“It is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Yet alternatives are exactly what we need. We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade.” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 2)

As her alarm blares, Ms. Tucker wakes to the hot sun pouring through the slits in the blinds. The sound of her air conditioner blocks out the noise of the nearby factories as it provides a slightly cooling flow of air. She blinks her eyes, and her mind begins to awaken and as she pushes herself up in bed, her joints crack as her aging body rouses from the night’s sleep. With her consciousness becoming more aware, Ms. Tucker remembers, today is the last school day of the 2051-2052 school year. What a relief that after today it is the summer break.

Another year has come and gone with students more or less the same each year. They drudge through the school, heads down as they stare at their screens that seem to be glued to their palms.

After a long time trying to encourage her students to think creatively and innovatively, Ms. Tucker is tired and ready to give up. She should be looking forward to her retirement, but she can’t afford it yet. Everything costs too much, and she has many bills to pay. Her life and career has not been easy.

Technological advancements were supposed to make life easier, but they have just made things more problematic. Algorithms were supposed to help streamline what content needed to be taught. Instead, along with grading systems, they dictate what children are taught from a young age so that their early formative years are highly segregated, and children are pigeonholed into professions from a young age. This, all in the name of capitalism and consumerism.

Technology is used in schools as a replacement for other materials but most often this technology use does not contribute to further or better understanding. Rather, it acts as an expensive replacement for the traditional tools of the 20^th century.

At the end of the long and exhausting day, Ms. Tucker returns home tired. She looks in the mirror and considers what could have been.

***

As her alarm chimes, Ms. Tucker wakes to sun streaming through the slits in the blinds. A soft breeze carries the sounds of birds chirping through the open window. She blinks her eyes and her mind begins to awaken and as she pushes herself up in bed, her joints crack as her aging body rouses from the night’s sleep. With her consciousness becoming more aware, Ms. Tucker remembers, today is the last school day of the 2051-2052 school year and her last day as a teacher; she has reached retirement after a long, exciting, and fulfilling career.

Technology and innovation have played significant roles in ameliorating the educational system. Teachers use algorithms to inform their planning of learning activities for their classrooms by identifying interests of their students. This supports teachers in creating exciting and engaging learning opportunities. By focusing on teaching skills and encouraging positive learning opportunities, teachers and schools have been able to foster an atmosphere that emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning. What’s more, curriculums focus on aiding students to recognize and develop the skills that will help them continue to adapt to a world that itself is continuing to evolve at a quick pace.

Over the years, evaluation procedures have been transformed significantly so that they no longer resemble the systems from the beginning of her career. Schools have shifted to gradeless systems in which students are provided with qualitative feedback. Students are involved in this process so that reflection and self-assessment skills are developed simultaneously with other learning.

During her career, Ms. Tucker has remained curious, and she has encouraged her students to be curious by fostering an environment in which students are inspired to ask questions and think outside the box. This has ultimately led to students being more creative in addition to curious.

After a day of heartfelt farewells, Ms. Tucker is proud of the job she has done. Upon returning home she glances in the mirror and reflects on her career. She is grateful for the innovations that have made her career and life fulfilling.

References

Dunna, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press. Retrieved from https://muse-jhu-edu.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/book/28148/#info_wrap

Prior to this task, when I would reflect on my own attention, I realized that my ability to maintain my attention is far weaker now than it used to be. Growing up, I would watch a television show or movie and that would be the only thing I was doing. Now, I often find myself divvying up my attention between two or even three screens as I attempt to multitask. If there is a lull in the action of whatever I am watching, I find myself reaching for my phone to scroll social media or play a game. While this would have been nice for me in the days of commercials, now I stream 100 % of my film content so the advertising that used to break up my shows is no longer there. Instead, I experience the advertising at the beginning of videos, on my social media accounts, or sometimes embedded within the show or movie itself as product placement. Ultimately, what I find most interesting is that I perceive my attention skills to have declined.

Having grown up with the rapid developments in technology and digital media, I can still remember a time before I had internet, before I had high-speed internet, and before mobile phones were ubiquitous. I think this gives me (and my generation) as fairly unique perspective in truly having experienced a vast range in the fight for our attention. As a result in the evolution of technology and digital media, I have also noticed my patience to have declined. While I used to wait for my dial-up internet to slowly connect and then slowly load whatever I was trying to access, now I feel frustrated when anything takes longer than a second to load.

While playing this game I noticed instances of my attention and patience struggling with various elements of the site. I found myself quite annoyed by the various pop-ups that recurred frequently throughout. Normally, if a site was this obtrusive, I would have closed it quite rapidly. This is where subtlety would be important for a site. When advertising is subtle it is not perceived to be annoying, thus it is likely more successful as users are not going to abandon the site completely. I also grew quite irritated by the slow scrolling of the window for accepting the terms and conditions. Interestingly, this feature was probably the most in my favor as it theoretically would have forced me to read the text I was accepting. Contrary to other sites where users can easily click accept without even looking at the terms and conditions or can simply scroll to the end quite quickly, this game forced us to scroll very slowly. However, instead of taking the time to read the words, I simply scrolled with one hand while I looked at my phone with my other hand. This would be an easy place for developers to be deceptive and hide important information or as Brignull (2011) wrote, “bury facts within paragraphs of text, so some users will proceed without fully understanding the transaction.”

The site was also adept at influencing me to click on elements I did not necessarily want or need to click on. It did this especially through the use of colour (a large green button, and a bright red banner at the top of the screen) which pulled my attention and influenced me to automatically click on those elements that were emphasized. The colour was more powerful in my quick decision making than the written words.

Ultimately, what I have learnt through this experience and through the resources of this module is that the people behind the websites and advertising have immense power. In their TED Talks, Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017) both seemed to emphasize that this power could be used for good or for bad. Where it seems to be being used now in more negative ways, they pushed the idea what would happen if we applied these algorithms and powerful advertising strategies towards making our world a better place. This brings me to education; with technology and advertising occupying so much of our brains and the brains of our students, how much room is left for learning? How can we leverage the power and influence identified by Harris (2017) and Tufekci (2017) to encourage learning for our students? These are questions that we need to be thinking about as we struggle to compete for our students’ attention.

References

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338. Retrieved from https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs-honesty-in-ui-design/

Harris, T. (2017, July 28). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day[Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C74amJRp730&ab_channel=TED

Tufekci, Z. (2017, November 17). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&ab_channel=TED

When I think of algorithms, I think of advertising on my social media and predictive text on my mobile phone. I know that algorithms are embedded in more than these two elements, but I believe these are the ones I experience most. Quite frankly, my understanding of algorithms is tenuous at best. Generally, my understanding is, the more that I research or type certain things on my devices, the more these will appear to me in the form of advertising or suggested words on my device. Thus, my initial thoughts about the communities derived from our musical choices would be based on quantity of shared selections. I assumed that I would be grouped with the people with whom I had the most in common in terms of our choices.

When I compared my choices with those of each individual in the course, I noticed that I was not necessarily grouped with the individuals with whom I shared the most choices in common. Elizabeth and I share six choices in common while I share five of the same choices with each Christina and Megan. None of these individuals are in my community. Instead, I share a community with individuals who share between three and four of the same song choices as myself. This leads me to believe that the quantity of choices is not the sole factor in deciding the communities.

When looking at a more detailed view of the community of which I am a part (Image 1), there seems to be symmetry to the graph that has been created by our choices. When I filtered the curators to view only those belonging to each of the communities, each community seemed to have a similar degree of symmetry that I observed with my own. I then experimented with randomly selecting one person from each community; in this scenario, there appeared to be little or no symmetry in the graph. I then tried viewing myself and the three individuals with whom I share the most common choices, Elizabeth, Christina, and Megan (Image 2). Our graph also seemed to have less symmetry than those created by the program. Thus, it appears to me that symmetry of the relationships between choices plays some role in the creation of these communities.

While the program did not know any of the reasoning behind our choices, I viewed the blog posts of my fellow community members to try and find any similarities and understand how our community was formed. Generally, I found that everyone in my community had very different criteria for their selections. Susana seems to have based her decisions on the instruments, while Johanna chose the songs that spoke to her on an emotional level, and Michael mostly selected songs that he liked. My primary criterion was to have the songs be representative of the cultural diversity of our world which led me to make selections based on geography with the instruments represented being a second criteria. This second criterion shares a similarity with Susana, while my first has a small commonality with Michael, who’s last three songs were included in an effort to represent worldwide cultures. While the algorithm has placed the four of us into a community, it does not provide any information about the reasoning behind our choices.

After learning more about the criteria of my community members, I took a look at the criteria described by the individuals with whom I shared the most songs (Elizabeth, Christina, and Megan). Interestingly, I found our criteria were much more similar than those of my community members. All three described attempting to include songs that were representative of the diversity of the human population. Additionally, Christina’s post could even be mistaken for my own; beyond selecting songs for their cultural and instrumental representation we each described our own awareness of our Western biases.

Ultimately, I still feel a little lost when it comes to what this program has done in order to create these communities. I can see symmetry as playing some kind of role (I think), but beyond that there is a lot of information that is lost. Beyond the symmetry created by the connections within my community, I see more similarities of choices and criteria with member of two other communities. However, these criteria are not represented in the graph having not been part of the data. Reflecting about what this means in terms of society and education, I think it is a cautionary tale. While computers, programs, and algorithms might be able to identify certain trends or statistical groupings, it seems to me that these machines cannot understand the more human side. The criteria we as a class have identified range in ways that seem uniquely human. Whether is based on feelings, preferences, or the desire to represent the diversity of human cultures, I think these are things that a computer has trouble understanding unless they are reduced to some kind of code.

Image 1. My community as generated by the program. Here there seems to be a fair amount of symmetry.

Image 2. The individuals with whom I shared the most songs in common. Notice the lack of symmetry in this graph. Despite the fact that I have the most in common with each of these individuals, our network appears much more random.

To narrow down these songs, my main priority to was include songs from each continent as I felt a duty to include songs that were representative of our world as a whole and not simply the “winners.” Rumsey’s statement about documenting the losers as well as the winners was an important notion for me (Rumsey, 2017). This made it fairly easy to eliminate several songs as, for instance, there were quite a few from Germany alone. I also tried to include songs that represented a variety of different instruments and musical genres. I recognize that European and North American songs still have a strong presence in my top 10. This is likely due to my own biases and inability to recognize differences of instruments and genres in songs that are more foreign to me.

My Top 10

• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
• Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
• “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
• Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
• Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round,” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
• Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
• India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

References

Rumsey, A.S. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?” [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrahqg9ZMc&ab_channel=BrownUniversity

For this task, I chose to alter not only the mode of my task but the task itself. I changed the format of this text by shifting from a ‘get to know me’ type of text to a more informative or how-to text detailing what items are important to have when hiking. To do this I employed the popular social media app TikTok to create a series of videos. (I have loaded the videos in YouTube to simplify their inclusion in this post).

This was the first time I really experimented with using TikTok as a creator rather than simply a consumer. Through the process of creating the videos, I learnt a lot more about the various elements that can be included in TikTok videos. Interestingly, the TikTok app can be used into increase inclusivity as there are a number of ways to make them multimodal.

I use the text-to-speech function in order to display text while also having the information read aloud. Alternatively, one could use the captioning function to display captions to their own speaking. As I experimented with the app, it appeared fairly easy to edit the captions to match the speaker’s words. Unfortunately, the text-to-speech function which I used was somewhat limited with the pronunciation of certain words. For example,  I had originally used the word ‘toque’ but because of the poor pronunciation of the word, I swapped it for ‘warm hat’. This is a good example of the New London Group’s (1996) suggestion that “effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries” (p. 64). While toque is a very common word in Canadian English, it may be unfamiliar to English speakers and computer programs from other parts of the globe. As educators, these cultural differences are important to recognize for our own understanding as well as that of our students especially in a world where communication technologies are increasingly breaking down the barriers of distance and international borders.

I could see TikTok as an interesting tool for education. Personally, I enjoy using it to learn about different topics that interest me but beyond using the app as a device for consumption, I think educators could leverage the popularity of TikTok for use in their classrooms as a tool for creation. I can envision students creating videos as an alternative to writing an essay, creating a slideshow, or standing up in front of the class for an oral presentation. TikTok offers a number of diverse functions, of which I have already mentioned some, that make this app an interesting tool for the classroom.

The ability to duet and stitch enable students to collaborate with a wide network of people globally and popular songs and sounds can be used to connect content with a larger theme or series of ideas. Understanding and manipulating these functions while using memes can help a creator to design content that is more successful. I think it could be argued that being able to read and understand memes is a form of literacy. Taking a meme and adapting it to another context or idea represents significant creative and critical thinking.  This thinking brings me to Dobson and Willinsky’s writing about hypermedia and their argument that  “hypermedia extends in significant ways our notions of textuality and literacy” (2009, p.289). They also wrote that the connectedness of hypermedia has as much significance as the content. In connecting their videos to others though the use of hashtags and the ability  to duet and stitch, TikTokers are creating a vast network of interconnected content. While some content may have more educational value than others, this network is important to recognize for the power it has.

References

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

I attempted this assignment by thinking of how to represent characters, objects, and ideas from the movie I watched. I did not rely on syllables as that is not how I use emojis. Generally, I chose emojis to represent the actions of the characters in the film. On occasion, I used multiple emojis to represent a single action or event. In one (repetitive) instance I chose an emoji to represent something completely different because the generic name of the thing depicted is a homonym of what another noun.

In the weeks leading up to this assignment, I finally got around to reading a book that had been sitting on my bookshelf for some time, The Emoji Code by Vyvyan Evans. This book was quite interesting as Evans (2017) described the history of Emoji and compared it to various languages in an attempt to better understand it. Evans (2017) uses the term Emoji to describe the code that is all of the individuals emojis. While Stern (2015) referred to emoji as the new lingua franca, Stern (2015) and Evans (2017) both indicated that while certain emojis may act as substitutes for different words, they do not (yet) represent a true language. At this point, there is still too much ambiguity. I think this ambiguity and limited ability of emojis makes it challenging to “write” in Emoji. As Bolter (2001) wrote, “picture writing lacks narrative power. The picture elements extend over a broad range of verbal meanings: each element means too much rather than too little” (p. 59). While Bolter did not reference emojis specifically (he does make mention of emoticons), his argument about the vagueness of images applies to the emoji. While it might be said that emojis act like a lingua franca, Evans (2017) has described examples of emojis that having different meanings in various regions of the world.

At this point, emojis help to provide additional information and context to the written text. Evans (2017), Stern (2015), and Bolter (2001) have described the ability of emojis (or in Bolter’s case, emoticons) to add to the written text by shedding light on elements like emotions and context. Without the information provided by facial expressions, gestures, and intonation, written text can be easily misunderstood, especially with regards to humor and sarcasm. At present, the power of emojis is to provide that context to our writing.

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). The breakout of the visual. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.) (pp.47-76). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Evans, V. (2017). The emoji code: The linguistics behind smiley faces and scaredy cats. Picador.

Stern, J. (2015, May 19). How I learned to love writing with emojis. The Wall Street Journal. http://graphics.wsj.com/how-i-learned-to-love-writing-with-emojis/

As an art teacher and generally artsy person, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to work in a medium connected with the arts for this task. Throughout my progress in the MET, I have come to realize the importance of the arts and the role they play in our communication. To me, art is a text; works of art can be read. Colours, shapes, lines, and the other elements and principles of art can be used to tell stories. Authors and artists both create work that falls along a spectrum; it is difficult to identify distinct categories between art and writing.

Once I settled on a word, the whole process took about 30 minutes, most of which was spent crafting the stamps. I consciously chose uppercase letters, believing they would be easier since they generally have fewer curves. The A and R were the most challenging letters to create because of the need to remove material from the center of the letter. I was very aware that I needed to carve the letters backwards so that when printed they would have the correct orientation. I struggled the most with the letter N and was not convinced I had it right until I actually lifted the print. I chose to use different colours for each letter because of my artsy personality; this was feasible because each letter was separate from the other. For me, the use of colour further obscures the distinction between writing and art.

In their podcast, Lamb and McCormick (2021) explored the idea of what defines a book; they distinguished between books or codices and scrolls. As I listened to the podcast, I was reminded of an artist I have been following on social media, Geo Rutherford. When I first saw her work and heard her refer to it as a book, I thought it was stretching the word ‘book’ quite far; but my understanding is growing increasingly as I proceed through this course. Lamb and McCormick (2021) described Andrew Robinson’s definition of a book as being made for public circulation, having relative permanence, being relatively portable and being capable of knowledge transmission through space and time. According to this definition then, Rutherford’s artwork is indeed a book. Rutherford (2020) herself stated that her book challenges our expectations of what books are. She further described the substantial amount of time that went into making these books. Historically, written books also required a considerable dedication of time.

Until relatively recently in the history of writing, books have required a significant amount of time and effort to be produced. Lamb and McCormick (2021) described that prior to the printing press, books were copied by hand, which was obviously slow, but the process was further delayed by the need to wait for the ink to dry. Even once the printing press was invented, creating books was still time consuming; Paul Collier described the process of using moveable type as a slow process that “requires a great degree of consideration” (Cooke, 2012). When creating my stamps, I also used a good deal of thought especially regarding orientation. Collier described that the quality of image produced from the letterpress is sought after as it is not seen often anymore. He further refers to it as an art form (Cooke, 2012). Again, the distinction between writing and art is blurred.  I see my print as a work of art. The colours, the quality of the print, and the crooked letters all create a whimsical sort of image that says a lot more than the simple word repeated on the paper. Afterall, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

References

Cooke, D. (2012, January 26). Upside down, left to right: a letterpress film [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RqWe1bFpM&ab_channel=DannyCookeFreelanceFilmmaker

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2021, May 8).  From the Vault: Invention of the Book, Part 1 [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to Blow Your Mind. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-to-blow-your-mind-21123915/?keyid%5B0%5D=Stuff%20To%20Blow%20Your%20Mind&keyid%5B1%5D=From%20the%20Vault%3A%20Invention%20of%20the%20Book%2C%20Part%201&sc=podcast_widget

Rutherford, G. (2020, December 9). Artist books explore beauty and fragility of great lakes ecosystem [Interview]. Wisconsin Public Radio. https://www.wpr.org/listen/1699276

Voice-to-text

I used https://dictation.io/speech

for this assignment I’m going to talk about the day I had yesterday I went to a zumba jam it was the first in person Zumba March 2020 or before that ever since the pandemic started they have been virtual and so it was really nice to get back in person Sam is a kind of Workshop or training for Zumba instructors ego and learn choreography that’s created by other Zumba instructors so it’s three hours we start with a warm-up the instructor who we call a Zumba Jammer basically leaves us through four or five songs that they’ve choreographed get down into chunks we learn each chunk and we repeat repeat and then put it all together for the song and we move on to the next song and then at the end we kind of repeat all the songs and finish with a cool down so it’s three hours of exercise of our body but also our mind as we’re learning new choreography and new moves sometimes be back in person as I said it’s been quite some time so faces I hadn’t seen in awhile and you know we did discuss the difference between being in person and being being virtually no people can have people are muted so you know when the answer to says how’s everyone doing and yes but they can’t hear so was nice to definitely be back in person we did have to follow some email guidelines as as for our local decisions in regulation but overall it was a it was a great day and you know I learned five new choreographies to bring back to my own Zumba classes and I’ll probably put in one or two new ones this week and save the others for later on I don’t like to put too many new songs in all at once because it’s learn all the new songs if I put them all in at the same time so I like to find the balance between putting a new songs but keeping the old ones so that people bored but they also can feel sick and yesterday I went out for ice cream and got myself my favourite that I always order which is ice cream dipped in chocolate and then it has little pretzels and caramel sauce drizzled all over it so it’s quite decadent but I figured after 3 hours of working out I deserved a little bit of extravagant yesterday

Analysis

When I look at the text created from this speech-to-text activity, I cringe a little. It is challenging for me to leave the text untouched, full as it is with mistakes. I think part of the reason I feel this way is because of the semi-permanence of this text that now exists and is attached to my name. Haas (2013) and Gnanadesikan (2011) both wrote that writing has the ability to endure through time and space. What I actually said it now lost, all that remains is this poorly rendered transcription. If a person were to look at the text above with not other content and not read this explanation, they would likely question my intelligence or ability.

The most obvious error is the complete lack of punctuation. From a quick glance and without even reading any words, one can easily spot that there are no periods and very few capital letters. The capital letters that are present do not mark sentence beginnings. Instead, they identify proper nouns. I find it interesting that the program realized that Zumba was a word that should be capitalized. I also find it kind of random that ‘workshop’ was capitalized, and I cannot seem to understand why that happened.

Beyond the lack of the punctuation, there are also a number of words that are incorrect. The program seems to have misinterpreted what I said and has included a number of words I did not speak. Whether this is due to me speaking unclearly or a failing in the program, I am unsure. Either way, I imagine that a person reading this text will struggle to understand some of what is now written.

Creating this voice-to-text assignment was interesting because I felt myself being analytical right from the get-go. In some ways, knowing that I was going to be looking more deeply at the text that was created influenced my speaking by distracting me from the topic about which I was speaking. I distinctly remember two thoughts that came to me as I was speaking. First, I recognized how many times I said ‘um.’ The second distraction came from seeing the words, especially the incorrect ones, appear on the screen after I spoke. I noticed that sometimes these incorrect words were fixed as I believe the program tried to make more sense of what was being recorded based on the other words I spoke. These distractions caused me to pause while I was speaking but those pauses do not appear in the text, neither do the multiple ‘um’s I muttered.

The missing elements of the pauses and ‘um’s is significant because it exemplifies some of what is lost when speech is converted to text. Gnanadesikan (2011) identified this failing of writing, “it does not record the identifying details of any individual utterance of those words. It records language, but not actual speech” (p. 9). When I think of speech as it is recorded in novels, the author imbues the speech with emotion by adding small details about how the character spoke. These details act as clues that help the reader better understand the tone or emotion of the character. Adverbs such as quietly and excitedly or verbs such as whisper and scream, provide readers with important insight that is lost when verbal speech is recorded by writing. Without this additional information, my speech-to-text creation lacks emotion. Additionally, there is no punctuation that would help a reader gain a better understanding of me as a writer. Had I typed this text rather than spoken it, I would have thought carefully about my use of punctuation which would provide a reader with more information.

Had I recorded this story or told spoken it aloud to an audience, there would have been a lot more information available to the consumers of this narrative. As it stands, the text lacks basic elements like punctuation and sentences but is also misses some of the more personal components like feelings. For a reader of this text, they have no clues as to the speed with which I spoke or the emotion I held in my voice. While these elements can be added in by skillful authors, it stands to reason that the process of transforming speech to text dilutes some of the power of our words. While writing has the advantage of communicating through time and space, spoken word has the advantage of emotion and passion.

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internetLinks to an external site. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).

Haas, C. (2013). “The Technology Question.” In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacyLinks to an external site.. Routledge. (pp. 3-23).

In my hiking day-pack

• Hiking poles (attached to the outside)
• Bag containing water purification system
• First aid/emergency supplies kit
• Toilet paper
• Camelback bladder (empty)
• Compass
• Pocket knife
• Towel
• Duck tape
• Ziplock back with garbage
• Lip balm
• Empty milk bag
• Head band
• Hair elastics
• Bobby pins
• Headlamp and batteries
• Mask
• Sun hat
• Raincoat
• Lightweight fleece sweater

Items normally in my pack that are missing in this moment

• Nalgene bottle
• Food
• Map

Before diving into what can be gleamed from the content of my bag (and from my bag itself), I would like to highlight a couple significant pieces of information provided by Scholes (1992). Scholes (1992) wrote that “a text is a cluster of signs or potentially signifying entities that can be connected by an act of reading to other such clusters” (p. 155). My bag, its components, and its contents are a cluster of signs; they provide clues that when connected together and to a larger context, provide insight to who I am as a person if only you know how to read them. This brings me to a second important point.

Scholes (1992) wrote, “we can make sense of things only by establishing our own connections within the network of textuality that enables our thinking and perceiving in the first place” (p.153). Thus, if you don’t have any prior knowledge or understanding of hiking, you might not be able to gain as much understanding from my bag as from someone who is well versed in hiking.

My bag and its contents quickly indicate that I spend some time outdoors, where there is limited access to amenities such as places with toilet paper. The inclusion of the hiking poles hints more specifically to hiking.

This bag tells the story of having returned from a hike: there is no food, the garbage bag has garbage in it, the water containers are empty or missing, and the map is missing as it was also used for road navigation. The normal tidying of my bag was only half-completed; while leftover food was removed, normally after a hike, the camelback would be stored in the freezer and the garbage would be emptied.

The mask in my bag provides a piece of temporal information. Only since the spring of 2020, did masks become a normal item for me to carry.

Many of the items in my day pack are there in case the “what if” happens. First aid kit… what if someone is injured? Water purification system… what if I run out of water? Headlamp and extra batteries… what if I don’t make it back before dark AND what if my first set of batteries die? Compass… what if I get lost? Pocket knife… what if I need to cut something? Towel… what if I want to dry my feet after a spontaneous dip in a creak that may or may not exist? Raincoat… what if it rains? Fleece sweater… what if I get cold? Duck tape… what if I need to make a repair? I think much of this comes from growing up in Girl Guides where our motto was “Be prepared.”  Really, the items that I use the most consistently when hiking are those that are missing: the food, my Nalgene and the water that would fill it and the Camelback bladder, and the map.

When considering the items in my pack, the ones that stand out as being the most textual, are the map and compass. We say things like “read a map” or “read a compass.” The map (even though it is technically not present) and compass represent a literacy specific to a subset of the population; few people have the need and/or ability to read a map and compass. Having the compass in my pack indicates that I theoretically have the ability to read a map and compass in order to find my way.  I say theoretically, because it is not unheard of for people to carry a compass and map despite being incapable of using them and if I am being completely honest, I probably overestimate my own ability to skillfully use them.

On the strap of my bag is a whistle (seen in the bottom left of the photo below), which serves as as communication tool in case of emergency. On it’s own, the whistle does not provide much information but when needed it can be used to convey information. In my experience as a Girl Guide, I learnt that 3 short blasts communicates that the user requires assistance.

Thinking more about the map and compass, it is interesting to think about the various types of texts that I am able or unable to read. While I am comfortable with a map/compass, crochet patterns, and recipes, I am limited in my ability to read other texts like sheets of music. What I am (un)able to interpret is part of my identity and describes elements that have significance in my life. Reflecting further on this concept of identity, my bag and its contents provide a lot of information about my identity to a hypothetical archaeologist.

Personally, the badge sewn into the side of the bag serves to identify myself as a member of a select group of hikers. I wear it on my pack as a symbol to other 46ers that I am one of them. For an outsider, a quick search of the internet explains that the badge represents the feat of having climbed the 46 high peaks of the Adirondacks in New York.

Many of the items point towards my gender identity although nothing definitively identifies me as one gender or the other. To guess at my gender, one must use stereotypical assumptions. Many of the items are pink or purple which are typically colours associated with females. The hair elastics indicate I have long hair, again another trait more often (but not exclusively) associated with females. The pack is a women’s pack although nothing obviously indicates it as such; only by searching the name of the pack (Lowe Alpine Airzone Z Duo 25) or understanding the design differences between women’s and men’s packs would someone know that it is a women’s pack. It could simply be that I am a small-framed man with long hair who prefers the colors of pink and purple.

The Ziplock dedicated to garbage is identified as such because I will most often reuse the same bag by simply emptying the contents into a larger bag or container at home. Being environmentally conscious, I do not wish to waste multiple plastic bags, but I do not want to confuse an empty garbage bag with a food-safe bag.

By examining my bag and the objects within, one can read it as a type of biography. By making judgements and connections to other texts, the reader can guess at my gender, preferences, and values. By looking at details like the size of my clothing, the reader can also guess my physical size. The straps of my pack might also provide insight to my size. Examination of the empty milk bag, carried for unexplained purposes, identifies me as likely being from Quebec and being someone who consumes dairy.

References

Scholes, R. (1992). Canonicity and textuality. In J. Gibaldi (Ed.), Introduction to scholarship in modern languages and literatures (2nd ed.), (pp. 138-158). Modern Languages Association of America. https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/scholes.pdf