Digital Academics

Progress Report for TOC Response

Well I am going through the process of gathering material for my response to TOC this week. I didn’t have the greatest success using the databases provided by Marylhurst through the Shoen Library site, but I was able to find some good articles through Google Scholar. There were some materials that would have been useful through interlibrary loan through Marylhurst, but due to the length of this assignment, I didn’t have time to wait for these materials to arrive. I just figured out how to capture video from the screen of my wife’s iPad, so I am hoping that I will be able to put together something that is at least visually interesting for this project.

How are things going for everyone else? Are you all going to use Adobe Voice to put your project together? I have been talking to Timothy Merritt and looking at some of the things he has done for New Media classes at Marylhurst. He has been using iMovie. I keep thinking that I am going to stick with voice and see what I can make with that. I just wish that there was an Android version so I could be doing this on a more familiar Android interface.

I’m looking forward to seeing what all of you create for this assignment.

-Jake-

Standard
Digital Academics

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

This new object — the scholarly contribution that is possible only digitally — is now emerging. When it does, and only then, we will come to realize that printed books are no more or less inherent to academe than posting them online — and that our true challenge is to learn how to read in a digital age.

Standard
Digital Academics

Pondering a Digital Media Essay for #LIT306

I am sure most of you have written critical essays of a literary work at some point in your life. As an English student, critical essays have begun to feel like my profession. Sitting down with a work, reading it, consuming it, and then attempting to navigate around the liminal spaces created by the experience of the piece; this is what we do. The act of creating a piece of written thought regarding a written piece makes a lot of sense to me. I think that it makes sense to a lot of other people as well. This week, in LIT 306 at Marylhurst, we have been experiencing the new media novel, TOC, by Steve Tomasula and it has been an eye opening experience. His work is literature that exists as an iPad app (I will refrain from commenting at length on the narrow realm of availability this work exists within). It is a mix of video, audio, and textual story telling that occupies a moderately interactive environment that allows the reader to travel about any portion of the work at a whim, and serves as a wonderful experiment in temporality. I am sure you can imagine that coming from the flat land of letters-on-page to this new media work is challenging enough, but our needing to create our own digital media essay in response to it has me scratching my head. It almost feels like being thrown into the deep end and then finding out when you are thoroughly soaked that there is a wicked undertow to boot. Fortunately we have a good guide (Trevor Dodge) that is encouraging us, and we are being given a fair amount of time (two weeks) to create the video essay but I am still antsy over the idea of the whole thing. I delved into this world of new media at the recommendation of a professor that I dearly respect (Meg Roland), and I am excited to announce that this is the most excited and nervous I have been about an assignment in the last few years at Marylhurst. More and more I find myself being drawn into this world of digital humanities and the more I experience, the more I am beginning to believe that it is the course I was meant to travel along. I’ll share a link to the presentation when I am done putting it together.

-Jake-

Standard