Two of the more ubiquitous problems instructors face today are, on the one hand, the pervasive distraction of smartphones, and on the other hand, the inability to gauge a student's comprehension of classroom material in the moment. Although the latter issue long precedes the emergence of the former, these are...
Summer Lab 2017
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Spring 2017 Speaker Series: Laurie Gries, “Doing Digital Visual Studies”
[cs_content][cs_section parallax="false" style="margin: 0px;padding: 0px 0px 45px;"][cs_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="false" style="margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;"][cs_column fade="false" fade_animation="in" fade_animation_offset="45px" fade_duration="750" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px;"][cs_text]Please join the Digital Writing & Research Lab for Dr. Laurie Gries' lecture, "Doing Digital Visual Studies," on Friday, February 24th, at 3pm. The talk will be held at the Texas...
Pedagogical Periscope: The Basics of Streaming a Webinar from Your Phone
Whether it’s the weather or you’re just feeling under the weather, traveling to campus and working with students in person isn’t always the best course of action for your writing course. In fact, staying home can sometimes be the most pedagogically effective choice—students always will appreciate the break, and you...
Eli Review at the DWRL
Recently, Professor Bill Hart-Davidson from Michigan State University visited our spaces in the DWRL to discuss Eli Review, a software service for writing courses that he has helped co-develop. Whether you're an instructor in an undergraduate composition classroom or a grade school teacher working with hormonal youths, Eli Review both...
To Catch ’em All, Campus Needs to be Accessible
[cs_content][cs_section parallax="false" style="margin: 0px -25px;padding: 045px 0px 0;"][cs_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="false" style="margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;"][cs_column fade="false" fade_animation="in" fade_animation_offset="45px" fade_duration="750" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px;"][cs_text]One afternoon sometime in the middle of our summer, in need of a little sun—the glow of a monitor only goes so far—I picked up my laptop and headed out...
Object of the Archive, Part III: What is an Archive?
In my last couple of posts, I interrogated what might be meant by common words like "object" and "thing" in a digital context. Utilizing distinctions made by Martin Heidegger, I suggested that we experience the world around us in terms of objects when we look only for what is present, what is scientifically...
Object of the Archive, Part II: What is a Thing?
In my previous post, I began to define what we might mean when we call something an "object" by way of the philosopher Martin Heidegger's term Vorhandenheit. With this neologism, which is translated as the compound present-at-hand, Heidegger articulates an abstract, indifferent, and theory-driven way of relating to an entity that narrowly focuses on its empirical and scientific qualities....
Object of the Archive, Part I: What is an Object?
This semester, DWRL staff members working in the Digital Archiving Research Area (DARA) have been tasked with exploring the technological, pedagogical, and theoretical intersection of two formidable abstractions: The Archive and the Object. These are vibrantly contested terms, around which significant differences in epistemological and discursive practice turn. Like black...
Typographic Topography
Before getting to where the Typography Team's™ cartography project has ended up, it might be a good idea to put these maps in context and point out how we got started down this particular(ly strange) path in the first place. It begins, as so many things do, with a slip. It was...