Assignments, Assessment, Attendance

Grades
Major assignments will be assessed on a letter grade system from A-F.  Letter grades will be assigned for each component of the course. They are enumerated according to University Policy as such:

Assignment #1

Reading Response on Assigned reading for one of the weeks prior to midterm: What is the argument? Why Does it Matter (to you, to others)? Answer the proceeding questions. Exactly 500 words—ie so many academic grants and fellowships set inflexible word counts. This constraint can be inspirational. Have fun! Receives written feedback. Orally delivered as a speech ie read from the page. Multimodality not required or expected.

Assignment #2

Do not circulate or share this assignment. The projects I describe here are in pre-publication.

Applying Debates in the Digital Humanities through Interface Design Prototyping

Objective: Deploy the Arduino Crystal Ball recipe (software and hardware design specs) to create a 3D object which incorporates the LCD display with the goal of creating a critical interface that applies concepts explored in the Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016) and in Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014) about social justice, inequity, embodied cognition, community formation, sexuality, race, ableism, ageism, the environment, class consciousness or gender analysis (etc) to create an ethical interface/object that facilitates learning/growth/play for a better world. Emerson refers to Jeff Sealey’s warning that “the philosophy driving most computing devices was one grounded in a paternalistic notion of ubiquity through invisibility […]”(Emerson 9). Interface is constituted of the LCD and the 3D object to which you will attach it. Think of it this way: interface is the entire object that houses the LCD, including the LCD itself.

The other two significant texts that will help you to conceptualize this project in prototyping-maker terms are “New Old Things: Fabrication, Physical Computing, and Experiment in Historical Practice” Devon Elliott, Robert MacDougall, & William J. Turkel and Jentry Sayers “Prototyping the Past.” The Visible Language Journal: the Journal of Visual Communication Research. 49.3, (2015). 156-177. Thus the readings assigned to date culminate in this critical prototype project.

Requirements: 1) demonstration of successful build (assemblage of the Crystal Ball using the Arduino starter package supplies and specs) 2) demonstration of successful incorporation of Crystal Ball software recipe 3) fabrication of a physical object that houses/incorporates the LCD display 4) Alteration of the variable strings in the Crystal Ball code to complement and enhance the meaning-making potential of the fabricated object that houses the LCD 5) Explication (length variable but which is in direction citational dialogue with texts assigned in this course, to date) 6) Digital Documentation (copy of your code, screenshots, photos, videos etc of your interface object in action. 7). Submit all of these digital files in your personal folder on Google Drive in a single folder titled “Assignment 2”.

Provocations

“While interface is a productively open-ended, cross disciplinary term, generally speaking in computing it refers simply to the point of interaction between any combination of hardware/software components. […]I settle on an […] expansive definition so that interface is a technology––whether it is a fascicle, a typewriter, a command line, or a GUI––that mediates between reader and the surface-level, human-authored writing taking place below the surface. The interface is, then, a threshold, but in a more complex sense than simply that which opens up from one distinct space to another distinct space” (Emerson x).

“The term interface refers to the point and/or modalities of communication between two systems. In the study of human-computer interaction, it encompasses the physical means to provide input in a system as well as the feedback produced by the system. A wide variety of input and output devices have been created to communicate with computers, some built with specific work-related tasks in mind (switches, keyboard, mouse), and others dedicated to playing video games.” (Therrien 305).

Example

To give you an example of a 3D Prototype I have created, and which has inspired me to create this assignment, runs as follows: A few years ago I created “Stein Bot” a collaboratively-produced poem robot. The project included modifying the Arduino Crystal Ball code and designing and creating, using a laser cutter, a balsa wood box with Stein’s image etched on the outside. Note that I haven not yet written a grant for a laser printer so I cannot offer this option for your fabrication process. My current grant secured a 3D Printer purchase. The Stein Bot prototype or Six-Sided Stein is neither a prototype of the past nor a fabrication of the future. Instead, it is a physical intervention in the critical understanding of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. The Bot makes literal the concept that every reading is a new reading and that texts yield as many readings as they have readers. Translating the object-description-method Stein pioneered, in which associations wrap around objects creating dense meshworks of social, political, and idiosyncratic description, my collaborator Andrew Pilsch and I have given “Box” its fully-realized dimensional exhibition space. No longer is the poem locked to linear parsing. Instead, each press of the “tender button” analog sensor scrambles and reorders the poem as if the user is reading the poem as a space, looking at one word on the right facing box wall, and then, say, looking at the adjacent box wall. “Box” becomes its own object, triggering for the user new social, political, and personal meshworks.

“Stein Bot” is responsive to its environment and makes material the metaphorical acts of meaning making involved in reading imaginative works. Each displayed scramble of Stein’s “Box” is unrepeatable and ephemeral, requiring the touch and attention of the human user in order to exist and persist. This act of “transduction” draws attention to the importance of gesture and nonverbal relational interaction (O’Sullivan and Igoe 2004).

Inspired by the box’s inherent properties of delimiting space as inside and outside, enclosure and disclosure, this prototype models the anxieties of creative activity. Gertrude Stein’s poetry has and continues to polarize audiences as they wonder whether there really is any there-there, or to put it more plainly, whether her work really has intention, direction, and meaning. The bot and the wooden box made material these kinds of skepticisms about interiority through a (hopefully) delightful endless rendition of her poem “Box.” In the spirit of Stein’s experimental procedures, “Stein Bot” provokes us to unlearn reading habits as it makes manifest the temporal and physical aspects of making meaning. This is a Vimeo link for watching the Stein Bot poem generator in action: https://vimeo.com/home/myvideos

Figure 1 This is one of my favorite shots of the box in construction. Stein’s eyes look as though they will shoot lasers.

Grading

20% of Final Grade

Assignments will be assessed on creativity, intellectual rigor, and demonstrated understanding of the concepts introduced in the course readings to-date. Assignments that do not meet the minimum 7 requirements enumerated above will be desk-returned (no feedback) for a mandatory Revise and Resubmit. Failure to R&R will result in an F for the assignment.

Deadline 3/13 AT 4:20PM DUE IN YOUR PERSONAL SUBMISSION FOLDER: “Applying Debates in the Digital Humanities through Interface Design Prototyping”

For transparency and equity I would like to share with you my universal graduate level rubric for assessment. This is how I approach grading graduate level work:

Evaluation Criteria

Assignment #3 Analyzing Literature with 3D Prototyping Assignment Description

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to involve graduate students in the development of a new analytic model for analyzing literature using modeling software and technology.

Background Information: At present, the dominant mode of analysis for complex texts, specifically literary texts, takes the form of textual response. Literary critics and other humanists write about writing. Analysis involves acts of decoding and description.

Although this is a very valuable critical mode and one that I encourage students to pursue, I also see the value in evaluating and reflecting on disciplinary thinking. In The Limits of Critique Rita Felski characterizes the dominance of an attitude of skeptical critique toward texts. She writes, “practices combine […] an attitude of vigilance, detachment, and wariness (suspicion)” in order to produce argument (3). Critique seldom adopts modes of playfulness, speculation, affection, or enthusiasm. This affective positioning of the scholar as a decoder of political and social meanings in a text limits the ways in which imaginative works can be analyzed and put to use in the world. I have encouraged you to become critical digital makers and tool users. In sum, traditional modes of analysis have embraced argument-as-making-known over making-as-a-means-of-knowing. It is time to merge “hack” and “yack” (Burek, Foster, Fox and Rosner 2017).

Proposed Solution: I am interested in critical analysis that involves making physical nonverbal objects. Making can and should be accompanied by critical writing. Toward this goal we wish to decenter writing as the ideal/only mode of humanistic analysis. Within recent years, media studies and digital humanities have moved toward studying media with new media (Sayers 2018). Historians have worked with 3D printers to recreate lost artifacts for museums (Resch, Southwick, Record, Ratto 2017). But literary textual analysis has yet to embrace 3D modeling. Jentery Sayers has called on humanities practitioners to remake objects that may have only existed “as fictions, illustrations, or one-offs” (Sayers, “Prototyping” 158). Our assignment responds to this provocation.

This analytic process assignment engages the trans-disciplinary method of modeling and 3D prototyping. Students will learn how to analyze literature through the modeling and construction of an object that has a featured and prominent role in an imaginative work. Imaginative works include poetry, games, narrative, drama, and creative essays. Students will engage with complex imaginative works by discussion and reference to related peer-reviewed articles, but they will also learn to respond to the work in a creative mode.

This assignment teaches students two fundamental principles about textual analysis.

*First, that imaginative works of literature act as models of the world. Models can be diagrams, mathematical structures, objects, or computer programs. Models also take the form of literature. As the philosophers Margaret Morrison and Mary Morgan write, models are “instruments which represent some aspect of the world, or some aspect of our theories about the world” (11). Since literature is a form of modeling­­––ie a mixture of the real and the imagined––a digital humanist, who is trained in textual analysis as critique, and who is charged with learning how to work with digital tools––can be positioned to embrace modes of critical description and physical creativity. For instance, a student may now ask, how does this text participate in or subvert dominant ideology? Also, what insight does the process of modeling yield? When textual analysis of literature draws on multiple forms of critical thinking (writing and making) the products of analysis are rigorously situated at the intersection of multiple fields.

*Second, that language and physical matter are compositional constraints that can be comparatively studied through visualization. In the early twentieth century a form of literary analysis known as New Criticism arose. Its practitioners posited that works of literature are like well-wrought urns. Literature produces aesthetic i.e. beautiful wholes. Since the mid-twentieth century, literary textual analysis has increasingly embraced the perspective that literature mirrors a chaotic world and that texts produce similarly irresolvable structures. In other words, deconstructionist, Marxist, and reader-response critics claim that the text is not a knowable whole. The complexities of genre, form, and historical contextualization of discourses parallel those of the designer working in a 3D modeling environment.

Submission Requirements: skp files, obj or stl files in your personal folder in a subfolder titled Assignment 3. Photographic documentation of the printed object, a written rationale and explication of the artifact that is in direct dialogue with Levine as well as one of the other articles we have read in this section of the course.  Your write-up should explicate your research questions, how your methodology (new historicist, marxist, feminist, materialist, thing-theory, etc) and questions lead to your object, explicate the relationship it has to the literary text and how it manipulation or other haptic encounter with the object enables you to answer questions or pose new ones about the work or about interpretation qua interpretation as inspired by the text.

Learning Outcomes
Because the purpose of this easily modifiable cross-disciplinary assignment project prototype is to teach students how to analyze texts through multiple critical modalities, the anticipated student outcomes are both concrete (to learn to make objects with 3D software and tech) and conceptual.

*Be able to speak critically and comparatively about traditional textual modes of critique and emergent critical making practices.

*Develop basic competency with modeling software to create scaled models of historical or imaginary objects.

*Develop skills with 3D printing. ** dependent on the FIG delivering the printer **