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.

September 18th, Field Bibliography

Bernhardt, Stephen, A. "The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens." College Composition and Communication 44.2 (1993): 151-75.

While dated, Bernhardt still makes a good point when he claims, "Changes in technology invariably trigger changes in the shape of text" (151). He lists nine "dimensions of variation" that help differentiate use of text onscreen and on paper. Onscreen texts tend to be: Situationally embedded; interactive; functionally mapped; modular; navigable; hierarchically embedded; spacious; graphically rich; and customizable and publishable. He believes that as texts change due the constraints of technology, we will develop new skills to process those new texts (173).

Kress, Gunter, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Disourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold, 2001. In the past, communication was generally conducted in a single mode. People spoke to one another, or they communicated by writing and print. Later, radio provided a mode to communicate by sound at a distance, while television combined both sounds and pictures. Both radio and television, though, functioned because of written scripts. With computers, we are using more modes of communication our social transactions. They argue that "meaning is made in many different ways, always, in many modes and media which are co-present in a communicational ensemble" (111). This stands in contrast to the older idea that communication only happened with words. Sullivan, Patricia. "Practicing safe visual rhetoric on the World Wide Web." Computers and Composition 18 (2001): 103-21. Changes in media technology change the way that people work. Much design advice or "guideline[s]"(104) are the result of trying to force websites into looking and acting like print. Such "safe" guidelines provide structure for designers, especially novices, but do continue to influence web design even after designers develop skills to be more creative in design. Because the web has "some of the characteristics of print, some of television, and some of film," new aesthetics must be established for the medium. For this reason, textual meaning on the internet is impossible to separate from the visual aspects. Wysocki, Anne Frances, et al. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan, UT: Utah UP, 2004. The authors claim that this book "provides rationales for opening a writing classroom to new media in particular ways" (vii). Distinguishing this text are the exercises, assignments, and handouts as well as theory and advice. Wysocki, Anne Frances. "awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs." Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 55-62. Under what circumstances can we imagine submitting a piece of literary criticism on a piece of construction paper written in crayon? Wysocki argues that certain materials and designs are not available for certain uses. She argues that Kress's understanding of "image and word" as being "bound logically and respectively with time and space" limits the way that images and words can be understood. Wysocki, Anne Frances. "Impossibly Distinct: On Form/Content and Word/Image in Two Pieces of Computer-Based Interactive Multimedia." Computers and Composition 18 (2001): 209-34. Wysocki argues that much advice for building content online assumes that, "content is separate from form, writing from the visual, information from design, word from image" (210). Using two interactive CDs that feature the work of Matisse, Wysocki compares how the experience of navigating the CDs shapes the user's experience with the content.