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Lesson Plan: Soundscape Narration

With audio technology becoming both more advanced and also more affordable, the options for understanding and exploring the ways in which sound and image interact with one another are becoming ever more practically available. Historically, many film directors have been fascinated with the possibilities of different approaches to the use...

Sounding Images and Imaging Sound

Image and code from wired.com Ferdinand Saussure provided a framework and vocabulary that can be applied in composition classrooms to understand the "arbitrary" nature of representational forms including sound and image. He famously gave us the vocabulary of semiotics including the “signifier" and "signified" within a framework that leaves meaning...

Lesson Plan: Digital Video Reporting Project (with iMovie and Audacity)

Today's shift towards the vast complexity of digital literacies involves, perhaps more than any other medium, the skills of producing digital videos, including the so-called "fact-based" documentaries and video reports. However, these "facts" are still "made" to fit a rhetorical message with its point of view, narrative structure, and appeals...

Lesson Plan: Using Siri to Teach the Ethics of Digital Labor

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...