On Method in the Humanities

Presentation on Bruno Latour, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, Robert Fogel, and the history of "method" in the humanities. Given at the 2016 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Part of a panel stream that explored lab culture in the arts and humanities: "Practitioners from a variety of laboratories will discuss the politics of creating and maintaining an arts/humanities laboratory. They will also discuss recent research emerging from their labs. This specific panel focuses on bioart, health studies, and interdisciplinary research.

Spectacular horizons: the birth of science fiction film, television, and radio, 1900-1959

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Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination

Gadgets like smartphones and GPS receivers, say the pundits, are fundamentally altering the ways we read, communicate, and even think. Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination throws such claims into relief with a cultural history of these seemingly small, everyday tools. The word "gadget" has historically referred to both concrete objects and indeterminate tools that have been forgotten, rigged up on the fly, or not yet invented. Spanning a range of literary, social, and technical histories, a genealogy of these alternately functional and fictional devices from their origins in mid-nineteenth-century nautical jargon to their current association with mobile media reveals a distinct evolution in the imaginative space between tools and their users. While other scholars have catalogued various fantasies about media technologies, these projects often resort to a binary in which works of representational modernity merely respond to technological revolutions. Focusing on the nascent tinkerer and genre fiction communities of early twentieth century America, I argue that fictions play a constitutive role in the emergence of new media as socially shared systems of communication and expression. The gadget is an object of study that, by its very nature, calls for an interdisciplinary approach able to place a range of technical, social, and literary histories into conversation. Gadgetry engages with fields like media archaeology, science fiction studies, design, and the history of science. Being interdisciplinary doesn't mean, however, that one simply maintains a diverse list of primary and secondary sources. It means holding one's methodologies up to the lens of critical inquiry. In order to construct a more comprehensive conceptual framework, part of my research has involved building a dataset on the etymology of the word "gadget." Using several text mining resources and a simple Perl script that visualizes the prevalence of categories into which I plug each instance of the word, I am able to watch as the tools, applications, cultural contexts, and social valuations of gadgetry evolve from the 1880s to the present. My work thus provides a model for how theories of technology and cultural form might engage with the explanatory power of digital resources

Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown

In this tutorial, you will first learn the basics of Markdown—an easy to read and write markup syntax for plain text—as well as Pandoc, a command line tool that converts plain text into a number of beautifully formatted file types: PDF, .docx, HTML, LaTeX, slide decks, and more.1 With Pandoc as your digital typesetting tool, you can use Markdown syntax to add figures, a bibliography, formatting, and easily change citation styles from Chicago to MLA (for instance), all using plain text

Autoria Sustentável em Texto Simples usando Pandoc e Markdown

Neste tutorial, você aprenderá primeiro o básico do Markdown - uma sintaxe de marcação fácil de ler e escrever para texto simples - bem como Pandoc, uma ferramenta de linha de comando que converte texto simples em vários tipos de ficheiros formatados: PDF, docx, HTML, LaTeX, apresentação de slides e muito mais

Learning with polyphony: AmpDamp

With exponential increases of information flows on social media platforms, user experiences have become fragmented, cacophonous, and often overwhelming. Such “noise” makes learning on these platforms difficult. By contrast, the principle of polyphony frames learning with social media as a graceful, intentional threading together of multiple voices. In this paper we describe AmpDamp, a design concept for orchestrating polyphony in social media environments. Connecting a physical knob to a browser extension, AmpDamp translates the gestures of turning up (amplifying) and turning down (dampening) into a dynamic orchestration of the “volume” of a user’s social media feed. By focusing on issues of granularity and temporality, we position polyphony as an entry point into incorporating the values of control and curation into learning experiences using social media.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe