This is a blog that I'm required to keep that's full of unedited, near stream-of-consciousness reactions to similarly required and related readings in a graduate course in N.C. State University's Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. The way these posts are written help me interrogate and understand what's going on in our readings. I'm identifying what's troublesome so that I can give it more thought, but the posts aren't written in a style that's productive for audiences outside of our class to read. That's by design. I start with contestation, then spend heavens only knows how long researching, recutting, and reevaluating so that I can try and see what potentially productive readings I can extract from these source for use in my own work's contributions back to the field. Comments encouraged, but please, you'll likely need a thick skin if your work is quoted here.
If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. ... The season of prosperity gives way to the season of economic scarcity, and out of the winter of recession, new growth has room to emerge.
Highlighting mine.
Yes, constructing seems to be a be a better alternative than creating, though I'm not sure the Xianized bias behind the creation is quite as important as it once was.
I'm doing a couple of projects that involve associated application development (that is to say, crappy applications speedily hacked in VB6), and thought I'd share that code by putting it on sourceforge.net. Here's my rationale, entered as part of the application.
The public description is pretty accurate. I'm putting this online to encourage those who read the research to review the code on which it's based, as well as to serve as a model for empirical rhetorical studies in the future -- the code must be as open and auditable as the textual composition.
Academicians (and myself; for now I'll treat the two as separate groups) have a bad habit of using terms with capitalistic connotations.
Good:
Until such a specialist is created, studies like Herring et al’s and those that are like or cite it open themselves to being undermined...
Good:
Until such a specialist is produced, studies like Herring et al’s and those that are like or cite it open themselves to being undermined...
That is, unless you want to give support for Corporate U, in which case produced does invoke the right connotations. Don't worry, this doesn't make you evil, at least not by itself.
I also really really dislike when people use "emerge" as in "Darwin says life emerged from pools of primodal ooze," (nevermind if he didn't) when what they really mean is that, "The evil beast emerged from its lair to snack on Hrothgar's thanes." Very little in human culture "emerged" in some passive selective system. That's oxymoronic. Something's usually created or, more and more likely, produced. This includes your new fangled idea. It didn't emerge. You feed it and created a room for it to grow until it sprang from your forehead. Though it may appear to have seemingly sprung fully formed form the start, we know the metaphor here is less Athena and more kangaroo fetus. *ewww* That's right. There's no passive emergence in society, folk. Quit being lazy and pick the word you mean to use.
I blame misinterpretations of Foucault for all the trendy uses of "emergence", by the way. It's supposed to be a code word for saying, "I'm a humanities scholar!" but is said with all of the conviction of Yoda in Thumb Wars telling us he's a puppet (about 15:20 in). Irony.
Awl hell, I hate people who pimp themselves, but there's a time when it must be done. This time is often about 12:30am when you've wasted a weekend looking at the same daggum paper, editing it like mad but knowing that you haven't made it a whit better than when you started, with the argument your brain's envisioning hidden behind the cruft you've managed to slap down on the page.
So yeah, I've been cited dammit. F'n L, yeah. Sure, I'd gotten the same jive used in a course at Duke, but never cited. I will not be influenced by the fact that the citation is in a master's thesis -- it's a doctoral thesis. Hells yeah. And it's in French, dang it. Beat that.
Dans « Inviting Subversion: Metalepse and Tmesis in Rockstar Games' ÇJrand Theft Auto Series », Wm. Ruffin Bailey a observé comment le jeu pouvait être subverti par les joueurs à travers des modifications effectives du monde numérique. Les conceptetirsde Rockstar ont rendu assez aisée la tâche d'altérer le code des Grand Theft Auto, en autorisant le joueur à modifier l'apparence et même, parfois, le fonctionnement du monde numérique. En opérant sur le code, un joueur peut, par exemple, manipuler les « skins19 » (fournir à Clouaux personnages de nouveaux vêtements) ou créer ses propres modèles d'automobile, plus puissants ou plus résistants que ceux qui sont inclus dans le jeu.
Let's do a poor English translation:
In "Inviting Subversion: Metalepsis and Tmesis in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto," some arsehole has observed how the game can have been subverted by the gamers who use modifications to change the [game's] digital world. The [parbleu, non?] Rockstar has made rather easy the task of altering the code of Grand Theft Auto, and authorized the gamer to modify the appearance and even, at times, the function of the digital world. By changing the code, a player can, for example, manipulate the skins (to furnish the protagonist new clothes) or create his own car models, more powerful or resistant than those which are included in the game [by default].
Even though he leaves out Hot Coffee, the sort of climax of the piece (hardy har har), it's close a dammed nuff. Sweet. Now I must channel that plus Mr. Daniels to complete this City Paper.
I appreciated the information Nemire was presenting in "Int Prop Dev and Use for Dist Ed Courses", yet I was concerned with the propensity of the article to "chase the law". This non-critical standpoint didn't stop at the legal system, but continued when discussing university policies as well. Here are four of the more egregious logical fallacies, with some commentary on why I believe them to be particularly misleading or damaging for uninformed readers. Overall, the lesson seems to be that people truly interested not only in not getting into trouble but providing a more equitable education system need to stop chasing the law and start acting in ways that manipulate the way the courts have to conceive of that law. I'll now pull a quick quote from Krause and Palm who, though they were talking about unionizing [graduate student] labor, seems appropriate.
Waiting for the law to change is also not an option because it relies on a misleading conception of the political process. Given the weakness of political parties, there are few effective mechanisms to hold elected politicians accountable to workers' interests as laws get made. Labor leaders have long repeated the maxim that organizing does not follow the law -- the law follows organizing. If workers do not build power on the ground, the law will not change.[1]
So let's take a closer look...
Advancement of knowledge and progress in technology drives the need for protecting inventions, new ideas, writings, music, and other media. (26)
And here the author is, in the first sentence of the abstract, doing us a solid by letting everyone know we're on board with copyright protection. Why does the "advancement of knowledge" unquestionably require "protecting"? Why not give knowledge away for as close to free as we possibly can?
Read in a more productive light, what sorts of protections does the "advancement of knowledge" require? Though the phrase "progress in technology" scares me in general when used as a reason for motivation, and the rest of the article plays into that suspicion, we can take our productive reading's cue from that arena. Here, I'm back to my favorite example of subverting copyright from within that system, Free and Open Source Software. We need to protect knowledge not from its being exposed to fellow human beings, but from those folk taking that knowledge and, through an abuse of law, making it their own, commercially. Unfortunately, that's not what Nemire means in this sentence or the balance of the article. We're looking at using copyright in a conventional means, as we'll see explained a bit more in our next three quotes.
The university is one of the largest providers of intellectual property. It is reasonable, then, to consider that the university has a stake in faculty, staff, and student activities regarding intellectual property. (29)
Did you hear the gasket pop in my head? *sigh* The connection needs to be made explicitly. I make lots of [figurative, I mean, of course!] poop, if you know what I mean. We can discuss what sort of stake that means I should have in its disposal. What specifically about providing IP, which I argue is precisely the university's raison d'etre, means they should be worried about IP created downstream?
Nemire doesn't give her comments this connotation, but I will: It is not "reasonable" in some fatalistic sense that the university should have a financial stake in the intellectual property it helps its, what, users? create, and that pulls me into a quote from a bit further along the same page.
When royalties are involved, some universities require faculty members to turn over part or all royalty payments to the university because documents were created on university time, using university technology.
We, as scholars and educators -- as those employed outside of the business world, in a position where the public trust is that we're not focusing on "Recruit. Retain. Solicit." -- have to take issue with the user of the word "because" here. The reasoning behind Nemire's "because", even if it's intended to be offered as a proxy in place of those universities that practice such viral practices, has already been undercut by the phrase "some universities". There is no universal "because" where the because only works for "some".
What's happening at those "other" universities? How is it that being "created on university time, using university technology" doesn't equate to their becoming king to your royalties? Give to Caesar, sure, but who made the university into the monarch?
The same sort of uncritical, "that's just the way it is" reasoning occurs in the following section as well, just a bit earlier than the last quote:
Faculty should have several concerns when considering intellectual property. They need to be aware that they are relinquishing their copyright when they publish academic work. It is common practice and will likely continue, as most journal editors and publishers want to own the information in their periodicals.
"It is common practice and will likely continue" does not review the law, only teach its readers to conform to it for tradition's sake. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition. (quoting Fiddler on the Roof, a snippet of which is helpfully included above, of course)
What are the options in the law? Do you own your work when you publish a book? What sorts of contracts are out there? How can we inhabit the law?
How can we stop chasing the law and start living within and manipulating it?
[1] Monika Krause and Michael Palm. Forthcoming. "Activists into Organizers. How to Work with your Colleagues to Build Power in Graduate School", in: Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, Andrew Ross (ed.): The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008, pg. 226-7
I hate to be an old fogey and all, but are we sure that necessary follows?
There is some editor-like credit that's appropriate for some types of digital administration, but I'm going to need better arguments for other cases than some flavor of "because we're there."
Scholarship is about conversation. Text is a pretty efficient means of capturing and disseminating conversation. If you can't text, can you scholar? I'm 100% about "clear excellence", but one might also have to realize that it's hard to demonstrate clear excellence if there isn't a ready-made peer group to deem your work makes that cut. I'm not sure there's an easy way to address the implied 'failing' that "Over 50% of PhD granting institutions have no experience evaluating new forms of scholarship." Very few Cotton Mather experts in this and any department, you know, and almost never more than two. Scholarship requires that you enter a professional conversation that contains the ability to respectfully self-police.
There, I've done my duty. People now have tripe about which to comment, though they won't. Am I not at 10 yet? ;^)
Against my natural inclinations, I finally have to admit I wish Wordcat had an option to include bookstores in its results. Why should I be limited to finding copies of books in libraries?
Okay, admittedly, what I'd really like to do is write the Napster of book chapters, so that you could post a request and have someone fair use you a copy quickly, or have the system forward you a copy if someone had previously requested the same thing. This idea (c) 2005 or so, Ruffin Bailey. ;^)
