Over the past fall and the summer semesters, I’ve been participating in an exciting pilot program at my university called UMW Domains (or sometimes, “A Domain of One’s Own”). The basic idea is to give students their own domain names and some webhosting, which they can then use to construct their digital identity during their time at UMW. It’s an alternative to off-the-shelf eportfolio solutions, and it’s a powerful way to approach digital competency, with the full rhetorical stakes of identity formation. What follows isn’t intended to be a complete run down of this project. For that, read Tim Owen’s blog entry from earlier last year, or some of the coverage or mentions in Wired, Inside Higher Ed, etc. Instead, what follows is a specific reflection on my own experiences.

For several years now in my Writing through Media class, I’ve been requiring students to purchase their own domain registration, and among its pros and cons, setting up a website on a personal domain is a process that has the power to be transformative for many people. I really believe this.

Today, I presented a paper at the 2013 MLA Convention as part of a special session on Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media along with Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon and Mark Sample.

My talk was about the font OCR-A, and it's part of some research I'm doing as a bridge between my dissertation and a current fellowship project that should turn into a book.

My slides are a PDF, which I'll embed first below. Again, this is ongoing research and thinking, so I certainly appreciate comments, questions, suggestions.

My paper today is about a typeface and font, OCR-A, [slide - block] and the link that exists between its contemporary uses in design back to the context from which it originated in the 1960s.

In many of my classes, I’ve have an opportunity to discuss the poetic, sublime, cliche and now inevitable Passage, a game well-known for being well-known as an art game (or artgame). As a game or game-like thing about life and death, its approachable style and memento mori theme are sufficiently affecting that I find most students tend to at least take it seriously. Whether they find it depressing, pretentious, provocative or cliche, most students tend to have something to say about Passage the next day in class.

My last entry was about a new class; this one is about an older class, but since the material is continually evolving, I thought it made sense to write briefly about it here as well. ENGL 386: The Graphic Novel has undergone a few iterations, but in its current form, it’s an upper-level literature class, intended for English Majors and meeting one of their requirements for 5 literatures on any topic. As I think the title suggest, “The Graphic Novel” is somewhat formal in focus, considering the elements of the comic medium as they are developed through the graphic novel genre.

The assignments routinely involve close analysis of comic pages, one large-scale collaborative research project, and one collaborative creative project in the form of a web-based graphic text — often, students do this last one as a “webcomic,” which we can host at UMWBlogs.org using ComicPress.

Choosing novels for this class is always difficult. You can see the full list of every text I’ve used for this class here in my Zotero library.

Since I seem to have re-awoken my blog, I thought I’d take some time to use it to publicize my Spring 2013 courses. One is brand new and the other is (like most course, truthfully) in a continual state of reinvention, so it might be interesting to look at what my plans are for now. I’m teaching two courses, with two sections of each, and this blog entry is about the new one: ENGL 251AA: Games and Culture.

In our department, 251 is a “special topics” designation, so we add suffixes for each new topic being taught. It’s a “general elective”, meeting an “Arts, Literature and Performance: Appreciation” (ALPA) credit, but offering no specific benefit for an English Major. My experience with 251s has been that the enrollment demographic typically includes a pretty good balance among majors and classes represented, though perhaps with some skew toward English and Computer Science students, owing to my tendency to the specific of my topics.

This semester (Fall 2012), I’m teaching ENGL 202H: Writing through Media, a so-called “special topics in writing” seminar that has become one of my standby’s. The history of the course is actually kind of interesting, since it goes back to my graduate school experience teaching “ENG 1131: Writing through Media” at the University of Florida. Often taught by graduate students in Digital Media and related areas, 1131 is a course created by Gregory Ulmer. The general purposes and guidelines for the course reveal its commitment to rhetorical theory as well as Ulmer’s particular approach, an array of ideas anchored by the loose gravity of his term “electracy”.

This past weekend, I was honored to present a short lightning talk at the Modern Language Association. I did this as part of a roundtable session, “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies,” organized by Mark Sample and including 5 other participants besides myself: Anastasia Salter, Steven E. Jones, Edmond Chang, Jason Rhody, and Tim Welsh. We each stuck to our allotted 6 minutes, which left plenty of time for a great discussion. I’ve included the text and images from my presentation below, along with a few notes, links and a bibliography.

This coming spring (2012), I’ll be teaching a new course, ENGL 251Y: Adaptation! Here’s the description:

If you need to fulfill your ALPA requirement, or just need a General Elective, you should probably take this class.

I recently traveled to the 2011 MLA Convention where I gave a presentation on some of my recent thinking on ARGs and the textual study thereof. Really, this presentation was the sequel to a blog entry that was to be the first in a series. I ran into some trouble with the software I wanted to discuss in step 2, but now that that software is working (Omeka’s Zotero Importer plugin), I’ve been able to experiment enough with it that I can offer some preliminary ideas about its use.

The text below is the presentation pretty much as I gave it. Looking over it again, I think I missed a few opportunities to go a bit more theoretical, and some of my finer points that could have been a paragraph are relegated to a pithy turn of phrase that may not have been as clever as I thought at the time I wrote it.

Still, I think it did go pretty well as far as getting my major points across, and it fit in nicely with my co-panelists Rita Raley and John Walsh.

Going forward, I think there could be potential for some kind of description framework or archival ontology for transmedia artifacts. I need to learn more about RDF, but I really think there’s some potential there, alongside a broader preservation effort along the lines of Preserving Virtual Worlds..

In any case, here’s the presentation, for what it is. I certainly welcome any comments or questions.