My students and I have been playing with WordCount, Jonathan Harris's slick database of the 86,000 or so most commonly used words in the English language, ranked according to frequency. As Harris points out (playfully calling it a "conspiracy"), there are many sequences of adjacent words in the ranked list of 86,800 words that are… Continue reading WordCount Poetry
Category: New Media
Using Understanding Comics to Understand New Media
A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts about the rhetoric of the hyperlink, which I was working on with my Textual Media course. I've complicated my students thinking (I hope) by suggesting that we can use Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's wonderfully insightful dissection of comics (itself in comics form) to understand new media. Among… Continue reading Using Understanding Comics to Understand New Media
Rhetoric of the Link
Rhetorics of the Web (by Nicholas Burbules at Wesleyan University) is an often-cited overview of various kinds of hyperlinks and the rhetorical strategies that they employ. In the course of teaching a new media class this fall, I've begun to wonder whether Burbules' examples are too general, ahistorical, or even naive about the possibilities of… Continue reading Rhetoric of the Link
GMU Course Blogs
I've been fed up with the standard issue university courseware options--namely Blackboard and WebCT--so I decided this semester to wing it with my own version of courseware (what I'm calling "of-courseware") powered by WordPress. Although Sample Reality runs on Movable Type, I've been hearing good things about WordPress, and I thought I'd give it a… Continue reading GMU Course Blogs
Atlases & Maps before GPS
I love maps, and I'm fascinated by the history of mapmaking. Check out this anonymous 17th century atlas I've come across, published in London in 1650. The title is succinct enough: A book and map of all Europe with the names of all the towns of note in that known quarter of the world: so… Continue reading Atlases & Maps before GPS
Caution Remixed, Flight XYZ#123
Poetry from Row 16A on US Airways #952 (the trip home)
Poetry from Row 11A on US Airways #730
Mark Sample Identity Theft Watch
Google Desktop Search
10×10
Exxon Secrets
Videogames and War
Google My Computer
Search Inside This Book
Like many avid readers and scholars I am thoroughly enamored of Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book feature. The feature debuted October 23, 2003 with the complete text of more than 120,000 books. I can't find any recent data on how large the digital archive has grown in the past several months, but the folks at… Continue reading Search Inside This Book