adjunctification
creeps inexorably up the food chain.

“Since 2005,” Gabriel Kahn reports, “universities have hired part-time faculty
at nearly twice the rate as full-time faculty.” The Modern Language
Association’s Report from the Task Force on Doctoral Study (2014) acknowledges
that depressed hiring conditions since 2008, not candidates’ lack of preparation
or aptitude, are responsible for the downturn in tenure-line hiring.

What would “paying” an adjunct to learn digital tools look like? Buy a
contingent faculty member out of one class for one term and stipulate that the
time be spent in DIY, on-demand digital tools training. Pay adjuncts to attend
in-person training institutes like Digital Humanities Summer Institute or the
Digital Pedagogy Lab. Follow up to see how such training changes classroom
practice, whether or not it creates conditions of increased job security and
even job satisfaction.

Maybe you’re thinking: there is no way anybody will fund this.

“What do we have left if we shouldn’t settle for just being ‘nice’ or
‘respectful’?” asks Elizabeth Losh of the digital humanities in her scholarly
blog Virtualpolitik.

“Even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, [scholarship] has always
been collaborative” Kathleen Fitzpatrick declares (12). Similarly, teaching has
always been collaborative. Most students graduating from English departments
today are taught by a mix of faculty at all ranks.

Paying adjuncts to learn digital tools might look like generosity.

In hindsight, it may just look like survival.

***

I will deliver this talk as part of a roundtable discussion at the Modern
Language Association Convention in Vancouver, BC, Saturday 11 January in the
Vancouver Convention Center East, Room 16, at 8:30AM. The panel is called
“Disrupting the Digital Humanities.” Join the conversation in real time or
whenever: #MLA15, #s448, @kathiiberens.

WORKS CITED

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the
Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press. 2011.

Flaherty, Colleen. “One Course Without Pay.” Inside Higher Education.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/16/arizona-state-tells-non-tenure-track-writing-instructors-teach-extra-course-each
Accessed 2 January 2015.

Flanders, Julia. “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship.”
Digital Humanities Quarterly. 3.3 (2009).
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055/000055.html Accesssed 2
January 2015.

Frost-Davis, Rebecca, Matthew Gold, Katherine Harris and Jentery Sayers. Digital
Pedagogy in the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association, 2016. Print
and online open access.
https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/announcement.md
Accessed 2 January 2015.

Fyfe, Paul. “How to Not Read a Victorian Novel.” Journal of Victorian Culture
16.1 (Spring 2011): 102-106.

Kahn, Gabriel. “College In a Box: Textbook Giants Are Now Teaching Classes.”
Slate.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/online_college_classes_textbook_companies_offer_courses_with_minimal_university.html
Accessed 2 January 2015.

Losh, Elizabeth. “Respect, Niceness and Generosity.” Virtualpolitik.
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.no/2014/08/respect-niceness-and-generosity.html
Accessed 2 January 2015.

Modern Language Association. Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study (2014).
http://www.mla.org/report_doctoral_study_2014 Accessed 2 January 2015.

Smith, D. Frank. “EDUCAUSE 2014: Online Learning Could Fundamentally Change Role
of Universities.” EdTech Magazine.
http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2014/09/educause-2014-online-learning-could-fundamentally-change-role-universities
Accessed 2 January 2015.

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WHAT I’M DOING AS A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR

Posted by admin in curation, Digital Pedagogy, Electronic Literature, MLA,
Teaching | Leave a comment
23October2014


I’M THE 2014-2015 U.S. FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR OF DIGITAL CULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY IN
BERGEN.
HERE’S WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO.

In Kraków, I presented “Trends in Digital Poetry” at Festiwal Literacki
Ha!wangarda. I also led an e-literature curation workshop and gave a talk about
my book project “Algorithmic Subjects” at the Jagiellonian University.

ESSAYS PUBLISHED OR SUBMITTED FALL 2014

–“Judy Malloy’s seat at the (database) table: a feminist reception history of
early hypertext.” Literary and Linguistic Computing: Journal of the Alliance of
Digital Humanities Organizations. (2014) 29 (3): 340-348. Online and print. Open
access online thru November 2014.
–“Interface” chapter. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. New York: MLA Press.
2016. Open access online and print.
–“Live/Archive: Occupy MLA.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. In press. Open
access online.
–“Touch & Decay: Adapting Steve Tomasula’s TOC for iOS.” The Art and Science of
Steve Tomasula’s New Media Fiction. Ed. David Banash. New York: Bloomsbury. May
2015. Print.
–“Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces“. Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. In
press. Open access online.

INVITED TALKS

–Jagiellonian University and Festiwal Literacki Ha!wangarda. Kraków, Poland.
October 3-5.
–Äarhus University. Digital Humanities Lab of Denmark. December 11-12.
–University of Rostock. Fulbright lecture series. “Why Teach Video Games?” 15
May 2015.

SERVICE TO THE PROFESSION

–Nominated to the Modern Language Association Executive Committee.
–Executive Committee of the proposed MLA Creative Writing Forum “Rhetoric
Composition Writing Studies: Creative Writing.”

TALKS

–Two MLA 15 presentations in Vancouver:
—-“Want to ‘Save the Humanities’? Pay Adjuncts to Learn Digital Tools” on the
“Disrupting the Digital Humanities” panel;
—-“Occupy MLA: Protest Fiction in Networked Environments” on the Literary
Twitter panel.
–Two “Paratext in Digital Culture” Workshops:
—-“Street Paratexts: Paratext as Agent of Political Action.” 8 December. Bergen.
—-“Taroko Gorge: a Theory of Networked Paratext.” 30 August. Bergen.
–Bergen Public Library. “Stories Beneath Your Feet and Fingertips: Playing
Locative Stories.” 4 November.

TEACHING

This spring I’m teaching DIKULT 103 Digital Genres and co-teaching with Scott
Rettberg DIKULT 303, a master’s class in Digital Aesthetics. Last fall I taught
DIKULT 203 Electronic Literature, and one third of the DIKULT 106 Online
Identities course. My fourteen e-literature students come from Slovenia,
Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain. Digital Culture at UiB is
an English-language major, so we have a common tongue. My curriculum blends
media analysis, literary criticism, and making art. Students author art and
criticism individually and collaboratively. They have made short videos, memes,
generated poems (adapting M.I.T. professor Nick Montfort’s elegant javascript
poem “Taroko Gorge“), several analytical oral presentations and, at the end of
the term, a location-based Netprov, OUTSOURCE MY STUDY ABROAD, a collaboration
between my students and those of Rob Wittig, Visual Arts professor at University
of Minnesota Duluth.

Here are two particularly canny Tarokos–though really, many of the students did
inventive and beautiful work.

—Silje Fossdal dramatized the late, tense years of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s
marriage by staging quotations from The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz as an
accusatory dialogue. This is a savvy use of the generator, because the dialogue
rarely (if ever) repeats, which imparts the feeling of not being able to escape.
The watercolor art in background is Zelda’s. When Silje’s friends told her the
poem was beautiful, she added a jarring audio track to evoke the distance
between the Fitzgeralds’ beautiful appearance and shattered marriage.

—Patrick Durdel, who had never worked with javascript before this class,
eliminated lines of code to see how the output would render. Playing around,
Patrick reduced Scott Rettberg’s Tokyo Garage to one outputted line and tinkered
with it to exaggerate its overlap: brilliant of Patrick to see in the bold
yellow letters a visual poem of Tokyo’s skyline.

Hiking Lyderhorn, one of the 7 mountains ringing Bergen.

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ELECTRONIC LITERATURE AT UIB!

Posted by admin in Electronic Literature, Teaching | Leave a comment
19August2014

This post conveys information for DIKULT 203, Electronic Literature. You’ll find
here a course description, our reading schedule, assignments, grading rubrics,
and links to electronic literature collections and coding resources.

Screen shot of Jim Andrews’ “Aleph Null,” a work of visual poetry.

I’m Professor Kathi Inman Berens, a Fulbright Scholar visiting UiB from the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I earned my Ph.D. at the
University of California at Berkeley. You can learn more about me here. My
office hours will be Thursdays 9-10AM in HF Building 235a. I am also available
at other times; email me at kathiberens at gmail dot com to set up an
appointment. I’d like to meet with each of you at least once this term. Our
class meets Tuesdays in Datalab 124, Thursdays Group Room O.

The University of Bergen is home to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, an ambitious
database archive of seven thousand cross-referenced records of electronic
literature. We will each contribute one entry to the ELMCIP knowledge base.
You’ll also write a “close reading” analysis of a work of e-lit, make your own
adaptation of the poetry generator Taroko Gorge, collaborate on a “locative”
story that we’ll set here in Bergen near campus. Together we’ll conceptualize
that story, build it, play it using our mobile devices, then write about it.

This is UiB’s official description of DIKULT203’s requirements and guidelines.

READING SCHEDULE

Here is the Reading Schedule.

UiB mandates about 1000 pages of reading. We should measure our time in hours
rather than print pages. Longer works of e-lit on this syllabus might take 3
hours to read and 2 more hours to write notes and compare to other works.
Shorter works will vary in duration. The criticism will aid you in
contextualizing the e-lit and will deepen your knowledge of e-literature’s
medial fragility and the challenge of preserving access to it, and e-lit’s
emerging role in the canon of literature.

I am a good teacher of writing. We’ll approach e-literature texts as objects for
you to emulate, remix, rip off and analyze.

Books
Emerson, Lori. 2013. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the
Bookbound. Minnesota University Press.

Pressman, Jessica. 2014. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure, Lori Emerson and Benjamin Robertson: The Johns Hopkins Guide
to Digital Media. 2014. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Strickland, Stephanie. 2014. V: WaveTercets/Losing L’Una (second edition).
Denver: Spring Gun Press.

Online Archives
Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1
Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 2
ELMCIP Knowledge Base
I Love E-Poetry
Electronic Poetry Center
Eastgate Systems
Authoring Software

COURSE DESCRIPTION: WHAT IS ELECTRONIC LITERATURE?

At the simplest level, it’s a collaborative experience you initiate between
yourself, a computer, software, and the artist’s designed concept. Often but not
always, these experiences convey a story; sometimes words do different kinds of
expressive work than the semantic work we’re accustomed to in print-based media,
where the materiality of words is usually invisible. Sometimes, as in Jim
Andrews’ visual poetry I’ve captured above in this post’s thumbnail image, there
are no words or letters at all.

In print media, words are the vessels of “ideas,” but in electronic literature
the medium (animation, text, image, sound, touch) is as much an expressive part
of the art as the “ideas.” Ideas are never unaffected by the medium in which
they are conveyed. E-lit works “perform on request” (Ted Nelson, cited in Scott
Rettberg (“Electronic Literature,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media,
2014), and YOU the reader convey that “request” by touching the computer through
keyboard, touchpad, screen or mouse. We’ll investigate “the literary” as a type
of experience that may or may not involve words, but which is one way or another
about “writing,” even if the writing we examine is source code and its outputs.

E-books are not electronic literature. E-books are printed stories converted to
digital display for convenience, so they can be stored and read on portable
digital devices. Electronic literature requires an algorithm to run. It
“performs,” and so do you, actively shaping your experience of the story, or
understanding the limits of your agency as a reader to intervene in that
particular story’s machinic process. I’ll teach you how to classify electronic
literature according to platform, interactivity and genre; but as you read
entries in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, you’ll see that even the
same work can be classified differently depending on how readers engage it.
(See, for example, Roberto Simanowski’s short illustration of this dilemma on p.
135, “The Double Life of Texts.”)

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After successfully completing this course, students will have:

an overview of the history and genres of electronic literature

familiarity with key works of hypertext fiction, digital poetry, and interactive
fiction.

an understanding of how visual, kinetic, temporal and interactive features work
in narrative and poetry in electronic literature, and how they complicate our
understandings of the reader and of the literary in general


an understanding of the basic principle within the programming.

After successfully completing this course, students will be able to:

apply theories about electronic literature in their own interpretations of
specific works

reflect upon their own creative practice and use feedback to improve their work


write specifically for digital environments

grasp elementary principles of programming

understand coding and design as elements of writing practice.

REQUIREMENTS

Course Work
There are two compulsory activities leading up to the assessed final project.

1) Students will participate in a collaborative practical project
2) Each student will choose a work of electronic literature to they present
orally to the class and write a critical description of at least 400 words

In order to take the exam it is required that the student has participated in at
least 75 percent of the teaching and classroom activities. Course participation
is approved by the course leader.

More detailed presentations of compulsory and semester assignments will be
presented on the student portal.

Final Projects
Students can choose between two alternative assignment types:

1) Create a work of electronic literature and write an introduction to the work
of 1,500 words that sets it in a critical context.

2) Write a comparative analysis of two works of electronic literature, 4000
words in length.

TEACHING METHODS

There are sixteen lectures and eight sessions in the lab over thirteen weeks. In
addition, each student will have one supervision meeting with the lecturer in
connection with semester thesis.

Because we are collaboratively building a locative work of e-lit, sometimes our
“lab” will be outside on the sites testing our project. You will also be
expected to attend Prof. Inman Berens’ lecture at the Bergen Public Library
Thursday, Nov. 4th at 7PM.

In our instructor-led labs, some of them co-conducted with Professor Scott
Rettberg, we will creatively blend experimental conceptual work and practical
digital techniques.

Each student will have one supervision meeting with the lecturer in connection
with semester thesis.

ASSESSMENT METHODS

Students can choose between two alternative assignment types:
1) Create a work of electronic literature and write an introduction to the work
of 1,500 words that sets it in a critical context.
2) Write a comparative analysis of two works of electronic literature, 4000
words in length.

Grading Scale
Grade scale A-F.

I look forward to working with you!

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