The Home Page ·  The Integral Worm ·  My Resume ·  My Show Car ·  My White Papers ·  Organizations I Belong To

Contact Me ·  FAQ ·  Useful Links

My Professional Writing Papers

Technical Writing ·  Exposition & Argumentation ·  Non-fiction Creative Essays ·  Grammar and Usage of Standard English ·  The Structure of English ·  Analysis of Shakespeare

Analysis of Literary Language ·  Advanced Professional Papers ·  The History of the English Language ·  First Internship: Tutoring in a Writing Workshop ·  Second Internship: Advanced Instruction: Tutoring Writing

Visual Literacy Seminar (A First Course in Methodology) ·  Language in Society (A Third Course in Methodology) ·  The Writer's Guild

Journalism

UMBC'S Conservative Newspaper: "The Retriever's Right Eye" ·  UMBC'S University Newspaper: "The Retriever Weekly" ·  Introduction to Journalism ·  Feature Writing ·  Science Writing Papers

The Shipka Spaces: Theories of Communication and Technology

Communicative Objective #1 (CO1): The Re-patent ·  Presentation/Gaming Activity: "Shopping Happens" ·  The History of "this" Space: UMBC Food

Blackboard Weekly Posts (A Bulletin Board Community)

Communicative Objective #2 (CO2): Recontextualization of Authorless Text

Explanation of How to Read "This" Objective ·  Parameters for Recontextualizing Authorless Text ·  Photos of the Authorless Text Artifacts

The Authorless Text Narrative ·  The Authorless Text Goals, Choices, and Process Narrative-Sketch ·  The Authorless Text Lost and Found

The Authorless Text Workshops One and Two: Brainstorming Ideas Within a Social Context ·  The Authorless Text that was Researched, Tested, and Abandoned

Authorless Text Blackboard Community Post

Click here if you feel schizophrenic.

Click here if you feel apathetic.

"Altered States, Analog to Digital:
A brief synopsis of my life told through business cards."

Click here if you feel euphoric.

Recontextualization of Authorless Text Rolling Credits: Who contributed to "this" objective.

I argue that every piece of writing is stimulated by another piece of writing. This was the point of the Re-patent objective and the De- and Re-contextulaization of Authorless Text. Every patent is simply a re-patent of a previous patent with an improvement in the previous patent. I also argue that everything that will be said has already been said somewhere in space and only awaits to be re-discovered/re-searched/and re-cycled into a new text in a new context building on the previous text.

Maggie deLauney
Maggie and I were together in Shipka's ENGL 407, Communications in Society (Communications within a Social Context), and she overheard my conversation in Shipka’s office with Shipka about my dilemma of narrowing down what kind of authorless text to recontextualize. Maggie thought the use of business cards to weave a small glimpse of my own personal history would do the most work and that sharing this tale would have something to offer to my youthful peers. Maggie receives credit as the visionary and cheerleader in "this" communication objective who initiates the spark and establishes the path to pursue.

Shipka
Shipka agrees with the path being forged and also my idea playing with the idea of "Altered States": altered states of technology (analog to digital), altered states of geography (moving from state to state within the Continental U.S., and suggests a third: altered states of the mind and emotions. This clinches the recontextualization of the authorless text. Three tales happening simultaneously. The whole concept easily lends itself to being converted from analog (the printed business cards) to being digitized in the form of a web page and allows me to use multi-modes and modalities, thereby creating a narrative that the user can actively interact with versus passively reading a text whether analog (printed text) or a digital text on a computer screen. Not only does this apply active learning techniques, but also allows me as the designer to leverage adult play theories. If you want to get your audience to actually read something, make it interactive, make it an activity, and foremost: make a game of it.

Crystal Gatton
Crystal gets credit because she was the straight man or a helpless victim of one of my online musings of the mind. When I arrived at home, I checked Shipka's ENGL 324 Communications and Technology and ENGL 407 Communicators in Society Blackboard sites to see if my peers have posted anything new. I respond to an ENGL 407 Blackboard post responding to the presenter’s (one of them being Crystal) questions explaining “Flipper” the sock puppet from Sock Puppet Day. After reading my responses to Crystal's postings on ENGL 407 "Sock Puppet Day" ENGL 324 "Personal Reading Practices" posts, she probably thinks that I am a mental patient on a weekend pass.

         Everything I write: every paragraph, every sentence, every word I write within the “Shipka Spaces” is deliberately engineered for a purpose. Every word, sentence and paragraph performs "work." NOTHING is RANDOM in my communication design processes; hence, "CREATIVE." The word "Creative" infers "random" and when the consumer reads goals and choices, it should be absolutely clear that these communications are a PLANNED and STRUCTURED DESIGN PROCESS.

         I further argue that this non-linear process is what disturbs the average consumer when reading my essay, "Loosing my Religion" finds "jarring" about the essay. The essay was purposefully written to be "jarring", "jagged," "disturbing," "dis-continuous" with it's constant switching in time and space. The essay is meant to represent the cutting blade in the slaughter house that ended Harry's life. Some readers may think it is an argument condoning the consumption of meat and advocating vegetarianism and veganism when it is not. The argument is "should a farmer give a name to an animal whose sole purpose is to be raised as "food." Assigning a name to the animal elevates it above "food for consumption" and assigning to the animal an identity within a social context. The animal is property and a commodity, but should the animal be elevated to the status of a "pet." Or as I once heard it said by a Micro Center associate in humor, "Love your dog, but don't LOVE your dog."

         But I have diverged. Crystal Gatton's ENGL 324 post of Reading Practices creates the spark for my experiment in attempting to create non-linear text within the restrictions created by a linear word processor.

Here is Gatton's linear text post de- and re-formatted into a non-linear text using a linear word processing software (Microsoft Word), Figure 21.

         I take most of Gatton's text and my responses and play various games with making my response text non-linear to experiment with things I might do with HTML. I argued why must we write text linearly? As an example, if we had to write an argument about pigs, why can't we write the argument in the shape of a pig. When the recipient sees the argument, immediately they would know that is is an argument about pigs because they would visually see a pig made out of text. This exercise would have worked better using Adobe Illustrator because I have seen such texts created by the art students. Obviously, we have chosen to accept linear text as a standard convention because there are many concepts that are impossible to form a two dimensional shape. Imagine in the future when we have computer generated hologram visual displays having to negotiate with a text written in three or four dimensions. More amusing would be a text written by a mathematician with such a display considering that half of all mathematicians think spatially in "n" dimensions.

Unfortunately, my sense of humor is quite wry and far out in left field. Inevitably, the pitch sails right over Crystal's head.

Naphtali Barsky
Thanks to Naphtali Barsky for in his Blackboard post answering the question of Personal Reading Practices for Pleasure, that added fuel to my argument of why word processors are for linear text format only and why non-linear texts are considered an oddity other than on the Internet. The reason N. Barsky is helpful in this argument is he too at one point in time was being trained as a computer scientist so he understands a great deal about computer hardware and software form the inside of the discipline. Naphtali, like myself, among other reasons, changed career goals because of the lack of creativity within the computer science field. Naphtali also receives credit for the discussion about whether Shipka would understand the term image map as does Elizabeth Piccirillo and Matt Bowman even though I did not follow their advice and decided to err on the side of caution and define the term.

Bilal Mechairia
A thanks also goes out to Bilal Mechairia who was the one person in the Thursday workshop who voiced his opinion on which of the three possible re-contextualizations of “authorless text” I should flesh out into a reality. This at the very least provided a focus in this C.O. and also let me know which text someone might have interest in reading. Mechariria's input enforces the path that should be forged.

        All of these people help me to find the focus of the argument that I am trying to formulate in my narrative “Altered States, Analog to Digital.”

Various Computer Science Instructors
All of this was possible with the aid of UMBC’s web server, the UMBC library’s Epson 1200 scanner and scanning software, a Dell P4 mini-tower computer, Microsoft Photo editor, the instruction I received in my IFSM elective courses in order to learn good web design [User Centric Web Design (HTML), IFSM 403, UMBC] and various coding languages such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language, IFSM 448, UMBC), JavaScript (IFSM 247J, UMBC), Java programming (IS 380, Drexel and IFSM 413, UMBC), HTML, and last my own web site which has been under development for several years.