Literary Kinds 2012

I.                   Breaking Away

I am a twin. For a very long time now, I had been vying to be my own separate person. My parents, or anyone else in our family for that matter, have never treated us as if my twin and I are just one person. I can’t say much for other people, though. For some reason, the general public thinks that because we are identical twins—same not only outside, but even inside, within our genes—that our personalities should be the same way, too. This is not the case.

Growing up, my mother always made us wear the same clothes. The garments would be similar in pattern and design, only differing in colors. We always had the same hair, the same earrings, the same friends, even the same face. As children, it was fun being my twin’s reflection, and vice versa. When I was old enough to realize there was something wrong in the picture, it seemed impossible, then, to alter the way that many people have been viewing us—inseparable, an entity that somehow cannot exist without the other.

One morning in September 2011, I was in awe when my eye caught the following Al Jazeera news headline: “Scientists claim to break the speed of light”. It was a break from Einstein’s theory of special relativity that establishes the photonas the fastest particle and a break from the core laws of physics that govern the world around us. Little did I take notice of the science news article as a break in the science writing genre.

"no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era." (1)

As the information age has taken hold, thoughts, views and writings have gained a wider realm of dissemination than ever before.  The internet and its databases have provided the knowledge of those who came before to all and any without a filter or intermediary.  Thoughts and ideas are presented through an open door for all to enter and interact.  The results of this openness have enacted many changes in all that we think and do, especially in the Digital Humanities.  The antiquated idea that a writer constructs her writing as “original” and as an individualized piece of work is being challenged by the overwhelming flow and mixing of ideas by anyone and everyone.  The idea of the individual owning a deed to an idea is being replaced by a common space occupied by all. In “The Geography of Thought,” Nisbett delineates the differences between Western individualist thinking and East Asian collective. It is in this light that I’d like to examine our traditional process of “original” writing, explore how the Digital Humanities is reconceiving that concept to a more collective framework and how this might change the landscape.

LITERARY KINDS: A PROCESS

"For my first paper for the course, Literary Kinds at Bryn Mawr College, I’ll be using Tumblr to do an analysis of what this blogging platform is and the ways in which it can be useful in academic work. It’s going to be crazy meta so I’m going to work hard to keep it fresh and exciting.

In line with the digital humanities, this blog will take the form of an archive - an archive of my thoughts about the medium and how I’ve started to compare this form to others. Additionally, though I do this with aims of a final project of sorts (still to be determined), I want to value the process of learning and I will gladly take any advice that you leave in the comments or my inbox."

(The first post on my Tumblr blog that explores Tumblr as a medium.)

I've seen two articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week that testify to the shake-up that's happening around issues of open-access review and publishing. 

As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact describes an approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—that aims to "measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked .... Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented ... 'It's like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere ... That has the potential to really revolutionize how we measure impact' .... It's a way to measure the 'downstream use' of research."

I just felt like sharing that after class today I went straight to my Teaching of Writing course and on the board was the following quote:

"We write by the light of every book we've ever read." - Richard Peck

I scribbled it down in my notebook and decided to share just because I felt like it was another way to express the ideas we've been unpacking in class! 

In class on Thursday, it was discussed that it was possible to be individual, collaborative, original, and using common treasury all at the same time; that possibly, we don’t necessarily always have to classify any given type of writing into these four things.

With the help of the internet, I believe that the lines between these four things will blur even more within the next few years. Coming along this, will be more problems concerning authorship, since using the common treasury can be easy, and claiming this thing as originally yours, is even easier. It’s already hard to identify the real source of an idea. If information and ideas are readily available in the palm of our hands—quite literally, when talking about the iphone, tablets, and smartphones—what is to stop anyone from “unconsciously” plagiarizing. Digital writing, in a sense, will also be like a database. There might not even be a distinction from one person to another.

Take, for example, Tumblr. I use Tumblr, and I often find myself “re-blogging” posts that others have blogged before me. Yes, you can easily trace down the original source, because Tumblr keeps track of where each person gets it, but does that really make a difference? When I find a post that I want to re-blog, I don’t bother looking for the original poster. No, I don’t give credit to the person before me, since I know she didn’t make it up either, but by merely putting it on my blog, aren’t I also claiming it as my own, as part of something that is an extension of myself, by posting it on my blog?

Our discussions this week about the transformation of writing in the humanities due to the advancement of technology really got me thinking about what it means to be "media literate". Media literacy is defined as a repertoire of competences that enable people to analyze, evaluate and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. As a digital humanist (woah, never used that title in "public" before), I'd make the claim that I'm not as media literate as I'd like to think I am.

Ahem.

I've experimented a lot with various forms of media. Anne, unfortunately, has seen some of my efforts fall flat; this paper which I attempted to form my message through a 'talking head' video and this paper where I attempted to make a video paper. As you can probably tell, I have a place for 'lens-based' media given my background in film studies. It's interesting to look at how these projects failed however because I think that it really shows that the education surrounding media literacy today is quite lacking and thus, how can you possible attempt to rethink the ways in which academic papers are presented if the training and education to do that is so limited.