Reading Fictional Worlds of Technology with Ursula Franklin: Fail Safe and Constructed Realities

This working paper takes up Ursula Franklin’s concept of constructed reality, mentioned in her Massey Lectures, and expands upon her engagements with themes of power and technology as represented in literature, film, and other imaginative works. We consider what Ursula Franklin might have said about the power of fiction to shape our understanding of technology as practice, and take as our case study the 1962 novel and 1964 film Fail Safe, a Cold War-era dramatization of technological systems that threaten to cause an accidental nuclear war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. We begin by analyzing Franklin’s (mostly passing) references to works of fiction, then turn to a close reading of Fail Safe through the lens of Franklin’s ideas, and conclude with a discussion of Cold War (techno)science-fiction as it relates to Franklin’s concerns about technology and militarism

Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments

This article considers the role of textual studies in a digital world and reviews the work of a particular group of digital textual scholars. Specifically, the article examines the work of the Textual Studies team at the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (INKE.ca), a group of digital textual scholars working on user experience, interface design, and information management with the goal of better understanding how reading is changing in the context of digital media.  INKE’s work rethinks what the book can become and aims to generate prototypes to be shared on an open-source basis with the public

Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations

In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.&nbsp

USU Teaching Documentation: Dossiers from the Mentoring Program

The nation\u27s land grant institutions were founded on the principle of access for the general public to the knowledge gained through research and creative activity fostered in higher education. Central to our access mission is our dedication to teaching and learning that is informed by research and discovery, both of which must result, at least in part, from our engagement with our external constituents. That teaching and learning informs our research and vice versa; our research informs and aids in our teaching mission. This work, compiled by Professors Maria Luisa Spicer-Escalante and Cathy Ferrand Bullock, is focused on how the best, highly informed teaching is accomplished when done in an intentional manner. That intentional process helps the best university educators thoughtfully build their teaching story in an organized manner. Educators think about how they can successfully reach and engage their appropriate student audiences (or mentees), what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish their goals. Further, as learning outcomes are identified and established, first-rate methods for course design, content inclusion, and continuous improvement can be outlined. Those of us who follow these intentional principles may then detail our growth and success along the way as teachers in the development of documents that tell our stories. Undoubtedly, the ability to clearly document and articulate that story will help academic personnel add to their tenure and promotion preparation in a very meaningful way. But as or even more important is the opportunity to describe these journeys with all the efforts, large and small, of improving their product in terms of learning outcomes and student growth and success. The nuggets of wisdom compiled by Professors Spicer-Escalante and Bullock, in USU Teaching Documentation: Dossiers from the Mentoring Program, will help teachers across the board from the new lecturer or assistant professor to the experienced professor dive into their teaching programs and find ways to continuously experiment and refine their approaches to our critically important student audiences. Good luck, teach on, and successfully document some of the most important work you all do! Frank Galey Executive Vice President and Provost Utah State University 2019https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/ua_faculty/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Vehicle, 1964, Vol. 6

Vol. 6 Table of Contents Milepostspage 2 John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Pagepage 4 Sadness No. 4 (Sorgen)Sherry S. Frypage 5 Christian BurialRoger J. Barrypage 7 The World of BeautyDavid Helmpage 9 The Song of the LarksDon Kapraunpage 10 ContrastKeith Haierpage 13 PanoramaDaun Alan Leggpage 13 A Child\u27s View of DeathCherie Brondellpage 14 RegretLiz Puckettpage 16 Brutal WarMary H. Soukuppage 17 aloneLiz Puckettpage 18 MadgeLinda Galeypage 19 Moon WatchingJoel E. Hendrickspage 20 AnalysisLiz Puckettpage 21 UniverseRick Talleypage 21 Anyone Can Be A LuniticRick Towsonpage 22 I, Too, Have A Rendezvous with DeathElaine Lancepage 23 The ReturnRobert D. Thomaspage 24 NamesLarry Gatespage 25 Eternal MomentsDavid Helmpage 25 The Last DaysPauline B. Smithpage 26 BeliefRichard J. Wiesepage 27 StormPauline B. Smithpage 28 ExplosionLiz Puckettpage 29 Autumn EveJoel E. Hendrickspage 29 The Girl On the White PonyLarry Gatespage 31 HoffnungTerry Michael Salempage 33 Stone WallsDaun Alan Leggpage 34 AdorationGail M. Barenfangerpage 37 MirageRoy L. Carlsonpage 38 Nature and NonsenseRick Talleypage 39 A Step Through A Looking GlassMarilyn Henrypage 40 Thoughts of a Summer PastPauline B Smithpage 42 Indiana GrassLarry Gatespage 43 RedondillaRoberta Matthewspage 44 Summer LoveDaun Alan Leggpage 45 To Youth Reaching For MaturityDavid Helmpage 45 Thanksgiving DayJoel E. Hendrickspage 46 Sadness No. 6 (Schatten)Sherry S. Frypage 48https://thekeep.eiu.edu/vehicle/1012/thumbnail.jp

The Shakespearean Archive: Information's Cultural Work from Early Modern Print to the Electronic New Variorum

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC

Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information

Shakespeare's texts have come to stand as both an ideal and a limit case for the concept of information, which emerged from a late twentieth-century cultural formation that still dominates current thinking about the design of digital tools. This essay aims to challenge computing essentialism—the idea that computers have a single nature that we must either take or leave—by exploring the prehistory of Shakespeare and new media, particularly the postwar confluence of bibliography and information theory. By understanding this crucial episode of computing's cultural history, we can recognize its consequences for the technologies that digital Shakespeare projects use in the present.This work was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts

This chapter applies a bibliographical perspective to one of the most ubiquitous forms of reading software, the web browser. Even textual scholars tend to look through web browsers more than they look at them, despite the intensely complicated and contested work of mediation that browsing software performs between readers and the World Wide Web. This chapter begins by contextualizing the activity of browsing within the history of reading, as a way of understanding the humanistic reading techniques that have developed in concert with mechanical aids to reading. Turning then to web browsers as software, the analysis develops through two examples at either end of what we might call a spectrum of instrumental rationality: at one end, the implementation of the controversial Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects (or OHCO) hypothesis in the form of the Document Object Model (or DOM, a kind of central nervous system that browsers impose upon documents); at the other end, an “Easter egg” hidden within the Firefox web browser known as “The Book of Mozilla,” which uses scriptural tropes to encode a secret history of the browser’s social and economic contexts, and its contested status. Both examples position the reader in contradictory ways, even within the same reading environment, but also in ways that suggest surprising continuities between printing and computing as technologies in a supposedly providential history.This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada