Jamie Kane - Alternate Reality Game (ARG)

I've started a new thread of posts on my personal blog about the BBC's Jamie Kane game (which I am requiring my undergraduate classes to play).

So far I've just posted a brief description and my initial thoughts. I'll update it as we move farther into the story, and as I get the reactions of my undergrads.

If you're interested in ARGs, or the blending of the textual/narrative world with the real world that happens in them, I can recommend this one -- it's free and only lasts 15 days. This could be a great work to examine for your final project...

Blogs and Social Networking

Following up on Steve's post about blogs and media diffusion, I wanted to add a few links to some sites that might be of interest along the same lines.

Social News sites like Digg and SlashDot were part of the inspiration behind Daily Kos's move to include diaries and to promote certain diary entries to the main page.

As explained on the Digg site, "Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

As with DKos, the number of recommendations of a particular entry allow that entry to become visible on the main page. Thus, though you may not be Matt Drudge, you can still get noticed by thousands (or hundreds of thousands, at DKos) of readers.

Interesting stuff.

MT Markup Update

I have just learned that Movable Type (this blogging system) does not allow the "strikethrough" tag, which has been deprecated in the most recent HTML standards.

What that means is that pain-in-the-rump "cutting-edge" systems like Movable Type now only allow you to use the "deleted" tag (open-carrot del close-carrot, and open-carrot slash-del close-carrot to show strikethroughs, while other systems (like Blogger) still let you use "strike".

Long story short, use "del" to show strikethrough text. I've updated the MT instructions sheet on the WebCT page to include this tag.

Panel Discussion: Coming Out as a Scholar

Anyone who is going to be in Burlington from 1:30-3pm on Wednesday the 12th of October is invited to come to a panel discussion moderated by yours truly.

As part of UVM's celebration of National Coming Out Week, "Coming Out as a Scholar" will bring together lesbian, gay, and straight academics researching diverse topics such as queerness in Native American populations, the history of gender and sexuality in the British Empire, LGBTQA issues in nursing, and the ways queerness is "played" or hidden in online communities, to discuss possibilities, pitfalls, and what it's like either being out on campus or studying "out topics."

The panel will include:

Paul Deslandes, Assistant Professor of History
Brian Gilley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Cheryl Laskowski, Assistant Professor of Nursing

and the discussion will be moderated by Richard Parent, Assistant Professor of English.

Coming Out as a Scholar
1:30-3pm, Wednesday, Oct. 12th
North Lounge of the Billings Student Center, UVM

For more information, feel free to zing me an e-mail at REParent (at) uvm (dot) edu.

I hope to see you there!

(x-posted on 095 and Digital Digressions)

New Post on Movie Trailers

I just posted to my personal blog about a remixed movie trailer for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Apropos of our discussion of the opening prologue to Meet the Lucky Ones and its role in our interpretation of the work itself, I think this really puts an interesting spin on our usual understanding of previews and prologues.

Check it out. Besides being hermeneu-tastic, it's also really funny.

Daughters of Freya

If you're not quite finished getting e-mails from Daughters of Freya, log in to the web page, http://www.emailmystery.com and use your login name and password to access the rest of the e-mails.

If the system is smart enough to recognize that you shouldn't see the rest of the story, let me know and I'll give you my login and password.

The magic number of e-mails is: 108. If you haven't got this many, you're missing out.

Thoughts on the "public intellectual"

This is off-topic from hermeneutics, but I've got a new post on my personal blog about the "public intellectual" (it's even interactive -- you can vote).

It might be of interest to some of you. If so, check it out. If not, as you were.

New Resources

I've added a new set of web pages to the Resources tab.

These will include works cited by Hayles in Writing Machines, as well as others that may be of interest to you.

I'll continue to add to this list throughout the next week.

Posting to the Course Blog

I have uploaded to our WebCT page the instruction sheet for posting to the course blog. The MS Word file is under the Assignments tab.

And, as always, if you have any problems -- let me know!

More thoughts on Wednesday's class

I posted a moderately lengthy recapitulation and extension of our problem-solving vs. problematics discussion on my personal blog. Check it out.

There's also a link to an online game-version of Hamlet there. I'm now adding that to your reading load for Wednesday's class. (I've updated the schedule on the blog here to include the work and a link to it.)

Ha! Yes, I am cruel and heartless to make you play Hamlet. It will mesh nicely with "Same Day Test," I think.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that if you are interested in Interactive Fiction/Text Adventures, you should check out Nick Montfort's excellent book, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, available at Bailey-Howe (QA76.76.I59 M66 2003).

Writing Machines Responses

I've started posting the responses to N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines under the Discussions Tab at the top of the page.

Head over there and check it out. To comment, you will need to register (it's free) with Typekey. Just follow the link.

If you haven't yet e-mailed me your response, try to get them to me soon so we can all have a chance to read, think about, and comment on each others' work before class on Wednesday.

When you can't do anything else... blog.

Tulane is a well-respected university in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Well, it was a well-respected university. Now, driven from its city by the flooding of hurricane Katrina, and with students, faculty, staff, and administration forbidden to return, the university has been reduced to...

a blog.

The blog structure (easily updated, arranged chronologically, most recent info at the top) is an ideal format with which to communicate with the extensive Tulane community in exile around the country.

Interestingly, there are no comments enabled on the site. I wonder how long it will be until someone starts a Tulane discussion blog?

Reading back through the posts at the blog, it's surreal seeing how the university sought to take practical, reasonable steps to safeguard its people and facilities, and how those steps (and the projected timetable for resuming classes and reopening campus) were so far off the mark.

[Cross-posted to 095 and Digital Digressions]

UPDATE: Here's a link to a LiveJournal site detailing the devastation from the inside. This is worse than most floods. In most floods, the water rises, life gets really, really bad, people die, and then the water goes away. The Interdictor blog really brings home the bowl-like state of New Orleans -- there's no where for the water to go. It's there. It's gonna stay there. The only way to get it out is to pump all gazillion gallons of it away. Check it out.

Fun With Interpretation

Just to show that not all hermeneutical work is scary or unintelligbly arcane, here's an article by Andy Borowitz, Canadian humorist extraordinaire, which plays -- with great complexity -- with many of the concepts we discussed in class this week: experience, interpretration, the claim of "crisis," emotion, affect (in its many senses), authority, postmodern self-referentialism... the list could go on an on.

IN WEEK BEFORE LABOR DAY, POINTLESS ‘FILLER’ COLUMNS ABOUND
Lazy Columnists Pad Out Stories by Quoting Experts, Experts Say

In a phenomenon that occurs every year in the week before Labor Day, national columnists across America file pointless, content-free “filler” columns, enabling the lazy scribes to hit the beach earlier, according to observers who have been following this trend.

The “filler” columns are churned out in a matter of minutes with no loftier goal than meeting a deadline and filling up space -- meaning that columnists will often resort to using the same words or phrase again and again and again and again and again.

And rather than doing any original writing, the slothful columnists will rely on so-called “experts” to supply them with quotes to fill up space, experts say.

“They'll often quote people you've never heard of,” says Harold Crimmins, an expert in the field of filler columns. “It's pretty shameless.”

The typical “filler” column is often a reprint of a previously published column, but the writer will later plug in one cursory reference to current events, such as the Cindy Sheehan controversy, to disguise this fact.

And in order to fill up space even faster, Crimmins says, the lazy beach-bound columnist will compose his summer “filler” columns with short paragraphs.

Many of these paragraphs will be as short as one sentence, he says.

“Or shorter,” he adds.

There are other telltale signs a reader can look for in order to determine whether a writer has, in fact, filed a so-called “filler” column, according to Crimmins.

One of these is a tendency to repeat information that the reader has already read earlier in the article, with columnists even stooping to using the same quote twice.

“They'll often quote people you've never heard of,” Crimmins says.

Another tip-off is if the column ends abruptly.

Readings for Hyper Hermeneutics

Just a reminder that the readings for this seminar will not be stored on this blog. You may find them on the WebCT site and on electronic course reserves at the UVM library. You can access electronic reserve by going to the Library Services page and then choosing "View Course Reserves" (part of the "Do It Yourself" menu). Once you get to the reserves page, use the pull-down menus to choose my name and the course number. That will get you to our readings.

Welcome to the blog for English 340

I'll be getting rolling on the blog in the next few days....