45 research outputs found
Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing
Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes
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Becoming plastic: modernist poetics, (neuro)psychoanalysis and the material object
Becoming Plastic: Modernist Poetics, (Neuro)Psychoanalysis, and the Material Object is a creative-critical thesis comprising approximately 45,000 words of critical prose and a poetry collection of sixty pages. Through critical discussion and my own creative writing, the thesis explores the continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects in poetry – arguing that there is a disturbance of ontological categories happening in the process of poetic composition which functions to involve readers in a radical reappraisal of the material world in which they participate.
The critical component of my thesis engages with the work of neglected modernist poets – such as Lola Ridge and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – alongside those who have received considerable attention from literary critics – including Amy Lowell, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein – in order to examine the disruptive potential of the material object in modernist poetry. Arguing that these poets disturb the theoretical boundaries between subject and object via experimental poetic languages and forms, the three chapters of this thesis bring together studies in psychoanalysis (Freud, 1919; Kristeva, 1982), the nonhuman turn (Bennett, 2010), defamiliarization (Shklovsky, 1917), thing theory (Brown, 2004), and neuroscience (Malabou, 2004) to demonstrate the capacity for modernist poetry to interrogate what it is to be human or nonhuman in a world of things. Acknowledging the assemblages in which we participate, Chapter 1 reconceptualises the relationship between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in the texts of Ridge and Lowell. Demonstrating that the disruption of the human / nonhuman binary is accompanied by a disruption of genre, it argues that Ridge and Lowell accentuate the complex assemblages at work in the text. Building on this, Chapter 2 examines Loy’s poetry and artworks as that which actively transform both the nonhuman object and the literary text into abject things which interrogate assumptions about people, language, and objects. This chapter argues that Loy's compositions offer a reappraisal of the literary object as we know it – its customary spatial notations, typography, punctuation, and communicative language – heralding the possibility of a thingly poetics. Advancing this investigation into the physical and psychological continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects in modernist poetry, Chapter 3 explores the literary experiments of Stein and the Baroness through the study of neuroplasticity. Offering the first plastic reading of a modernist poem, it argues that Stein and the Baroness's literary experiments articulate how the brain is physically and psychologically altered through sensory encounters with nonhuman objects. Synthesising studies in modernist literary cultures, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, this thesis examines the vitality, potentiality, commonality, and plasticity of matter – contending that these poems ultimately challenge our understanding of both the modernist object and the limits of genre.
The thesis also draws on my own creative practice in order to interrogate the relationship between the material object, psychoanalysis and the limits of genre – to explore the extent to which the poem itself slips between ontological categories. Aiming to accentuate the synaptic connections between my chapters, between human subjects and nonhuman objects, between theorists, between modernist and modern poetic composition, and between creative and critical writing, the thesis includes a manifesto which outlines the principles and parameters of the plastic text. Furthermore, I present a collection of my own plastic compositions – 'Museum of Lost and Broken Things' – which explore the physical and psychological continuums between human subjects and nonhuman objects. These poems enact the theoretical principles and formal techniques examined in each chapter – consolidating the productive connections between critical and creative matter
Language Acquisition Through Motor Planning (LAMP): Impact on Language & Communication Development for Students with Complex Disabilities
Thesis advisor: Susan BruceAugmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is central to the lives of many individuals who are not able to effectively use spoken language. AAC systems are an essential component of a student’s ability to access his/her world, including daily communication and school content. The provision of such systems is a high priority in the field and supports the emancipation of those with limited voice, power, and independence that must function within a social structure that has been designed for the more typically abled. The study employed a single-case multiple staggered baseline design with randomized intervention implementation and intervention schedule using the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards from 2010. Five students with complex disabilities using advanced speech generating devices with the LAMP method, Language Acquisition Through Motor Planning, (Halloran & Halloran, 2006), of picture symbol organization participated in the study. The LAMP method was examined, and the potential impact on language and communication it may have. Specifically, the ability to use print versus picture symbols for communication and literacy was investigated within the context of a highly structured 1:1 literacy lesson facilitated by interventionists. Results indicated that all students made varying degrees of gains in the use of print words. These gains were sustained in the generalization phase. Operational skills were impacted demonstrated by increased skill development in navigation of the speech generating device and the type of vocabulary selected. In addition, communication functions were expanded, and in some cases, there was a significant increase in the complexity of word usage across people and settings. Discussions on interventionists perceptions are presented and integrated within individual student results providing context and direction on training needs.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Equivalent Fraction Learning Trajectories for Students with Mathematical Learning Difficulties When Using Manipulatives
This study identified variations in the learning trajectories of Tier II students when learning equivalent fraction concepts using physical and virtual manipulatives. The study compared three interventions: physical manipulatives, virtual manipulatives, and a combination of physical and virtual manipulatives. The research used a sequential explanatory mixed-method approach to collect and analyze data and used two types of learning trajectories to compare and synthesize the results. For this study, 43 Tier II fifthgrade students participated in 10 sessions of equivalent fraction intervention. Pre- to postdata analysis indicated significant gains for all three interventions. Cohen d effect size scores were used to compare the effect of the three types of manipulatives—at the total, cluster, and questions levels of the assessments. Daily assessment data were used to develop trajectories comparing mastery and achievement changes over the duration of the intervention. Data were also synthesized into an iceberg learning trajectory containing five clusters and three subcluster concepts of equivalent fraction understanding and variations among interventions were identified. The syntheses favored the use of physical manipulatives for instruction in two clusters, the use of virtual manipulatives for one cluster, and the use of combined manipulatives for two clusters. The qualitative analysis identified variations in students’ resolution of misconceptions and variations in their use of strategies and representations. Variations favored virtual manipulatives for the development of symbolic only representations and physical manipulatives for the development of set model representations. Results also suggested that there is a link between the simultaneous linking of the virtual manipulatives and the development of multiplicative thinking as seen in the tendency of the students using virtual manipulative intervention to have higher gains on questions asking students to develop groups of three or more equivalent fractions. These results demonstrated that the instructional affordances of physical and virtual manipulatives are specific to different equivalent fraction subconcepts and that an understanding of the variations is needed to determine when and how each manipulative should be used in the sequence of instruction
URI Undergraduate Course Catalog 1992-1993
This is a digitized, downloadable version of the University of Rhode Island Undergraduate Course Catalog.https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/course-catalogs/1042/thumbnail.jp