Author Archives: Carolyn A. McDonough

Savoring Ramsay & Digesting Drucker

I’ve been savoring the Ramsay reading and also trying to digest the Drucker reading.

Ramsay is now on my desk next to Walter Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer as an essay with LONG legs.

I’m loving his writing style and am resonating to phrases such as “soul-crushing lack of order” to describe Web 1.0.

I appreciated the “design your own path through culture” rather un-scholarly path that he recounts about the Frank Zappa/Varese axis (via Look magazine no less!) Amazing how he applies this to illustrate the differences between “search” and “browsing” and how “search”, in my opinion, is killing all the creativity in all of us.

As much as I’m nearly always engaged in the “purposive experience” I have always truly valued the “serendipitous experience”. The thing that falls into your lap. The puzzle piece you find without looking. LOVE those moments.

So I actually had a WHOLE different kind of weekend courtesy of Ramsay’s writing which gave me permission to BROWSE again. While I also did have to “search” in my weekend studies, my mindset felt different, and being bombarded by all the “prescripted” yields didn’t bother me as much. Thank you, Stephen Ramsay! And anyone who can riff on Erasmus AND Barthes et al is a hero in my book, all pun. (I’ve studied Barthes at length for my MA in Media Studies and tweeted about his essay Camera Lucida on #dhintro18.)

Now, on to Drucker, wow…

Having read many screenplays, which sometimes give cues to the readers/actors such as shy, bold, flirtatiously, etc. I was wondering if she was citing a famous scene from a well-written screenplay when I came upon the infamous p. 12-13 section with flirting as an XML example. I was so perplexed about it that I took to search (apologies to Ramsay) and Googled:

“why does johanna drucker use flirting as XML example in speclab?”

Here are the results: DruckerFlirtingExampleGoogleSearchYieldScreenShot

Hannah’s “hot take” post is in the Top 10 search yield results for my Googled question.

I realized the Drucker passage is not from a screenplay and I also got a clue toward WHY she uses flirting, from the search yield results, due to a sentence being highlighted, which I’d also highlighted while reading:

“In the [flirting] example… the concept of ‘flirtation’ is far more elastic than that of ‘conversation'”.

My first thought to myself was, why didn’t she use a less charged example like coughing to demonstrate a concept far more elastic than conversation?

So I have to wonder if she purposely used “flirting” to inject a feminist agenda, much like Donna Haraway does in The Cyborg Manifesto. Maybe I’m reading in to it too much.

Personally speaking, the flirting example coming so early on in the reading was distracting to me. I was simultaneously trying to rectify flirting as an XML example while also trying to grasp the data science of XML which Drucker attempts to illustrate through it. Very circuit jamming. And it catalyzed the conversation over in Hannah’s “What the hell, Drucker?” thread about using this very flawed “sexist” example to demonstrate plasticity in XML (agreed) which Patrick noted to Hannah detracted from the XML itself (also agreed).

So, in my opinion, while Ramsay is successful in illustrating search/browse with the unique example of Zappa/Varese, Drucker is not as successful in illustrating XML with her unusual choice of flirting.

Back to savoring Ramsay after some dinner…

TEXT MINING — OBITS + SONGS + ODES

My process with the Praxis 1 Text Mining Assignment began with a seed that was planted during the self-Googling audits we did in the first weeks of class, because I found an obituary for a woman of my same name (sans middle name of initial).

From this, my thoughts went to the exquisite obituaries that were written by The New York Times after 9-11 which were published as a beautiful book titled Portraits. One of my dearest friends has a wonderful father who was engaged to a woman who perished that most fateful of New York Tuesdays. My first Voyant text mining text, therefore, was of his fiancee’s NYT obituary. And the last text I mined for this project was the obituary for the great soprano Monserrat Caballe, when I heard the news of her passing as I was drafting this post.

The word REVEAL that appears above the Voyant text box is an understatement. When the words appeared as visuals, I felt like I was learning something about her and them as a couple that I would never have been able to grasp by just reading her obituary. Indeed, I had read it many times prior. Was it the revelation of some extraordinary kind of subtext? Is this what “close reading” is or should be? The experience hit me in an unexpected way between the eyes as I looked at the screen and in the gut.

My process then shifted immediately to song lyrics because, as a singer myself who moonlights as a voice teacher and vocal coach, I’m always reviewing, teaching and learning lyrics. I saw the potential value of using Voyant in this way in high relief. I got really juiced by the prospect of all the subtexts and feeling tones that would be revealed to actors/singers via Voyant. When I started entering lyrics, this was confirmed a thousand fold on the screen. So, completely unexpectedly, I now have an awesome new tool in my music skill set. The most amazing thing about this is that I will be participating in “Performing Knowledge” an all-day theatrical offering at The Segal Center on Dec. 10 for which I submitted the following proposal that was accepted by the Theater Dept.:

“Muscle Memory: How the Body +  Voice Em”body” Songs, Poems, Arias, Odes, Monologues & Chants — Learning vocal/spoken word content, performing it, and recording it with audio technology is an intensely physical/psychological/organic process that taps into and connects with a performer’s individually unique “muscle memory”, leading to the creation of vocal/sound art with the body + voice as the vehicle of such audio content. This proposed idea seeks to analyze “songs” as “maps” in the Digital Humanities context. Participants are highly encouraged to bring a song, poem, monologue, etc. with lyric/text sheet to “map out”. The take-away will be a “working map” that employs muscle memory toward learning, memorizing, auditioning, recording and performing any  vocal/spoken word content. –Conceived, written and submitted by Carolyn A. McDonough, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018.” [I’m excited to add that during the first creative meeting toward this all-day production, I connected my proposed idea to readings of Donna Haraway and Kathering Hayles from ITP Core 1]

What better way to celebrate this, than to “voyant” song/lyric content and today’s “sad news day” obituary of a great operatic soprano. Rather than describe these Voyant Reveals through writing further, I was SO struck by the visuals generated on my screen that I wanted to show and share these as the findings of my research.

My first choice was “What I Did For Love” from A Chorus Line (on a sidenote, I’ve seen the actual legal pad that lyricist Edward Kleban wrote the score on at the NYPL Lincoln Center performing arts branch, and I thought I had a photo, but alas I do not as I really wanted to include it to show the evolution from handwritten word/text to Voyant text analysis.)

I was screaming as the results JUMPED out of the screen at me of the keyword “GONE” that is indeed the KEY to the emotional subtext an actor/singer needs to convey within this song in an audition or performance which I KNOW from having heard, studied, taught, and seen this song performed MANY times. And it’s only sung ONCE! How does Voyant achieve this super-wordle superpower?

I then chose “Nothing” also from A Chorus Line as both of these songs are sung by my favorite character, Diana Morales, aka Morales.

Can you hear the screams of discovery?!

Next was today’s obit for a great soprano which made me sad to hear on WQXR this morning because I once attended one of her rehearsals at Lincoln Center:

A complex REVEAL of a complex human being and vocal artist by profession.

AMAZING. Such visuals of texts, especially texts I know “by heart” are extremely powerful.

Lastly, over the long weekend, I’m going to “Voyant” this blog post itself, so that its layers of meaning can be revealed to me even further. –CAM

I Attended a TLC Workshop — Notes + Visuals

I attended an informally styled, very informative workshop on Wed. Sept. 26 on “Expanding Your Pedagogical Toolkit”. The facilitator was GREAT, Asilia Franklin-Phipps, and I can’t wait to get to know her even more. The TLC Staff workshop team was GREAT also.

We were seated in groups of 4-5 at round tables in the Skylight room on the 9th floor with a  totally open view straight up to yesterday’s blue sky and moving white clouds above us (beautiful setting) and I think this contributed to the open process we were engaged in.

We did a hands-on project together which consisted of us reading pedagogical class ideas/suggestions “expand our teaching toolkit” aloud to hopefully inspire us. It was primarliy a matching game, though, to match the ideas with categories such as “Introduce a Topic”, “Explore a Concept, Theory or Topic”, “Engagement”, “Check for Understanding” and even “Attendance”.  We then connected/cross-referenced the categorized ideas with string.

As the saying goes, “a picture says a thousand words” so here are two photos:

1) above: photo of the table where I sat

2) above: photo of the table to my right

Wow — guess who the “linear thinkers” were…?! I think these photos not only describe the workshop but also the processes of learning how to teach, teaching and learning. Dare I use the word from our Sept. 25 class readings, “mangle” (but here with a small m) to describe the bottom photo and these collaborative processes…?

We received a wonderful worksheet handout pdf today via email from Asilia of the pedagogical ideas we read aloud and categorized, which I’m happy to share here. It’s a great document and could come in handy in case anyone hits a dry spell in their classes during the semester.

Pedagogical_Toolkits_handout

The Mangle

 

(DHUM 70000 – Introduction to Digital Humanities) The Mangle
Carolyn A. McDonough <noreply@gc.cuny.edu>
Fri 9/21/2018 2:18 PM
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Carolyn A McDonough;

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CUNY Academic Commons
Carolyn A. McDonough started the topicThe Mangle in the forum DHUM 70000 – Introduction to Digital Humanities:

I’ve been immersed in p. 56-60 of Presner’s “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities” to the point where I couldn’t put it down. His connecting of Critical Theory to DH has me jazzed. I posted this in the Forum also, but I see the class is using this side more to reply, so here it is again.

The mention of Horkheimer and the references to Kant, Marcuse, Bloch, Pickering, et al, made this is an amazing read for me.

I’m especially relishing Presner on the “intellectual origins of critical theory” and as a method. He establishes the “purpose of this chapter is to concretely connect… CT with ‘the mangle of DH'” (p. 56) following Pickering’s articulation of ‘the mangle’ (which I’ll leave for all to read on their own).

I’ve studied and written extensively on Adorno & Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin for my first MA in Media Studies at The New School, and the latter also in ITP Core 1.  My thesis seed at The New School was on A&H’s essay “The Culture Industry” as applied to the field of advertising (which my research in 2006/07 revealed to me had not been done) and I examine Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the context of the “selfie” in my interactive paper “The Digital Aura”.

I’m always re-reading, re-thinking and re-visiting the A&H and Benjamin essays and keep copies of them at my desk. When I first read them about 15 years ago, I couldn’t believe how prescient they were (and in my opinion, still are). Now I will add Presner to this group of readings.

I like the aspects of CT that Presner addresses/highlights such as its confronting of “bad facticity” (ESPECIALLY AlND MORESO IN OUR CURRENT ‘FAKE NEWS’ TIMES.) I also appreciate how Presner describes that the “task of CT”, he suggests, is to “take us out of the domain of facticity” altogether (alleluia) and “into the domain of social practices, the speculative, the future-oriented, and the ethical.” (p. 57)

Presner paraphrases that for Horkheimer (in 1937!) the “traditional theory” from philosophy and science was about “factual knowledge and technical mastery” and “isolated from social and material conditions”. (p. 57) Horkheimer just couldn’t abide this in a post-Marxian perspective, and therefore aspired to CT which includes social and material conditions.

I could go on and on as I’m obviously quite lit up here, but I’ll wait for class….