Google’s Book Scanning Project

March 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During my usual channel-surfing the other day, I caught an interesting debate on Google’s book scanning project. Robert Darnton (cultural historian at Harvard University), David C. Drummond (Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google) and author James Gleick were the participants in the discussion, each respectively representing the rights and interests of users/readers, Google, and authors/publishers.

In 2005, Google launched its ambitious project to digitize books. It has already scanned 12 million different titles so far. There were lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild against Google regarding a violation of copyright laws because a majority of these books (about 8 million) were out-of-print but still copyright protected. Under the new settlement reached in 2008, authors have control over how and when the material is displayed and receive a share of market revenue. The below video clip features Robert Darnton who criticizes this move as excluding the interests of readers, libraries, and the public good from the process.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18V0OAsLB9s[/youtube]

I am one of those old-fashioned people who prefer reading in print instead of on screen. But I can’t help but admit that electronic books might be our future destination, particularly considering the younger generations who were born digital. What bothers me the most is not whether or not we should trust the good will of Google, which is, after all, a profit-making private corporation. What is scarier is, as Darnton argues, we as users are not just ignored by one legal settlement and commercial deal between the Authors Guild and Google but excluded from any knowledge of what is happening behind the scene.

Filed Under: Copyright, literature, Tools

Russian Aboriginal Ice Dance: “Cultural Theft”?

February 25, 2010 By 6 Comments

Playing with the ongoing theme of dance in recent postings, here is one controversial piece of dance. The 2010 Olympics ice dancing competition just ended, and the aboriginal folk dance put together by the Russian team brought a lot of controversies in and out of the ice rink. Voila! (The video clip shows the original version performed in the past month before it had to be “toned down” at the Olympics.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_uoToFGK6E[/youtube]

It has been reported that especially some indigenous Australians expressed their anger and frustration calling it as “appalling,” “a rip-off” and “exploitation.” Bev Manton, chairwoman of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, wrote last month in The Sydney Morning Herald that “the faux tribal designs on the costumes and the skaters’ faces ‘are no more authentic or Aboriginal than the shiploads of cheap Aboriginal tourist trinkets that pour into our country from overseas.’”

Now, compare this to the U.S. team’s “Bollywood” impression, which has become a YouTube sensation and instant favorite amongst Indian communities.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1zTUcOmtg4[/youtube]

Apart from the quality of each performance itself, there are a series of questions that come to my mind. Why do some people consider the Russian pair’s dance offensive or feel uncomfortable while the majority enjoy the U.S. pair’s? (To my mind, it is not just a simple matter of the skating costumes, although one of the NBC commentators mentioned that the Russian team’s faux leaves hanging from their tribal costumes were “gimmicks” whereas the U.S. team’s Indian clothes were “authentic.”) If dancing is a means of cultural expression and human communication, what are the limits of cultural appropriation in dancing in which indigenous culture can be shared, celebrated, and replicated by nonnative members? When does cultural tribute stop being appropriation and become theft? Where is the line between them? How far is too far? While costume controversy seems to be a perennial source of woe and entertainment in figure skating, it is amusing to find these questions to be still valid, perhaps more than ever, in the so-called age of globalization.

Filed Under: Art, Cross-Cultural Communication, Fun

Rethinking academic labor

December 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

I don’t know how many of you are in the job market this year, but according to the report published in the November issue of MLA Newsletter , it looks grim in the field of English and foreign language departments. Catherine Porter, the president of the Modern Language Association, notes that job advertisements were down by 40% in English and by 52% in foreign languages, compared with October last year.

What is more alarming is that some scholars warn us that this recession, unlike others, can be not so much a silver lining for an upcoming bounce-back as the beginning of all-encompassing transformation of the postsecondary educational system. Time will tell us whether this is true or not. But in the ensuing paragraphs of her column, Porter suggests a number of ways to explore the impending issue of the productivity of academic labor in higher education. For example, she proposes that we should redefine productivity—in both teaching and research—in a broader context of globalization and the advent of the digital humanities. She also introduces various models for curriculum development and assessment created by universities and scholarly organizations including Carnegie Mellon’s hybrid model combining “on-line learning environment with instructor-led courses” (I would like to know more, but it was only briefly mentioned). Finally, the significance of graduate education and professionalization is emphasized with regard to collaboration among multiple disciplines and the role of graduate students as teachers.

I hear many different voices in response to Porter’s column including that of a CUNY professor. Despite the controversies surrounding the topic of academic labor, her column allows me to be more aware of what we do in the Institute—the development of Blogs@Baruch and the pilot project of Great Works assessment tool, for example—in a larger context of the ongoing transformation of university education.  Working for the Great Works assessment project, I have become more interested in kinds of models and platforms that we create and bring to the table. My initial idea of assessment was so naïve that I thought it would simply simulate the input-output corporate model to evaluate students’ achievement in a specific course. I now realize that the model is not given, but created by the collaboration among faculty, students, and university administrators. It also may not only seek an assessment of final outcome but also intervene every stage of learning process.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Jobs

New Media and the Idea of Freedom of Speech

October 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

Gabriella Coleman, cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Media Culture and Communication at NYU spoke at the Graduate Center about her research on the free and open source software movement and the hacker culture last Thursday. I couldn’t make it to her talk but was able to read her article “Code is Speech.” In this article, she investigates how Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers have contested and rewritten central concepts of modern liberalism, especially freedom of speech, by illustrating the cases of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and the protests provoked by their arrests between 1999 and 2003. Her article touches upon the sensitive issues such as intellectual property, copyright, and the notion of originality, which N. Katherine Hayles also problematizes as the products of the 18C liberal humanism in her book My Mother Was a Computer. Coleman writes:

“This is key to emphasize, for even if we can postulate a relation between a product of creative work—source code—and a democratic ideal—free speech, there is no necessary or fundamental connection between them (Ratto 2005). Many academics and programmers have argued convincingly that the act of programming should be thought of as literary—‘a culture innovative and revisionary close reading’ (Black 2002; see also Chopra and Dexter 2007). As with print culture of the last 200 years (Johns 2000), this literary culture of programming has often been dictated and delineated by a copyright regime whose logic is one of restriction. New free speech sensibilities, which fundamentally challenge the coupling between copyright and literary creation, must therefore be seen as a political act and choice, requiring sustained labor and creativity to stabilize these connections” (449).

Coleman’s words remind me of Mikhail’s recent post in which he weighed in on the question of openness of the VOCAT. I was excited to read that he believed the VOCAT should be free and open wide to other institutions and other developers, to benefit not only many other students and schools but also the tool itself so that it may evolve in ways we’ve never foreseen.

I also think that that’s how William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” envisions the Net in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. With all the futurist horrors of mechanization of humanity imagined by the novel, it implies that the net can still be the brave new world for us as long as it remains open and public.

Filed Under: Copyright, Media, Tools

Workshop on how to deal with source material

September 17, 2009 By 4 Comments

Last Friday, the Writing Fellows had our first CUNY-wide meeting of this academic year. After attending the orientation in the morning, I went to one of four concurrent afternoon workshops, titled as “Source Use and Writing with Authority” led by Professor Sean O’Toole of Baruch College.

The workshop was designed to inform us about how to teach students to engage with secondary sources in many different ways other than just to support or back up an argument. For example, sources can be used “as a primary focus of analysis, to establish a problem or question worth addressing, to supply context, background, or information, to provide key terms or concepts, and to grapple with another opinion or interpretation.”

We had two brief exercises: first, we read an article (Stanley Cohen’s “Folk Devil and Moral Panics”) to identify the ways in which the author uses his sources; second, we drew a diagram illustrating our strategies to handle the secondary materials that we use in our own writing project, the technique introduced by Mark Gaipa. Gaipa’s article (Pedagogy 4.3, 2004) suggests a variety of strategies that are illustrated with cartoons: picking a fight, ass kissing, piggybacking, leapfrogging, playing peacemaker, acting paranoid, dropping out, and crossbreeding.  I found that the drawing exercise indeed helped me relieve my anxiety dealing with sources, so I am thinking of using it as an office-hour exercise for my students. It might also be helpful for those of us who are writing a dissertation and having a hard time handling source materials, oftentimes feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. I knew drawing was often used in therapy, but I’d never realized its power before I had the exercise in the workshop.

Filed Under: Process, Writing Instruction

“The Loathly Lady,” or what do women want most?

June 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Wendy Steiner, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, created a comic opera called The Loathly Lady in an effort to “[step] out of the university into the worlds of politics and the arts.” The plot is based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” with bits of allusions to Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf just to name a few. A 7-minute pilot animation is available to watch on her homepage, and the detailed production notes can be found in her article published in Profession (2008). The animation in itself could be a nice introduction to Chaucer’s work for students in class. (It takes a while, about 5 minutes, to download the animation, but it is worth waiting.)

Filed Under: Art, Fun, Gender

Two Cultures, Two Kinds of Audiences, and Two Forms of Communication

May 11, 2009 By 3 Comments

Tuning into the current stream of our collective reflection upon last Friday’s symposium, here I put in my two cents. Like my fellow attendees, I found Jeff Jarvis’s Google speech extremely exciting and thought-provoking, which made him the perfect fit for the morning session. It is, however, Peter Elbow’s talk about the usefulness of occasional ignoring of the audience that resonates more deeply in my mind. I am currently reading his book, Writing with Power, and it allows me to think again about how the relationships between author/speaker and audience should change according to two different forms of communication, verbal and written. To reiterate the point he made, writing is more solitary and process-oriented than speaking is, so audience-forgetfulness can be a good strategy for early stages of writing. Elbow’s empiricist approach also classifies the different types of audiences such as safe or dangerous, caring or discouraging, real or imaginary, and so on. I found his notion of the ghost audience that we carry with us in our head particularly intriguing:

“The audience in our head usually affects us more when we write than when we speak. When we speak, the real audience is right there dominating our attention and drowning out other audiences. When we write, however, all audiences are in the head, even the real audience. In the dark of the brain a real audience is easily trampled by an insistent past audience” (187).

Elbow’s advice is that, in order to exorcize the demon of the dangerous internal audience that inhibits our words or thoughts, we need to actively “change” our audience and capitalize on the support of a loving audience that we once had or that we can imagine. I think that this suggestion could prove useful in improving our teaching methods, too.

Finally, attending the Institute’s symposium reminded me of C. P. Snow’s 1959 argument on the division of two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I assume that in this case it is the division between business and academia whose cultures we try to bring together, as partly shown by Jarvis and Elbow. I see how these seemingly disparate fields can hit it off and have productive conversations in the right setting like this year’s symposium.

Filed Under: Audience, BLSCI, Symposium

Against the rhetoric of the decline in student writing

March 18, 2009 By 1 Comment

For those who lament the decline in student writing skills, here’s a counter-example you might be interested in. In 2008, David Gold III published “Will the Circle Be Broken: The Rhetoric of Complaint against Student Writing” in Profession, and offered an argument that was not particularly new.  Instead of blaming a supposed decline in student writing ability on high school English teachers or our students, we as instructors and consultants need to find out why students may have difficulty writing and help them overcome it by giving them proven strategies.

His research caught my eye. Apart from juicy details illustrating how some professors publicly “sneer at” their students’ lack of passion for writing, Gold brings into light the direct comparison between the expository example of an elite student writer a century ago, a 1922 Berkeley freshman, and that of his own student:

“The choice of an automobile depends primarily upon the purse of the prospective purchaser. There are three classes of automobiles to be considered: the high priced, medium priced, the cheap cars. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Cheap cars are not easy riding. Expensive ones are easy enough to ride in but their cost is prohibitive to the majority. The medium priced car strikes the happy medium: and decreases the disadvantages of each of the extremes while yet partaking of the advantages of each of them.” (Berkeley student, 1922)

And, from his own student:

“Today a super slim woman is the norm. As one 16-year-old-girl said, “How thin you are is associated with success and how big you are reflects low self-esteem and being unsuccessful” (Martino and Pallota-Chiarolli 103). However, the black community condones just the opposite. The ‘thick’ woman is idolized, being defined as having a large gluteus maximus and a big bust without excess fat elsewhere. This image is depicted throughout the hip-hop industry, representing that the average woman can be her normal weight and still be attractive. The most infamous example is Mo’nique, a big comedian who made a career out of embracing her size and has helped many big women everywhere to love themselves regardless of negativity. The hip-hop culture promotes physically diverse women that can do anything they put their minds to. The uniqueness of all women’s bodies is accepted.”

Even though Gold’s selection could be biased, given that these two samples have been chosen among many specimens and we do not know the contexts in which these students were writing — for example, what kind of prompt was given to each of them? — I still cannot help but admit that I see more lively effort or more “passion” in the second piece. It may also be my own bias from the perspective of today’s readership. But I also have to agree with Gold that we often forget the level of complexity of the tasks given in contemporary composition classes asking students to write “original, research-based arguments that synthesize and respond to multiple points of view, incorporate a variety of textual evidence, and seek to persuade a specific audience in a specific rhetorical context, in addition to following the conventions of edited English.” I have newfound respect for my students.

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

What grade would you give A-Rod for his performance?

February 23, 2009 By 6 Comments

It turned out that Alex Rodriguez should have taken performance-enhancing drugs for his oral performance last Tuesday. I don’t know whether anyone has followed the story of his steroid-use scandal, but I thought I would bring to the attention of the BLSCI communication experts this video clip of his news conference following his admission that he took steroid injections from 2001 to 2003. I wonder how you’d all assess it from a presentational point of view.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0lZTQC2Ck[/youtube]

Here are a few bits and pieces of the critical responses from media experts and sports commentators, particularly to the 30 second-long pause near the end of the clip, when Rodriguez thanks his Yankee teammates:

  • Skip Bayless, a sportswriter and ESPN commentator, calls Rodriguez baseball’s “new drama king” and his performance the most insincere acting that he’s ever seen.
  • Facial expression expert Dan Hill reads Rodriguez’s emotions in his face, and finds contempt and resentment (the tightened lips and the lowered eyebrows), fear (the mouth pulled wide), sadness (the lowered eyes).
  • Or, listen to what Gene Grabowski, the senior vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, had to say. I felt his comments on Rodriguez’s lack of preparation were intelligent and reasonable. Criticizing Rodriguez’s poor connection with his audiences (and maybe MLB’s ill-managed relationship with baseball fans), Grabowski wrote in his blog post, “Rodriguez recited from a prepared script with no visible indication that he had even read it beforehand. And he uplifted each page as he finished reading it, practically waving the successive pages in the public’s face. . . . The baseball world needed direct human connection, eye-to-eye, spirit-to-spirit. Not sound bytes, not message points, not even apologies.” Rodriguez’s overall grade? Grabowski gave him C-.

So, what grade would you give A-Rod?

Filed Under: Baseball, Oral Communication

Misunderstanding about Cultural Misunderstanding

November 14, 2008 By 6 Comments

Some of you probably know that Baruch College has been ranked as the most ethnically diverse campus in the U.S. by this year’s Princeton Review. Working at the campus that has the most diverse student body in the nation, we often come across difficulties in cross-cultural communication, the topic which Szidonia’s last posting illuminated beautifully. I also have been working with many international students in Great Works, who make their extra effort to cope with the linguistic and cultural predicaments that they face. Having come from Korea, I can particularly relate to Asian students with their nervousness and discomfort in the classroom where they are expected to engage in discussion by challenging other people’s opinions and where they find a dissent sometimes valued more than a consent. This can be quite a novel idea to those who had different cultural upbringings. On the other hand, I have to confess that I felt perplexed the other day when a faculty member asked me why his Chinese female student is not vocal in class and whether it is because of her cultural background. I wished to give him a better explanation than just blaming it all on culture, but didn’t know where to begin.

I think the issue of cultural difference/misunderstanding/stereotyping is all the more compelling because it raises the kinds of questions that can’t be resolved easily, including those which Szidonia and Yukiko already brought up. In what occasions should we give a person the “cultural baggage bonus” or grant a cultural easy-pass? How can they be unjustly given or not given? In miscommunication, at which point does cultural difference stop playing a major role and others such as sexual, regional, generational, disciplinary, and individual differences factor in? One thing I’d like to add is the fact that people change, things move, and “culture”, like everything else, continuously evolves.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication
« Older Posts