Data-palace: Modern memory work in digital environments Derek Van Ittersum
Distributed Cognition
Drawing from the work done on trying to understand memory as composed across space within a cockpit, Ittersum describes the process of distributed cognition as “all the places where ‘memories’ can be stored.” It is in this way, reminds Ittersum, that CHAT centers the situational aspects of the interactions, mentioning the “simultaneously improvised locally and mediated by historically provided tools and practices” core to understanding the CHAT framework.
Recounting the work done on digital tools, Ittersum continues with an analysis of the ways in which searching is a distributed action across time and tools within a software context. Mentioning programs like Word and OnNote, Ittersum points toward a distributed cognition within these systems, proposing that the improvised and mediated actions within the interactions with software like those mentioned represent the same distributed nature as that of the pilot initially mentioned, linking the ways that both situations show the way in which ‘memories’ have a spatial component.
Re-membering identity: Recovering textual networks through a remediated canon
Janine Solberg
Embodied Memory
Pulling from the way texts and literacy was mediated through feminine bodies in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Solberg connects the use of secretaries with the themes of gatekeepers and external memory devices. In much the same way that a computer might be used today, Solberg points toward a networking interface of organizational memory.
Feminine bodies were supposed to be able to navigate their situational contexts, pulling from and working through the system of other nodes — other feminine bodies. As the connections between men, Solberg describes the way that feminine bodies became both the external memory (for the office) and a part of the internal memory (for the organization). There is also a third type of memory positioned between the two as well: muscle memory.
As the recording devices (in the sense women where objectified), feminine bodies need to be able to type quickly and move trough their desk spaces, becoming not only the medium of communication, but centralizing the embodiment of the memory in some situation consisting of both the body and its interactions in the space.
Pulling from the reading notes on Tracing Genres, I mapped nodes that matched the two major themes of Systems and Users and Genre Construction, linking out to the ways that each author that Spinuzzi (2003) uses constructs genres in turn. I specifically linked the ideas of Popham and boundary objects with the way that Spinuzzi discusses genre construction within organizations.
Spinuzzi (2003) strongly makes the argument that there is a division between system-designed and user-designed environments. Drawing from Johnson () on articulating three main points of difference between them, he makes note of the “formalist . . . [and ]determinist” nature of designing from the system-level outwards. For the user-designed environment, on the other hand, Spinuzzi (2003) links into the “social constructionist . . . [and] postmodernist” constructions of environments that are build, as he later explains, from the usage and not dictated from external pressures and forces (p.141-143).
Speaking to this worker- or user-created series of solutions, he writes:
Workers produce solutions that are devious, wily, and cunning, but often these solutions do not involve a deep understanding of the system, and sometimes they even run to superstition. Workers produce solutions that work-but often they do not produce solutions that work well by their own criteria, and often those solutions are not promulgated so that other workers can take advantage of them. (p. 290-292)
As as much as Spinuzzi (2003) might suggest that user-centered design is a better choice, he also warns of the solutions that users create: ones that are “wily” and usually in such a way that the work gets done faster but not necessarily more efficiently for the greater ecology. It is these forces, Spinuzzi (2003) explains, that work toward genres as well. They are not the most efficient means of informational exchanges; however, they are often the “wily” solutions to problems that caused them to be generated in the first place and stick around not because they are prized but because they work most of time.
Genre Construction
Early in the book, Spinuzzi (2003) uses this same metaphor, writing:
Genre tracing is concerned with examining the ways that workers rescue themselves . . . by developing unofficial, frequently unarticulated work practices and genres, by adapting old genres to new uses, and by linking their innovations to established, official genres. (p. 327-328)
Genre tracing, as the process through which genres are explored, is rooted in the searching of the ways that “workers save themselves” through, again, the “wily” solutions they find and use for information exchanges. Spinuzzi (2003), recording the terms of others, lists genres as “tools-in-use” (Russell 1997); “typified rhetorical response to a recurring social situation (Miller 1984)”; “‘socially recognized types of communicative actions used by organizational members for particularlar communicative and collaborative purposes’ (Yates and Orlikowski 2002, 14)”; “tradition” (Bakhtin); and ‘seeing and conceptualizing conceptualizing reality’ (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978, 134).”
Yet, in recalling the work of Barton and Barton (1993), Spinuzzi (2003) connects the way that maps make us over and change our way of thinking. For Barton and Barton (1993), as it comes to maps, they dictate not the space but the metaphorical control of the space. In this same way, Spinuzzi (2003) writes of “crystallization” of practices that come to control our articulations of how the space could be instead of what it really is. For Spinuzzi (2003), a genre is a major controlling force of thought; in the same way that it is constructed through what we might think of as traditional forces, it is shaped through its usages and refined through its ability to transfer information, not any efficiently that might make the entire process faster overall.
Application
As I’ve mentioned on Facebook recently, I flew on an airplane this past Tuesday for the first time in twenty years. And the experience, having been thinking about Tracing Genres some during different flight segments, was that flight attendants safety speech is a strong genre. Through expectations and the materiality of the process, there has been this crystallization of practices that Spinuzzi discusses. Most people, as I noticed, either ignore it or give over vague attention to it, but there is a ritualism to the delivery, the audience, and the components that speaks to a usage that has codified through time into what it is now. Perhaps, at one time, it was more efficient. But now, it’s just the way things are done.
References:
Clay Spinuzzi. Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). Kindle Edition.
Speaking to the increasing ways in which student work are remixes and mashups, Delagrange, McCorkle, andBraun (2013) each write of different approaches to understanding the role of invention, collaboration, and assessment when it comes to planning, accessing, and trying to grade works that pull from or are composed of elements from other, commercial and public domain projects. Questioning the use of older, more traditional assessment, methods, each in turn opens up the way works and in turn assessment takes place using the lens of cultural criticism, law management, and rhetorical theory.
THE EVOLVING RUBRIC: AN ASSESSMENT TOOL Susan H. Delagrange
Delagrange (2013) discusses the ways in which an “evolving” rubric, one created through collaboration with students, can often help discover the ways in which students understand the works they consume and create. Through using agreed-upon categories, Delagrange (2013) write, the assessment for things including things like remixes can become a “living document,” one that “[is] evolving to suit the needs of the class and of the assignment.”
FAIR USE: IT’S NOT JUST FOR LAWYERS ANYMORE Ben McCorkle
Introducing the Fair Use doctrine and the safeties it inscribes for creators , McCorkle (2013) writes about the challenges of enabling students to create mashups while also navigating the complexities of laws that forbad or curtail how certain elements can be combined in new ways. Suggesting that evaluative instruments be based in real-world issues, McCorkle (2013) calls for assessment that speaks to these issues and use Fair Use guidelines as a framework for new forms.
REMIXING LEARNING OUTCOMES: REFRAMING PRINT-CENTRIC EXPECTATIONS
Catherine C. Braun
Detailing that the complications that come from asking students to create new media works that include remix aspects, Braun (2013) relates the “the ways that broader institutional and programmatic definitions of writing and assessment might affect assignment design and the assessment of digital projects within individual writing classrooms.” It is not always a matter of student ability (although that is part), often the overriding issue is the institutional assessment itself and how it “values older forms of discourse, thereby discouraging, from a programmatic standpoint,newer forms of composing, which cannot be assessed appropriately using the old criteria.” By including the words and underlining ideas of “revision” and “re-use” in mission statements and college descriptions, writing classrooms, as influenced by such decisions and wording, can works toward a greater inclusion of mashups and associated assessment.
Reference:
McKee, H. A., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (2013). Digital writing assessment & evaluation.Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae.
Building from Bitzer’s (1992) idea of constraints when it comes to rhetorical situations and Foucault’s (2012) discursive constellation, it’s hard not to think of Miller’s (1984) articulation of genres as arising out of social actions as an attempt to, again, circumspect contextual production artifacts. However, while Bitzer (1992) and Foucault’s (2012) attempt to contain discontinues and rhetorical situations through structural rules, Miller (1984) provides the ability to open up the production rules that generate genres as “organized around situated actions” (p. 154). Moving against Bitzer (1992), Miller (1984) states that “Exigence must be seen neither as a cause of rhetorical action nor as intention, but a social move” (p. 157). Biesecker (1989) in explaining the same issues, writes that “rhetorical situation as an exchange of influence defines the text as an object that médiates between subjects (speaker and audience) whose identity is constituted in a terrain différent from and external to the particular rhetorical situation” (p. 110). Yet, Miller (1994) highlights the opening rejected by Foucault’s (2012) rules and, in a way Biesecker (1989) as well: “In a paradoxical way, a rhetorical community includes the ‘other'” (p. 74). Within Miller’s (1984;1994) model, the discontinuity is within the open set that includes all inclusive and exclusive events that move toward genre congealment.
Miller (1994) closes “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre” with the admission that genres work as much on its users as they help mold its own uses, identifying them as “the relationships we carry around in our heads” (p. 75). Such a forwarding matches with the same explanations made by Bazerman (2003) in “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People” where the the idea of a “genre set” is “texts someone in a particular role is likely to produce,” a “genre system” is “several genre sets of people working together in an organized way, plus the patterned relations in the production, flow, and use of these documents” (p. 318), and that systems of genres are actually “systems of activities” (p. 319). The social dimension of genres, then, is key to both their maintenance and the collisions with other sets in which they are produced through the intersectionality of the agents, actions, and interrelations within itself.
Diagram of a metabolism chemical reaction network from Metabolism of Loops by Marius Buliga
A genre network could be thought of as the relationships between the actors, events, and even outside, overlapping networks that provide “power” (within the metaphor of continued maintenance) and support to its structure. Within Popham’s (2005) “Forms as Boundary Genres in Medicine, Science, and Business”, such a framing seems possible as the use of forms between disciplines is presented as boundary objects that “mediate the central tensions between diverse fields to achieve coherence” (p. 285). As Popham’s (2005) writes:
Thus, boundary genres—that is, genres functioning as boundary objects—may actively participate in interprofessional struggles about hierarchies, dominance, and values, helping to create, mediate, and store tensions. (p. 285)
Such a positioning allows, as Popham (2005) concludes, that following the “the genre system as boundary objects allows us to see . . . how [professions] constrain, limit, and expand one another” (p. 286). In much the same way, then, a genre is not some static idea or collection, but a living constellation of interactions that pass between different professions and disciplines, infecting them as it moves and highlighting the way in which genes translate and encode the techne from one to another and back again.
Much like what was done last week, the work continued to map out the interconnected terms from Foucault, using the italicized terms within The Archaeology of Knowledge as a guide for how to follow the argument (and methodology) laid out within the book as a way to analyze other things.
Unlike the previous works looked at in this class, The Archaeology of Knowledge gives itself over well to branching out into other nodes, linking the ways that terms are presented within the text as, in its way, layers to dig through on the way toward some final theoretical understand of other texts.
The observation I made to Alex this week on The Archaeology of Knowledge was that I got much more from the introduction than I did across the following six chapters of the book. While I was finding myself taking detailed notes on the first section, the following parts were, at least in my perception, more terms and structuralism that didn’t really add to the overall construction of a methodology except to complicate the liminal spaces Foucault (1972) was trying to open in the first.
The premise of exploring the “discontinuities” was, I thought, a strong argument for collecting and organizing the different topics Foucault (1972) lumps together. Yes, it is a very useful lens to look at the relationship of objects to each other and a context in terms of not their similarities but differences. Yes. The development of the ideas of “threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation” are all powerful tools for the breaking apart of how we think through issues of organization and, ultimately, network relations (5). The same can be true of the “null point” Foucault (1972) mentions about chronologies as well. There is always “a receding null point that is unreachable and unknowable” in such constructions (25). In fact, and reflecting on the overall book, it is the “discursive formations” that he highlights as the collision points between collections that are best at isolating the ways in which we, as humans, so dislike the way in which discontinuities unsettle us in all of our patterns and management (38).
Object Formation
That was, if anything was to catch my attention, the one thing that I took away from the book itself: the way that we organize and make “sets” speaks to the nexus of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive limitations. We so dislike the idea of infinity, for example, we invent the idea of Limits that give us a close approximation of the idea of infinity. One that is manageable and under our control. Even the promise of a discontinuity frightens us and we use math (as a form of structuralism) to control the totality of its possibilities. We would prefer, as Foucault (1972) discusses, to dress up our ideas in the clothes of linguistic messages, referrals to more referrals until the discounting is layered and nearly forgotten.
Somewhat closer to my roots in programming, I found the idea of object formation to be intriguing in the way that software “objects” are developed and maintain. In chapter 3, Foucault (1972) lists the following three rules for how objects are formed:
Map the first surfaces of their emergence
Describe the authorities of delimitation
Analyze the grids of specification
Taken into a software context, I would think through these as something close to the patten of “has-a” and “is-a” series of relationships between the attributes and the nodes or objects themselves. To “map . . . their emergence” would be to track how the objects appear within their context. Does their need to be a Car object, as an example, or is the context constraining the domain as Honda or Ford?
Object oriented design object. Showing how the interface and public and private features of an object interact (from Wikimedia Commons)
Moving into the “authorities of delimitation,” I would shift the focus from the object as a whole to how it intersects. What, in other words, is its API? What parts are private to the object itself and which might be public? How does is it created and how is it handled once it exists? What does it do that is different from the other objects of its type?
Finally, as Foucault (1972), wraps up the formation of objects, he shifts to an even closer examination of the “grids of specification,” something I would place within the operations of trying to figure out the interconnectivity of the objects. How are they placed? Within what context? Is their an existing structure into which they fit? What, in other words, are the operationalized protocols that they must ‘speak’? How are they conformed?
Fixed Grammars
Moving into Chapter 3 of the third section, I saw what Foucault (1972) was trying to create as the maintain of what might be called an “accepting language,” a term borrowed from Computer Science as something that consists of valid collections of input within a finite set as used in conjunction with an algorithm. (Technically, accepting languages are used with deterministic finite automata, but that’s another issue entirely.)
An example of a deterministic finite automata (DFA) drawn within a “network” layout
In trying to describe the patterns of statements, Foucault (1972) proposes the following rules how you go about determining them:
Fix the vocabulary (discursive formation)
Statement cannot be isolated
Statement is not visible
Referral, subject, an associated field, a materiality
Starting with the first two, we see the “fixing” of the vocabulary. In a CS sense, that would follow that you would eliminate impossible combinations from the language (in moving towards an “accepting” language) and then, as the next step, try to find atomic (indivisible) “statements” or combinations of tokens that cannot be broken down any more than they already are.
The last two steps don’t strictly meet up to CS as DFA are usually theoretical constructs of possible machines (automata). However, in the analysis that Foucault (1972) is doing, they are the locating of the “weak” connections that are at the heart of the statements (in what they are hidden) and of a search for a materiality and contextual relationship into which to locate the statement: its referral, subject, and associated field.
In a few sentences, describe how you felt after playing.
Activity:
What do you think of when you think of the word “bus?”
Together, let’s draw individually what we think of as a “bus.”
Bus, Explained
A bus is a connection + some materiality.
In a digital setting, a bus works in concert with a driver. A bus is, in a sense, “driven” by some software that knows when to pick data or power up, where to drop it off, and what to do while carrying it.
A bus is a description of the constraints placed on the connection between nodes.
In a network, there might be a bandwidth limit between nodes. A certain amount of data might only be able to be sent at a certain time or as part of some batch. The bus is the manner through which data is exchanged and moved. It is both the means and the director of that data.
References:
“How does a computer’s parallel port work?” 1 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question11.htm> 18 January 2016
HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What is the main difference between FireWire and USB?” 27 July 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/difference-between-firewire-usb.htm> 18 January 2016
HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What’s another name for FireWire?” 27 July 2011.
HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/whats-another-name-firewire.htm> 18 January 2016
Tracy V. Wilson “How PCI Express Works” 17 August 2005. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pci-express.htm> 18 January 2016
Jeff Tyson & Tracy V. Wilson “How SCSI Works” 18 May 2001. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi.htm> 18 January 2016
Ha. Poor How Stuff Works. While obviously a source for information about, well, “how stuff works,” it also seems to have let just about anyone with any degree of knowledge about a certain aspect or piece of technology write their entries of roughly any length they want. All very well and good, you know, if you want a quick write-up for cousin Susie to know “How does a parallel port work?” and all, but not really an expert on the subject by any means. Merely, as the author line lists, a “contributor” to the knowledgebase of the site.
In terms of “buses,” if I were to define it as a computer scientist, I would list it as “a data exchange interface.” In much the same way that it it might be “highways that take information and power from one place to another” as define by How Stuff Works, it’s also not strictly “information” in the interpretational sense (Tyson & Wilson, 2016). Data is by far the better term for defining how units are moved around. Information is interpreted from an internal or external context. It is understand by some entries within a symbolic context. Data just is. It’s merely moving things around within a setting like a computer that is utterly and completely devoid of meaning.
Computers have no symbolic interpretation linguistic ability. They exchange binary power signals that are moved across a pipeline from one place to another. “Power,” as listed by How Stuff Works, however, might be right as, in a computational sense, “power” and “data” are the same thing. A computer both runs on power and exchanges it among its buses in a way that moves from one internal part to another. Within a computer, there is often a central bus and those running off of it. These can be thought of as both the circular system and the nervous system, in a biological context.
For the metaphor of a circular system, power is routed through a computer via the central bus around the computer from the power supply to each part in turn. The motherboard controls the bus, routing things through its own controls and stepping up or down the power as needed. Unlike the circular system in a body, however, there is no “waste” to remove from the system. Within a computer, power is all. It is connected to everything. In order for all parts to receive power, they need to be connected to everything else within a path.
To detect things, like in a nervous system, a computer must “scan” for things at regular internal. However, unlike a body reporting on what might be pressing on the skin, a computer detects things along the bus by measuring the power levels along its ports. Just like blood pressure changes as blood leaves the body, so does a computer “scan” that something has happened and that it needs to then read information. When the power levels change, the computer tries to adapt to the change through passing along whatever it found by way of data exchange to software that reacts if the device is known and its interface open.
Often, the software that sits between a port and even “drives the bus,” so to speak, is just that: a driver. As a small piece of code, a “driver” might be thought of as a series of if-then statements with a handful of functionality thrown in depending on the device. For the most part, the driver acts in the same manner as that of a “bus driver” might: given certain conditions, it knowns when to let things on and off the bus, when to stop, and then to go again. For the bus, the driver is invisible. It is the software that “runs” the hardware that directs the bus to do things. Just as the brain and body is inseparable, the bus and its “driver” act on one another and move the body as certain external and internal actions happen.
In relation to a network, a bus might be thought of a connection made manifest. It is the materiality of the movements between nodes. While, in an abstract sense, there might be a link between nodes, the use of the word “bus” implies some constraints toward the situational context. In much the same way that we read about the construction of a rhetorical situation, a bus might be thought of as the constraints through which data is exchanged. Be it a bandwidth, length, or even speed, a “bus” is the part that joins the abstract to the built, the bridge between the standardization and something substantial.
References:
“How does a computer’s parallel port work?” 1 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question11.htm> 18 January 2016
HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What is the main difference between FireWire and USB?” 27 July 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/difference-between-firewire-usb.htm> 18 January 2016
HowStuffWorks.com Contributors “What’s another name for FireWire?” 27 July 2011.
HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/whats-another-name-firewire.htm> 18 January 2016
Tracy V. Wilson “How PCI Express Works” 17 August 2005. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pci-express.htm> 18 January 2016
Jeff Tyson & Tracy V. Wilson “How SCSI Works” 18 May 2001. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/scsi.htm> 18 January 2016
Building off of the first set of readings (Bitzer, Vatz, Biesecker, and Rickert), I plotted out a pattern where nodes and connections grew out from the authors-works into the primary ideas that they wrote about and how I saw them bridging between other author-works. As an example of the connections I drew, I saw the major theme of “rhetorical situations” (obviously found in all the works as curated together) as the main node through which each author, in turn, wrote and discussed.
Color-coding the authors, I made connections between how each covered rhetorical situations and, as the following screenshot shows, branched off accordingly.
