Embedded Files
"They are persuasions rather than arguments that start nowhere and move across populations. Perhaps many of the world’s most puzzling problems —problems that resist rational explanation—reside in this outlying territory."
Together as a class, we will annotate each and every reading found here. Each week, using hypothes.is, students as a group will contribute annotations that create linkages between and among readings, that engage and build from the annotations of others, and that contextualize the readings in our contemporary scene.
A running list of possible annotation types:
Direct Questions (for instructor or classmates)
Open Ended Questions (to prompt further conversation)
Definitions (key terms or just unfamiliar terms)
Etymologies (explore the history and origins of key terms)
Paraphrases (restate what you think a key claim is)
Internal Connections (draw lines within the text)
External Connections (link text with related texts)
News Stories (events that speak to or are spoken to by the readings)
Relevant Academic Work (other courses taken or projects undertaken)
Resonant Art (poetry, literature, film, music)
Remember to tag your annotations as well.
Finally, avoid engagements of the readings that amount to thumbs up/thumbs down readings or critiques (i.e, “this is contradictory,” “I dis/agree,” “the author leaves out x”). These responses certainly reveal how a reader is engaging the text, but they do little, on their own, to put the texts to work for us. Ascent to the readings to see where they might lead you. (Annotative course design inspired by Casey Boyle. I strongly encourage you to read his "--something like a reading ethics," in particular the section "Reading Ethics," which outlines "a series of steps to read and cite more productively.")
I want to try out this set of required guidelines for this semester. Add a minimum of 10 annotations across all the readings assigned for a given day. As part of those 10, be sure to:
define at least 1 key terms
compose at least 1 paraphrases of key claims
trace at least 1 etymology
make at least 1 inter-textual connections
make at least 1 intra-textual connections
make at least 1 external connections
Please post all annotations using the ENGL 3850 group. It really is imperative that you keep up with the readings: once you fall behind, as has been born out in previous semesters, there really is no catching up. There just isn't much wiggle room in the schedule.
Week Two
"The 'Q' Question"
Richard Lanham
"Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love"
Jim Corder
"No You're Not"
Keller Easterling
"From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik"
Bruno Latour
Week Three
"Rethinking Maps"
Rob Kitchin & Martin Dodge
"Since When Have Trees Existed Only for Rich Americans?"
Ian Leahy & Yaryna Serkez
"Why an East Harlem Street is 31 Degrees Hotter Than Central Park West?"
John Leland
Week Four
"Examines the material spaces in which our networks entangle themselves
"Using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time, Shannon Mattern advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities."
Week Eight
"Sensitizing"
Bruno Latour
"Why You Can't Just 'Trust the Science'"
Ross Douthat
"Louisiana Loses Its Boot"
Brett Anderson
Week Nine
"How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power? Easterling argues that the search for solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. This background matrix with all its latent potentials is profoundly underexploited in a culture that is good at naming things but not so good at seeing how they connect and interact.
"In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organisations of all kinds."
Week Ten
"Reinventing the Master's Tools"
Jacqueline Bacon & Glen McClish
"How to Turn Your Red State Blue"
Stacey Abrams & Lauren Groh-Wargo
"Hollywood Bias Comes at a Hefty Price"
Franklin Leonard
Week Eleven
"Visualising Information for Advocacy is a book about how advocates and activists use visual elements in their campaigns. In this 170-page book we explore how to influence issues using the right combination of information, design, technologies and networks. Through over 60 examples of visual information campaigns from around the world we show how they capture attention, present stories and take us on journeys through data.
"Whether we’re swamped by it or starved of it, the value of information depends on its quality, and its usefulness depends on our ability to communicate it successfully. As activists, we can't sit and wait for people to wade through sixty-page reports. To influence people we must make strong arguments and communicate them using strong evidence. Well timed, rigorous and well presented information is the greatest asset activists possess."
"Covid's Confusing Paleltte"
Caity Weaver
"Along the Columbia River, Making a Monument of the Land"
Alex Cipolle
"A Free Tool to Improve Cities"
Sara Hendren
Week Thirteen
"Digital Tendencies"
Carolyn Pedwell
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse