October 2-- Field Bibliography

Kosterlnick, Charles, and David D. Roberts. Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Allyn and Bacon Series in Technical Communication. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998.

The authors state that their purpose is to enable the readers to be able to create "sturdier, more reliable, and more comprehensive frameworks for thinking about and practicing design" (xviii).Reminding us that each document has a designer who creates it and a reader that makes meaning from it, they use rhetorical principles to ground their message.

Shankar, Tara Rosenberger. "Speaking on the Record: A Theory of Composition." Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 374-93.

Rosenberger calls for a new vocabulary with which to discuss oral forms of composition. Most of our current vocabulary about composing refers specifically to print literacy practices and thus show a "graphocentric bias" (375). She proposes the term "spriting" as a combination of "speaking" and "writing" to produce "talkuments" (376). While the new vocabulary may not catch on, she does open up the conversation about terminology for new media compositions that do seem to be something besides "stories" or "essays" but do not yet seem to have a more specific identity.

Shipka, Jody. "Sound Engineering: Toward a Theory of Multimodal Soundness." Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 355-73.

Shipka argues that texts can be composed, or "soundly engineered" from anything. She asserts a multimodal "activity-based" method of composition rather than the traditional thesis driven styles that are currently privileged in most composition classes (357). She requires her students to reflect on their rhetorical aims and the choices that they make in pursuit of those aims with their multimodal compositions.

Turing, Alan. "Computing Machenery and Intelligence." New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 50-64.

Written in 1950, Turing's classic work still influences what we consider to be a "thinking" machine. He argued that a machine could be said to "think" if it could react to a human in a way that is indistinguishable from anther human, and then goes on to discuss various ideas of digital computers. The significance of this piece is in its historical value, since this article brought the possibility of artificial intelligence to the public and proposed a method of measuring it.