Computers and Composition

In the latter half of the 1990s the digital
image became prevalent, easy to manipulate, and consequently, easy to recontextualize,
meaning that now just about any image is available to any computer user for any occasion. To use Bolter's terminology, the "interpenetration" of textual and pictorial space in digital environments, especially on the Web, has increased
markedly, so that the predominance of the digital image now rivals that of the digital word. Indeed, a number of thinkers have noted the digital image's ascendancy in communicating
information via the computer. But how are we to think about, to analyze the rhetorical dimensions of these images? This essay focuses on using classical rhetoric 'as a way of
thinking about the persuasive power of computer-based images.

Community literacy's definition of community is often spatially defined; thus, community literacy programs belong to a particular city, neighborhood, or group of people. The challenge is attending to opt-in communities that are not geographically defined—communities that form in large part because of Internet access and continuous involvement in online, virtual spaces rather than material locations. Centers, then, are replaced by forums, wikis, and avatar-mediated conversations, and in this environment, community center teachers and organizers are replaced by community managers, those people who work at the intersection between IP holders and players, mediating literate practices, mentoring new people, and working with players to effect changes to the system. This paper looks to the video game industry's use of community managers to suggest ways to organize and think about communities in online spaces.

In the last ten years there has been a growing consensus among textual scholars that one of the main purposes of a digital edition should be the presentation of a ‘mobile text’, in which each manuscript or witness – ancient or modern – can be read, compared and manipulated by various computing tools. However, is the concept of textual movement strictly related to the use of the computer? This paper argues that, not only is the idea of mobile text much older than the computer, but current digital tools and languages often seem inadequate to the task of representing the richness and complexity of such literary artefacts. The first part of this paper tries to reconstruct and discuss the birth of a new textual paradigm from its origins in the intellectual milieu of the 1930s, up to research into the writing process carried out in the 1980s. The paper then focuses on the theory of text as a ‘system’, as outlined by the Italian editor and philologist Gianfranco Contini. It follows a concise overview of the theoretical issues raised by genetic criticism in France, showing its connections with experiments carried out into the psychology of composition. The last part of the paper presents an ongoing experiment of genetic philology developed by the Digital Variants (www.selc.ed.ac.uk/italian/digitalvariants) team: the Magrelli Genetic Machine. Variant texts and brouillons d’écriture generously made available by the Italian author Valerio Magrelli are displayed through several interactive tools realised in Flash, and their original textual mouvance is reproduced by means of a dynamic display. This experiment involved a number of practical steps, but also raised some theoretical questions: how to convert a printed text and a manuscript in digital format; how to create a dynamic text which appears as an image, simultaneously comparing different choices made by the author, etc.; and, finally, how to show the writing process. It is undeniable that writing with a computer implies a loss of knowledge about the genesis of a text, as writers do not usually save earlier versions. Digital Variants, by asking writers to save their writing-stages, can allow users to examine a variant text from the author’s as well as the reader’s perspective, and thus stimulate reflection on how the digital dimension can blur the boundaries between ‘authorial’ and ‘editorial’ practices.

In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are needed in schools.  Scholars examining these trends in research have reached a clear consensus: facility with interpreting and designing multimodal texts will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital, global world of the 21st century. In this article I propose a framework and a method for drawing on these new social practices and developing performance knowledge for learning in schools. In a long-term project professional development a multimodal composing project provided point-of-need support for English teachers in workshops and in their classrooms to help them expand their beliefs about literacy and critically reframe their pedagogical practices. The focus on digital video composing provides teachers and students with multimodal learning in an authentic, high-status, social and media practice with powerful attention-getting qualities and expert models in the real world. Analysis of teachers successfully integrating DV composing for students in their classrooms revealed four principles representing the key changes needed for teachers to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms towards multimodal composing.  The components that provide teachers direction toward this reframing include: (1) providing explicit multimodal design instruction and attention; (2) co-constructing authentic purposes for representing multimodal meaning for an audience; (3) designing multimodal composing activities that invite students to draw on their identity lifeworlds as resources; and (4) creating functional social spaces for mediating multimodal learning.

Morris's Arc (1988) for String Quartet flows; it flows with substance, and with purpose. By flowing, I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that all music flows because it is unfolding in time and time flows. Rather I mean that there is continuity to its various surges of eventfulness; these surges are not disjunct or sudden. And by substance I mean both that its sound is as a sensuous fluid material and that the unfolding of its constituent events presents a coherent organization, thus binding together into a statement that seems meaningful in retrospect. By purpose I mean not only that there is a local logic to the consequence of one note following another, but also that the flow of events enables the material to organize into processes that forge a trajectory toward a goal.
    The analysis first focuses on local details considered in terms of pitch and pitch-class formations as arising from twelve-tone rows; then it delves into aspects of form, process, and texture. These are considered in terms of emergent properties in flux. The modeling of these properties and their flux employs some mathematical formalisms, but the reader can rely on the fact that every mathematical definition and formula is described carefully in prose as well.
    In Arc, the twelve-tone pitch class details and the surging emergent qualities projecting form are not completely separate from each other. Rather, all these features interact. Thus not only does the article weave together connections between such facets as form, process, and texture, but it also connects these to the twelve-tone rows and pitch-class configurations that are more straightforwardly part of the compositional plan (and more usual in analyses) of Morris’s music.

[Download the pdf below, or contact the author jmailman@alumni.uchicago.edu, for a digital offprint. It can also accessed through JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.52.2.0249 ]

I wrote this love song to a computer circa 1982. It was published in  _The Greenfield Review_ 13 (Summer/Fall 1985): 149-50, but first printed in the The RPI Review [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] 5 (March 1985): 4, which is the version scanned here.

Please note: because the scan is of an older manuscript, it will not show up when you go to the next page; but if you click the Download button on the right, you will see that the poem is there, and you will be able to read or download it.  Sorry for the inconvenience; I wanted to preserve the old text in which this technological poem first appeared.

Our vision for the future of composition focuses on the “tube” and the culture inspired by online video sharing. Understanding composition in 2020 requiresfurthertheorizing about the participatory practices occurring in online video culture.Based on practices found on the platform YouTube, we turn to the term “tubing” to explain phenomena taking place there, and we put forward the concept of “participatory pedagogy” that we see emerging in 21st century classrooms. The ubiquitous and historically loaded “tube”
(noun) and its YouTube-specific counterpart “tubing” (verb), explain many of the shifts taking place as acts of writing expand to include participation in online video sharing. Other scholars have forwarded the notion of “postpedagogy” (Vitanza, 1991; Davis, 2000; Arroyo, 2003, 2005; Rickert, 2007), which places a high value on invention, encourages the playful, yet serious linking of disparate historical figures, and opens up new pathways that we see as working in tandem with what George Siemens (2005) called
a “pedagogy of participation,” an offshoot of what Henry Jenkins named “participatory culture” (2009). Using tubing as a guiding metaphor, we develop our version of “participatory pedagogy” for 2020 by focusing on the propagation of Internet memes and the inventional possibilities found in the everyday practices of video culture, which create an historical archive, an untapped repository of cultural patterns, and a light yet ruthlessly public demand for participation.

In this book I reveal the inside story to my choral and orchestral work "Sound to Sea".  It comes with the full score of the symphony and also a CD with the full recording of its premiere (55 minutes of music). I describe in rich detail the concepts and processes with which I engaged in the composition of the symphony.

"Sound to Sea" alludes to voyages: voyages of discovery and exploration, and also voyages of the mind. I contemplate the nature and practice of musical composition, and provide a personal account of my creative journey. I offer original insights into the art of composing in the 21st century, where scientific developments, and technologies of information and reproduction are transforming the way we think about creativity.

If you are interested in finding out more about what goes on in the creative mind of a composer, in this book you will find information that you would not normally find in academic papers. I demonstrate how computers - as we know them today - are unable to fully emulate musical creativity. Although I am an Artificial Intelligence scientist myself, I admit that computers cannot  - and perhaps should not - be "creative" on their own right. Rather, machines should support human creative processes.

Some 4.8 billion persons worldwide have online access, yet this number fails to show the full scope of online education today. In truth, every individual with online access is a learner—someone who goes online to learn something they do not know. The result is a context where online learning has become lifelong learning as multiple generations regularly consult online sources to acquire the knowledge they need and skills they desire. The question becomes: How do we realize these opportunities? The answer involves understanding content creation—or composing of texts in order to convey ideas, create conversations, and establish communities when online.

Уже название сборника статей, составленного Джимом Ридольфо и Уильямом Харт-Дэвидсоном, кажется настолько понятным, что его можно даже и не переводить на русский. Кто же не знает риторики, а digital humanities мы и здесь, в России, зовем digital humanities (далее — DH). Но трудности перевода термина «DH» на русский научный язык начались не сейчас и вызваны как внешними, так и внутренними причинами — сложностью в передаче самого понятия....
в то время как одни теоретики и футуристы рисуют, подобно Л. мановичу, изу- мительной красоты цветы-графы, плоды визуализации глобальных когнитивных процессов, другие (и их имен мы как раз можем не знать) легко исчезают с видимой поверхности, из глобального же small-talk о новой природе вещей и встраиваются в «лабораторию манипуляторов», доподлинно знающих, где сейчас нерестится рыба социальной готовности, где отложена икра массовых (частно-общественных) ожиданий.

The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to model specific sequential (as in narrative and logic) and non-sequential (as in creative and associative) thought strategies to help students write academic and creative essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, including U Michigan, UC Berkeley, ASU, University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon U. Comprised of separate "stacks" each modeling a specific heuristic, these stacks included:
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.

Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).

In this essay, we suggest that digital activism through sites like Instagram employs what we call the “intimate screen”—an extension of Kevin Michael DeLuca’s and Jennifer Peeples’ (2002) concept of the public screen—that cultivates a supportive, empathetic public through familiarity. By providing one Instagram page as a case study, this essay suggests one way social media advocacy for children with disabilities can proceed, especially when the goal emphasizes awareness. We propose that digital activism seeking awareness can employ different rhetorical structures than direct political protest. We conclude by making applications from this study to digital activism through Instagram and other social media.

Recent studies of online audiences point to a continuing need to develop methods for studying emergent media and its actual audience engagement. This article proposes that studies of online audiences can strengthen their approaches by employing elements of rhetorical fieldwork. Advocating for the digital field’s place amongst rhetorical fieldwork, this article introduces a method called deliberative drifting designed for researching the digital fields of live-streaming videos and their online audience engagement. Through a case study of three moments of democratic deliberation live-streamed on social media, this article shows how rhetorical field methods designed for digital fields can produce findings—especially for rhetorical audience studies—as robust as those found in traditional fields.

Recent feminist cultural studies of technology analyze how discourses and practices that circulate in high-tech culture reproduce and enact the same unequal power rela-tions embedded in our institutions and day-to-day activities. Feminist interventions are communicative acts that bring attention to the shifting power relations within a specific discursive context. An analysis of the assumptions about audience that oper-ate in electronic artifacts demonstrates how power relations play out within particular communities. The author argues that enacting feminist interventions in online envi-ronments changes the online community’s identity and sense of audience, and that creating feminist multimedia can help ensure a more human, diverse and gender balanced human presence in all forms of technology and new media. community electronic conferences feminist critiques of technology intervention multimedia The publication of “Women and Computers: An Introduction ” in the 1990 special issue of ...

This study explores students’ reflections on a digital project in an advanced ESL composition class in the US using a framework of multimodality. The goal of this study is to examine the role that including a multimodal digital literacy project in a composition class had in complementing and facilitating an argumentative research assignment. Findings demonstrate that including a multimodal digital project before assigning an argumentative research paper both facilitates an understanding of the writing process as well as develops a sense of multimodality in student writing by prompting them to see new ways to add modes of communication into their text-based projects. The paper argues that, as writing becomes increasingly multimodal and digitally mediated, the field of second language composition needs to incorporate digital literacies into its repertoire for higher levels of writing to foster advanced academic writing skills with authentic tasks that prepare students to become competent writers in a digitally mediated society.

This was a provocation in 1998 as part of a roundtable discussion involving four different writing centers at the University of Minnesota. Using Lunsford’s oft-cited classifications for Writing Centers as “storehouses,” “garrets,” and “Burkean parlors” to consider the state of online writing centers, I ask how we can use current technologies to keep the “Burkean Parlor,” interpersonal aspects that many of us value in writing center work.

In Technics and Time, 1, Bernard Stiegler (1998) challenged the prevalent philosophical distinction between tekhnē and ēpistēmē, arguing that humans are fundamentally technical beings. According to Stiegler, the industrialization of civilization led to a disequilibrium in the evolution of culture and the evolution of technics, with technics evolving more quickly than culture. Stiegler's discussions of technics, culture, time, and memory provide a useful theoretical framework for understanding some of the cultural implications of copyright issues, which are often viewed in terms of economics, legality, and/or ethics. In this article, I focus on the intellectual property debate as it pertains to peer-to-peer networks and the music industry. Drawing from Technics and Time, I theoretically frame these issues as a problem of temporality, memory, and a disconnect in the evolution of culture and technology. I then use small-scale/observational ethnographic analysis to examine a private torrent community to consider how torrent communities are cultural phenomena, the implications of this assumption, and how these considerations might inform or extend existing approaches to issues of intellectual property. More broadly, I ask, what are the affordances of thinking about these economic, legal, and political issues from a cultural framework?

In “Hacking the Classroom: Eight Perspectives” (2014) published in Computers and Composition Online, eight authors discuss the question: “Why does the Higher Ed classroom need to be “hacked,” and how might we hack it?” Kristine Blair, editor of Computers and Composition Online describes the article thusly: “Evolving from a panel at the 2012 Computers and Writing Conference, contributors define hacking as a empowering, subversive process of “turning the critical gaze inward, rethinking institutional structures and practices and revising them to foster new social relationships, pedagogies and modes of inquiry.”

Little attention has been paid to reference skills in L2 written text production in comparison with L2 text comprehension. This may be explained by the fact that the relation between L2 text production and the process of consultation of external resources has not yet been the object of exhaustive research, largely because text production is viewed exclusively as an encoding activity. The place of the consultation of external resources in text production will only be recognised when the latter is viewed as an encoding activity continuously interrupted by decoding sequences when internal support fails and additional information is required. To obtain this additional information, writers must turn to external resources and engage in decoding. The consultation of external resources is thus a conscious problem-solving strategy which is closely related to one’s definition of a problem, knowledge and beliefs about external resources, and attitude towards their use.
In this article we present a cognitive model of the problem-solving process in L2 text production which includes the use of reference sources. Using this model, we have analysed how students envisage, and carry out, their problem-solving processes in L2 written text production. A customised questionnaire was used to obtain data on students’ beliefs concerning the relation between internal and external support; their perceived knowledge of external resources; and their attitude to reference skills training. This data was contrasted to the problem-solving processes actually carried out by the students. Results suggest that, in theory, students correctly describe the stages of the consultation process. In practice, however, some fail to complete the process at a certain stage. Detecting when this happens allows us to design appropriate reference skills training. 
Key words: text production, L2, reference skills, dictionary, problem-solving

This historical paper from 1986 was prescient in predicting the development of computerization on university campuses. At the time of writing, computers were not widely used on campus. The article predicts an explosion of dedicated resources to increase computer resources on campus.

The original introduction is as follows:

The widespread promotion of computer use on American college campuses may someday be hailed as the most important technological innovation in scholarship since the invention of pencil and paper. It may eventually be denounced as one of the most extravagant fads ever perpetuated on higher education.

The decision rests on whether computer applications can be constructed which are useful and important for academic disciplines outside of the laboratory sciences and engineering-principally the humanities and the social sciences.
But there is a catch. Most educators agree that if computers are to be a worthwhile investment for the social sciences and humanities, they must prove that they can facilitate learning in ways unachievable using traditional educational technology:

When we write online, who is our audience? Is it a specific group of readers who frequent our particular blog or who refer to our specific website, or is it more varied? As we’re regularly reminded, cyberspace is borderless space—a realm in which geopolitical boundaries often have deceptive consequence. And as conventional notions of geopolitics and geography change, ways in which we perceive “audience” in writing must evolve.
The entries in this special issue review how different aspects of culture, language, and technology can affect composing practices when writing online for globally distributed audiences.

This article analyzes what is at stake when social media platforms restrict the modes in which audience members can publicly compose and communicate. More specifically, we are concerned with how platforms adjust users’ multimodal affordances during livestreaming public events, and how these adjustments affect public deliberation. This article focuses on an historic, political Twitch livestream: U.S. President Joe Biden's inaugural address on January 20, 2021. For rhetoric and writing scholars, this event is significant for two reasons: (1) it is the first presidential inauguration to be livestreamed, officially, on Twitch by the president's committee, and (2) the livestream's chat was restricted to “emote-only,” meaning online audience members could only communicate with Twitch emotes in the “live chat” space of the stream. Based on an analysis of more than 12,000 comments, our findings support a theory of what we call affective spam, a more nuanced, visual-content-based form of spam that online audiences use to influence public communication and deliberation on social media during live events.

Originally composed by Marcello Messina, Ntrallazzu is a cycle of pieces for live score and electronics built on Max, and involving various instrumental line-ups. In particular, Ntrallazzu 4 was performed by Luzilei Aliel on the pífano and electric guitar in São João del Rei during the VIII UbiMus workshop. Aliel’s particular setup also involved a further layer of processing: namely, the usage of Pure Data alongside Ableton Live in order to literally hijack the original piece and open a whole set of unforeseen possibilities that abundantly transcend the original intentions. In this paper, we signify our experience by means of the concept of comprovisation, while we situate Ntrallazzu 4 within the domain of ubiquitous music.