A tolerable straight line : non-linear narrative in Tristram Shandy

The non-linear narrative of Laurence Sterne\u27s Tri st ram Shandy demands attentive readers. Written under the influence of John Locke\u27s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the novel satirizes Lockean associationism and illustrates language\u27s inability to express ideas accurately. In the novel, words seldom convey characters\u27 intended meanings, yet Tristram uses language effectively to narrate self to his readers. Rather than having his mind\u27s workings conform to the linear nature of traditional discourse, Tristram communicates associatively to intelligent, involved readers without imposing linearity. In this study I examine scholars\u27 work to determine Tristram \u27s position on Locke\u27s ideas and use Seymour Chatman \u27s narrative model to study the emerging narrative self by applying his concepts of FA BU LA (story) and SJUZET (discourse). I review Tristram \u27s self-expression by focusing on techniques of non-li near narration and conclude by examining hypermedia as an alternative model for narrating consciousness that emphasizes the reader, comparing hypermedia\u27s reader to Tristram Shandy\u27s narrator

Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation (Book Review)

Humans are so enmeshed in mobility systems that they identify with themselves through those systems. In Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Persuasive Transportation, Ehren Pflugfelder (2017) uses the term automobility to describe both the specific kinds of mobility afforded by independent, automobile-related movement technologies and the complex cultural, bodily, technological, and ecological ramifications of our dependence on separate mobility technologies (p. 4). Given identities enmeshed in ecologies of systems involving human and nonhuman actors through which transportation emerges, automobility is described as a wicked problem to be solved, in part, by technical communicators and communication designers naming and revealing the persuasive power of transportation systems. Understanding this persuasive power benefits practitioners by revealing the shared agency of automobility among the car-driver assemblage, and academics, by offering a framework for recognizing transportation as persuasive and therefore rhetorical

Pervasive Pedagogy: Collaborative Cloud-Based Composing Using Google Drive

Cloud-based services designed for educational use, like Google Apps for Education (GAFE), afford deeply collaborative activities across multiple applications. Through primary research, the authors discovered that cloud-based technologies such as GAFE and Google Drive afford new opportunities for collaborative cross-platform composing and student engagement. These affordances require new pedagogies to transform these potentialities into practice, as well as a reexamination of contemporary theory of computers and composition. The authors’ journey implementing Google Drive as a composing and communication environment required continually remediating content, relationships, practices, and their own identities as they interacted with students in the cloud. This chapter addresses how GAFE and Google Drive engage students in the composition classroom, redefine and transform pedagogical and curricular concepts, and improve students’ experience and learning

Glocalizing the Composition Classroom with Google Apps for Education

Composing practices in a digitally networked world are inherently intercultural, and situate local needs and constraints within global opportunities and concerns. Global technologies like Google Apps for Education (GAFE) allow students to compose collaboratively across place and time; to do so, students and teachers must navigate a complex local network of institutional policy, learning outcomes, situational needs, and composing practices while also being aware of the global implications of using the interface to compose, review, edit, and share with others. The chapter describes using GAFE in locally situated composition classes. Using such technologies requires a focus on glocalization and an understanding of how networked composing activity affects the communication process, and the institutions, faculty, and students who are interconnected within it

Learning to Use, Useful for Learning: A Usability Study of Google Apps for Education

Using results from an original survey instrument, this study examined student perceptions of how useful Google Apps for Education (GAFE) was in students\u27 learning of core concepts in a first-year college composition course, how difficult or easy it was for students to interact with GAFE, and how students ranked specific affordances of the technology in terms of its usability and usefulness. Students found GAFE relatively easy to use and appreciated its collaborative affordances. The researchers concluded that GAFE is a useful tool to meet learning objectives in the college composition classroom

Localizing content: The roles of technical & professional communicators and machine learning in personalized chatbot responses

This study demonstrates that microcontent, a snippet of personalized content that responds to users’ needs, is a form of localization reliant on a content ecology. In contributing to users’ localized experiences, technical communicators should recognize their work as part of an assemblage in which users, content, and metrics augment each other to produce personalized content that can be consumed by and delivered through artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technology

Metaphors, mental models, and multiplicity: Understanding student perception of digital literacy

This study examines student perception of digital literacy from their engagement with the Fabric of Digital Life, a digital archive of emerging technologies. Through grounded theory analysis we identified the ways students make sense of an unfamiliar technology. Our results show students assign metaphors to understand a new digital platform, apply mental models transferred from previous conceptual domains onto new technologies, and express multiply-layered approaches that facilitated their digital literacy development––an indication for instructors to orient toward an expansive description of digital literacy that caters to student learning needs as well as their professional futures

The L 98-59 System: Three Transiting, Terrestrial-size Planets Orbiting a Nearby M Dwarf

We report the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovery of three terrestrial-size planets transiting L 98-59 (TOI-175, TIC 307210830)—a bright M dwarf at a distance of 10.6 pc. Using the Gaia-measured distance and broadband photometry, we find that the host star is an M3 dwarf. Combined with the TESS transits from three sectors, the corresponding stellar parameters yield planet radii ranging from 0.8 R ⊕ to 1.6 R ⊕. All three planets have short orbital periods, ranging from 2.25 to 7.45 days with the outer pair just wide of a 2:1 period resonance. Diagnostic tests produced by the TESS Data Validation Report and the vetting package DAVE rule out common false-positive sources. These analyses, along with dedicated follow-up and the multiplicity of the system, lend confidence that the observed signals are caused by planets transiting L 98-59 and are not associated with other sources in the field. The L 98-59 system is interesting for a number of reasons: the host star is bright (V = 11.7 mag, K = 7.1 mag) and the planets are prime targets for further follow-up observations including precision radial-velocity mass measurements and future transit spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope; the near-resonant configuration makes the system a laboratory to study planetary system dynamical evolution; and three planets of relatively similar size in the same system present an opportunity to study terrestrial planets where other variables (age, metallicity, etc.) can be held constant. L 98-59 will be observed in four more TESS sectors, which will provide a wealth of information on the three currently known planets and have the potential to reveal additional planets in the system

Toward Algorithmic Literacy: Tracing Agency Across Algorithm-Centered Online Research

Conference Presentation at International Critical Media Literacy Conference: This presentation shares the results of a recent study completed by the presenter that seeks to trace and visualize agency as it emerges during online research activity. The study positions this tracing and visualizing activity as algorithmic literacy with the goal of critical understanding of algorithmic influence on agency shared among researchers and search technologies. The presentation offers a visual model for depicting ways technologies and researchers interact to generate and select online search results

Implementing Responsive Design: Building Sites for an Anywhere, Everywhere Web (Book Review)

Web designers are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to creating media-rich web content that attracts and retains visitors. The primary problem is that designers must account for countless devices and users along with multiple network connections in their designs. The need for media-rich sites has shifted from a nicety to a demand, while the range of devices and network technologies users can access to experience those sites has exploded. Every user has the potential to use multiple devices to access web content, from desktop to e-reader, and those devices can access that content using high-speed fiber optics, wi-fi, multiple bandwidths of cellular data and even modems