The rapid rate by which technology replaces and outdates itself has been measured since 1965 by Moore's Law, which dictates that the amount of transistors within an integrated circuit (microchip) doubles approximately every two years. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, has predicted that the viability of his projection will cease...
Machine as Organism: Technology, Biology, and Collective
The constant increases in technological capacity, prevalence of automation and machine assistance, and the advancement of bio-tech, artificial intelligence, and medical technologies, expedite the tendency to view the issue of human subjectivity through a dichotomy of man/machine. This framing pre-inscribes a frictional relationship between man and machine, as if machines...
Tinkering With Pedagogy: Experimenting With Technology at the DWRL
At the start of last academic year, the Digital Writing and Research Lab assigned two research imperatives: data visualization and wearable technology. While data visualization is ubiquitous in most forms of media, and serves an already established and crucial role in empirical research and its dissemination, the affective affordances of...
Speaker Event Recap: Professor Patrick Jagoda
The Digital Writing and Research Lab’s speaker series consistently brings talented scholars working at the intersections of rhetoric, technology studies, and digital humanities, to the University of Texas to present their research. In February of 2017, The DWRL hosted Patrick Jagoda, associate professor at the University of Chicago. Dr. Jagoda...
Lesson Plan: Perspective API – Rhetorical Metadata, Pathos, and the Future of Internet Moderators
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Machine Communication: Using and Understanding MIDI
When multi-track recording was developed in 1955, it allowed for the concept of "production" as we understand the term in contemporary music-terminology. By recording the individual elements of a performance, one could alter and edit each part of the whole composition, or start from individual parts and construct an...
Rhetorical Synthesis: The Story of the Roland TB-303
The Roland TB-303 is one of the most influential electronic instruments to date. The story of the instrument and its influence remind us that objects can be "active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity" (Boyle, Barnett). The machine is an analogue, monophonic bass line synthesizer created...
Lesson Plan: Thyncing about Technology & Emotion
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Workshop Recap: Audio Recording and Editing
Last Friday, The DWRL hosted one of its bi-weekly digital literacy workshops, where staff members can increase their digital literacy and ascertain useful skills for the digital world we live in. This last week's workshop circled around audio: from genres of audio, strategies for using audio, finding audio that is...
Wearable Technology: Rhetoric, Habit and the Apple Watch
For the past few weeks, I have been wearing an Apple Watch, in an effort to survey the efficacy and implications of wearable technologies. Devices whose "primary functionality requires that they be connected to bodies” (Gouge & Jones, 201), have become the object of study and criticism within the field...