C.E. Ball’s article argues (to traditionally-minded academics who consciously or unconsciously denigrate new media texts’ potential for “true” scholarship) that new media scholarship—that is, scholarship written as new media text, not necessarily about new media—deserves to be valued. She identifies a “gap” between what new media scholars say and what they do (409). In order to establish an ethos within the academic community, they publish (as Ball is doing, and she notes the irony) in print-privileging journals. She notes, too, that new media scholarship requires authors to “[cross] so many disciplinary and departmental boundaries, which makes it necessary for scholars to show colleagues across fields that one can work in new media (and not just write about it)” (407).
8121 Reading Response: Prescience, Dream, Invention
Nelson’s Dream Machines (1968-70), Bolter’s “Seeing and Writing” and “Writing as Technology,” Lanham’s “The Electronic Word” (1989), Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945), Edison’s “To-Do-List,” MITH’s “Vintage computer collection,” and Griffin’s “Turing Test Breakthrough” (2014).
Science, Invention, Mind, and “The Record” of the Human Race
“As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush, is an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. In it, Bush identifies a need for the invention of machines that can take over wrote, repetitive thinking, like “mechanical” calculations, so that “man” can be free to think creatively about information. He calls for machines that will record and store information for instant access and retrieval, for transmission/sharing, etc. And he imagines what these “futuristic” machines might look like. Essentially he presages computers (Bush’s “memex” machine), databases, voice dictation devices, even the oculus. It’s a fascinating article, bound of course in the language of its time–“the men of science” and “the girl” of the stenograph, i.e., or the “which grew like Topsy” allusion.
Reading Response: “The Roaring Twenties” interactive website
My initial experience:
Beautiful opening page. The sound is awesome, seductive.
But the text–light on dark–that begins with the Intro–turns me off so much!
Is this a database? An archive with an interface orienting one as she chooses to explore the information in prescribed or pre-designed or pre-curated ways?