Category: Tasks

Speculative Futures

This week’s task was to create two speculative narratives on our potential relationship with media, education, text and technology in the next 30 years, and I’ve fictionalized myself for both narratives.

The first narrative is an interactive vignette about brain/computer interfaces in Inklewriter and the second is a chat story created with the TextingStory app on iPhone – the upload exceeded the 20mb file size for WordPress, so I’ve hosted it here.

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Speculative Genres

My introduction to speculative design and fiction was through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, mentioned by Dunne & Raby (2013) as not only a masterful example of speculative literature but a provocation of ideas surrounding “social, cultural, and ethical implications of science and technology.” What makes the trilogy speculative instead of sci-fi is that everything in the post-apocalyptic world Atwood designs could have technically existed within the possibilities of 2003 and beyond’s technology and science. If you think lab-grown but non-animal protein Beyond Meat or an Impossible Burger is disgusting, how do you feel about lab-grown chicken? But only the edible parts of a chicken – like the breasts – without the rest of the chicken, or at least without the unnecessary parts? If you want to read for yourself, check out the book, or read this blog site’s excerpt from Oryx and Crake regarding the chicken, or ChickieNobs. There’s a nod to this in the first narrative.

My narratives take inspiration from coursework in ETEC 522 and ETEC 523 and my exploration of exciting emerging technologies such as chatbots (Alex in the second narrative is an AI chatbot),  VR/AR and immersive experiences, the upcoming 5G revolution and its impact on Internet of Things and device connectivity, the potential of posthumanistic brain/computer interface technology via neuralnanobot implants. I’ve also been inspired by the 2020 dystopian adolescent fiction novel Feed by M.T. Anderson, where the feed is a brain/computer interface in a society driven by consumerism and corporate interests (sound familiar?) and the Netflix show Upload where the less resourced 2 gigs run out of data and exist on pause until the next month’s data recharge.

The first narrative also touches briefly upon the issues of the quantified self and our desire to learn more about ourselves and the world in quantitative ways: whether it’s through DNA testing, FitBit or Apple Watch daily steps tracking, social media and app use to check into locations, keeping up with our likes/faves and streaks, maintain a record of the beers we’ve imbibed or birds we’ve seen, we are chasing our quest for knowledge, our goals, our self-esteem and happiness using digital technologies. Admittedly, I engage in some of the above mentioned forms of tracking and measure my quantified self through social media and app use, and I have an understanding of some of the risks in sharing my personal data for the enjoyment I receive in return. Rutsky (2018) explains the draw and risks:

The attraction of these technologies lies precisely in their promise to allow users to be free, active creators and producers. Yet, this promise of increased freedom, creative expression, and mastery is premised upon converting virtually every aspect of life, nature, and culture into quantitative terms, into data – including human life.

As the world becomes more digitized and technologically advanced, some of the speculative futures imagined by revered thinkers such as Kurzweil, Orwell, Atwood, Anderson, Huxley, and even Musk have or will become a reality instead of science fiction, and one thing is certain: our lives have become inextricably linked with technology. And we are either unwilling or unable to remove ourselves from it completely. When I began the MET program I was much more of a tech Pollyanna and bought into the idea of techno-utopianism much more than I do now. I personally find it impossible to rid myself of everyday technologies I know might be harmful or exploitative from a personal and collective data point of view, and I think we have all had to embrace technology in ways that have expanded our comfort zones to remain relevant, either culturally, socially, or economically. Dunne & Raby (2013) and countless others have cautioned against wholeheartedly accepting technology for all its promise and possibilities without a consistent and vigilant critique of it – and ourselves. Technology is not a runaway train or autonomous being. We have created it, and we must act ethically and reflectively in our creation and use of it.

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References

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press.

Rutsky, R. L. (2018). Technological and posthuman zones. Genealogy of the Posthuman. https://criticalposthumanism.net/technological-and-posthuman-zones/

Algorithms of Predictive Text

This week’s task to use the predictive text feature of our smartphones to generate a microblog about a prompt resulted in the following:

This is not my idea of a good job offer but it’s ok. The only way I can find a new one is the best thing for me. LOL I’m so excited to have a new phone. I think it’s ok if you don’t want me to go back to work. The only reason why I don’t want to go back to work is because it’s not too much fun for me. I have to get tested for this one day and then I’m gonna try to get it done before the end of the week. LOL I hope you are doing ok today. I think it’s too bad I don’t know how much it will work out for me. The first time we had the same experience with that one day I have been accepted to a PhD program at the university of Toronto and the other day that we were doing this is the best way to get it done. The following day I was like oh wow lol ???? I didn’t know if it would be a nice day to go out there to see if I could go to the park for a while. The first two seasons of this year were also in May by two and three, the only time in May last year of that period was a little disappointing. I think I will be able to make a decision to go back to work tomorrow. I don’t think it’s so weird to say I am so sleepy ????. The first time in May was a little bit more fun than the last time. I think it’s the best thing to do. The only way to get a little better is to go back to sleep.

The microblog above best reflects simple everyday language used in casual text messaging conversation, rather than more sophisticated language used in novels or academic texts, and even more simplistic than the less sophisticated language used in magazines or blogs. In this way predictive text is reflective of the style and voice of my text messaging. I begrudgingly admit to overusing LOL, which came up as an option every time I typed a period. Every time I typed good the word lord was included in the next option. I do say good lord a LOT. There are other words that came up as predictive text options that I attribute to the following:

• when I text my mom goodnight I often use the word sleepy
• when I discuss work with a good friend who was furloughed last year
• I’ve been texting friends recently to share the amazing news that I have been accepted to a PhD program at the University of Toronto

As much as I think the predictive text has learned from me, I don’t think it has a lot of range or sophistication, and it clearly hasn’t picked up on all the cursing I do – it usually takes me several attempts to type duck every time I want to use it – and I’m shocked an option for y’all never came up with other pronoun options. I was annoyed the same few beginning sentence options repeated themselves over and over again. I could only begin a sentence with I followed by a limited verb set have, think or don’t or The followed by first, only, or following.

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Algorithms: Harmless or nefarious or somewhere in between?

On the surface, useful everyday technologies like Siri, spam filters, and predictive text that use neural networks and language in corpuses such as the Enron emails’ unfettered conversations and the past 50 years of texts used in Word2Vec seem fairly harmless (Herman, 2019; McRaney, 2018). But a few ideas in this week’s material are cause for alarm: Cathy O’Neil shares with us that algorithms learn from the past to shape the future and that their output is as biased as the data input that feeds them, and Alistair Croll shares that “algorithms shit where they eat” causing predictions to become reality and that “output is tied to input in unexpected and not obvious ways” (Mars, 2017; )

Last February I read about OpenAI’s text generation project that was supposed to be open but became shrouded in secrecy, because the company’s mission to create open source software was thwarted by ethical concerns about the software being misused in harmful or destructive ways. I went down the rabbit hole and found a similar text generation website called Talk to Transformer that uses Inferkit‘s neural networks to generate text and played around with it. Though the technology was impressive, there’s something unnatural and a bit bizarre about the following screenshots from last February. FYI, the first example is NSFW.

The output seems to be generated randomly, and in the above examples, it would seem the corpus might come from fiction texts, and the NSFW example seems to be pulled from the genre of erotic fiction.

But what if the software allowed for the user to input other parameters that would tighten up the corpus and shape or meaning of its generated output? What if I could generate text to pass off as my own academic work? I tried it again for the purpose of demonstrating how text generation can be used to autocomplete some of the ideas in this blog post, and I used it with this prompt:

On the surface, the creation of useful everyday technologies like Siri, spam filters, and predictive text that use neural networks and language in corpuses such as the Enron emails’ unfettered conversations and the past 50 years of texts used in Word2Vec’s corpus seems fairly harmless.

And Talk to Transformer came up with this:

On the surface, the creation of useful everyday technologies like Siri, spam filters, and predictive text that use neural networks and language in corpuses such as the Enron emails’ unfettered conversations and the past 50 years of texts used in Word2Vec’s corpus seems fairly harmless. And indeed, many are hailing Word2Vec as a powerful breakthrough for understanding the shared nature of human communication. However, the very real possibility of issues relating to fairness and trust has important ramifications.

The Sroufe Lab at Stanford University and the BCG Digital Finance Lab have since used Word2Vec to answer the very basic question: how do you build trust between bots? What is the algorithm that should an average person trust?

Fairly convincing? How about this one?

On the surface, the creation of useful everyday technologies like Siri, spam filters, and predictive text that use neural networks and language in corpuses such as the Enron emails’ unfettered conversations and the past 50 years of texts used in Word2Vec’s corpus seems fairly harmless. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a more sinister subtext—a vast, never-ending collection of the human past being explored by a criminal mind and monetized for the benefit of an oppressive, surveillance state. It’s about using machines to perform forensic analysis and identity theft, to expose people’s hidden (often mentally ill) activities and information that can be used to produce a false report and “gotcha” moment.

What if I could upload the entire corpus of my academic writing, so it could learn my voice? Then what if I could generate text pulled from relevant articles and journals based on a research project of my choosing? We know that a group of students from MIT built a text generator and used it to generate scientific articles that passed the peer-review process and were published in journals. The misuse of this technology for academic dishonesty is just one example of a potential harmful use of algorithmic technology. When algorithms are already so widespread and poorly understood, their ability to “make it unfair for individuals but sort of categorically unfair for an enormous population as it (sic) gets scaled up” is a bit frightening (Mars, 2017). Much needs to be done to create awareness for users of everyday technologies that use algorithms and to design ethical frameworks for the creation and implementation of algorithms.

Herman, C. (Host). (2019, June 5). You’ve Got Enron Mail! [Audio podcast]. Brought to You By… https://art19.com/shows/household-name/episodes/354d6bd0-d3f6-4536-80b5-c659fc47399f

Mars, R. (Host). (2017, September 5.) The Age of the Algorithm [Audio podcast]. 99 Percent Invisible. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/

McRaney, D. (Host). (2018, November 21). Machine Bias (rebroadcast) [Audio podcast]. You Are Not So Smart. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2018/11/21/yanss-140-how-we-uploaded-our-biases-into-our-machines-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

Golden Record Curation Networks

This task first required us to complete last week’s task on curating our 10 selections from the Golden Record and enter our selections into a Canvas quiz so that our professor could create a data file for us to upload to Palladio, a data visualization tool from Stanford. The data file uploaded to Palladio to get this visualization includes names of students in our course and each of our 10 selections from the Golden Record, but other than that, there were no other data points. After brute force exploration and clicking around within Palladio, I started to see visualizations of data that started to make sense to me. One showed the connected networks of students with a numbered node in the center, as shown below, and I decided to further investigate the network containing Sarah Hain, Lyon Tsang, Melissa Philips, and myself.

Network with Lyon, Melissa D., Melissa P., & Sarah

At first, I thought the number 4 represented how many songs we had selected in common between the four of us, but that’s not the case. In our network, there are two songs all four of us selected: Percussion (Senegal) and Johnny B. Goode (U.S.). The network below shows our four-way connection.

I isolated each member of the network to compare with another member of this network to visualize our two-way connections. Below, you can see one example of this visualization comparing the two Melissas and their selections.

After visualizing each two-way connection, I drew this network with numbered nodes that show the degree of connectivity and totalled up the number of connections each member had with other members. Melissa D. and Sarah have the most connections with others at 16 selections, followed by Melissa P. at 14 selections, and Lyon with 12 selections.

Explaining the Quantitative with Qualitative

I went to Lyon, Melissa P., and Sarah’s blogs to investigate my connection with them and in each, I found a piece of qualitative information that I interpreted to explain our shared two-way connections.

from Sarah H.:

“I chose my song selection as what I believe to be a good representation of our diverse culture on Earth. I wanted to be inclusive of a variety of styles including words and music to help with the interpretation of what we are sharing. Offering this variety to hopefully include something that could be understood. I also wanted to try to capture the joyful life on Earth rather than maybe the actual reality with what we are experiencing now with a pandemic on our hands. Although it is important to paint a truth, I think it is important to show the joy over the gloom at this time.”

As I said in last week’s task, I chose more happy, upbeat, peaceful, or evocative selections. In this way, Sarah and I purposefully chose songs we interpreted as joyful, and as a result we had 6/10 selections in common.

Our network:

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from Melissa P.:

Nonetheless, I formed a criteria that I felt was somewhat “fair”, and yet it is still based upon my understanding of the world, perspectives, value judgements, and the little understanding that I hold in regards to the cultures of the world.  However,  my main criteria was that every continent where humans reside be represented. My secondary considerations to help me narrow it down were that I was looking to provide a variety in musical instruments or genres, represent different time periods, and hopefully include songs that represented certain unique aspects about the Earth itself (water, animals) and/or intimate details about the human condition.

The tenth selection was the most difficult, but eventually I realized that the majority of the pieces are quite somber, and I decided to select a piece that represents that there is joy and fun to be had on Earth. I think that this is arguably the most uplifting piece of music on the Golden Record.

Though Melissa and I share 6/10 selections, she gave more consideration to making sure there was equal representation and distribution of songs to each continent, and though my choices were somewhat diverse and in alignment with hers, my approach was different as I did not seek to make selections that were diverse across geography, time, and in instrumentation. In fact, I leaned toward songs I interpreted as having more layers of instrumentation. Melissa P. and I state our active selection of joyful songs.

Our network:

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from Lyon T.:

I began by eliminating pieces with lower audio quality.

I don’t think the two panpipe recordings sounded that great, for example.

I was also drawn to instruments.

The Bach pieces show off a solo violin, a solo piano, and an orchestra. Flowing Streams featured a guqin, while the manipulation of human voices was prominent in Tchakrulo and Iziel.

Lastly, I looked for rhythm.

It is illustrated well in Percussion (Senegal) by a steady beat, while the jazzy Melancholy Blues shows how rhythm can be stretched and more fluid. The energy generated by rhythm is apparent in Johnny B. Goode and El Cascabel.”

Lyon and I shared 4/10 selections, and he and I share a preference for instrumentation as well as rhythm. His latter preference for rhythm may provide a better explanation for our connections as we share 3 selections which I would say are upbeat and the reason why I selected them.

Our network:

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Other Interesting Visualizations

Most Popular Selection

The most popular selection from the Golden Record was the Percussion track from Senegal, with 16 out of 21 students selecting it, and this visualization is shown below.

Least Popular Selection

Not shown is the visualization of the least popular track, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, selected by only 2 out of 21 students.

Wedding song and The fairie Round

Only women selected these two songs, and only the two Melissas selected both of them, as visualized below.

Strongest and Weakest Degrees of Connectivity

My strongest degrees of connectivity were with Melissa P., Sarah, H., and Erin M. with 6/10 selections in common.

Binal K. was my weakest connection with only 1 shared selection in common.

Golden Record Curation

How am I such a space nerd and music lover and have never heard of the Voyager Golden Record sent into space in 1977 until now? Did I miss that episode of Cosmos?

If the idea of a musical time capsule were conceptualized today it might be that we would send a fully loaded iPhone instead. By the time anyone discovered it, the battery would be long dead, and wouldn’t the radiation of outer space zap all the digitized music off of it? This is one of the problems with the digitization of information: it can easily become lost. In the context of analog vs. digital, perhaps an analog record has a better chance of surviving the long journey into deep space and posterity, though both the record and the digital files without their machines would be rendered useless (Smith, 1999).

This assignment was super rad, and I went all geeky and made a spreadsheet with my criteria. Disclaimer: I’ve never taken any music theory courses, so my meter/chord observations below are most likely not at all accurate.

Selection Criteria

My selections show a clear preference for complexity in regards to multiple layers of instrumentation over more simplistic works, and a preference for works with consonance over dissonance, even or free metering over odd metering, and for music I interpreted as feeling more happy, upbeat, peaceful, or evocative. Contrary to Timothy Ferris, the lead producer of the Golden Record, and his lack of consideration for “the idea that we’d somehow be threatening someone” with the record’s selections, I intentionally excluded works I felt were threatening or ones that made me feel anxious as I listened, with the exception of Beethoven’s Fifth because of its lasting cultural relevance (Taylor, 2019). I wonder if he second-guessed himself when he saw Independence Day (see GIF below). I’m thinking we really don’t want to upset unknown extraterrestrial species.

via GIPHY

One of the last concerts I went to before the pandemic shut everything down was Dan Mangan, a Vancouver artist who I fell in love with after hearing Troubled Mind, arguably his most upbeat song, because the majority of his music is overwhelmingly melancholy. I’ll never forget how a few songs into the show at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines, in between songs when Mangan was tuning his guitar, a guy sitting right in front of me yelled “PLAY A HAPPY SONG!” and Mangan chuckled and said, “You’re at the wronggggg show” as the crowd erupted in laughter. Even if the Golden Record’s producers weren’t sure extraterrestrials “would lounge back and listen to the music and experience it the way we do,” I think we have to imagine they might be just like us and find beauty and enjoyment in music that represents the full range of human experience and emotion but at some point lean more toward the upbeat and happy (Taylor, 2019). For this reason, I also mostly rejected works that were melancholy, with the exception of the Wedding Song, which after listening to the podcast to learn it was a lament about a woman marrying too young, had to be included if for no reason other than sending a message to the people of planet Earth.

Reflection

My personal selections were difficult for me to reconcile because while I understand the need for diversity and representation, my preferences are mostly of Western origin, which isn’t that surprising considering I grew up in a Western culture. The one exception to this was the Kinds of Flowers from Java, Indonesia. Though Ferris claims to have aimed for diversity and global representation during the selection of songs on the record, I thought it was interesting that a disproportionate number of the selections (over 25%) just happened to be from U.S. and former Soviet Union nations, the two countries engaged in the Space Race.

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References

Smith, A. (1999). Why digitize? Council on Library and Information Resources. https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April 22). #65 Voyager Golden Record. [Audio podcast]. Twenty Thousand Hertz. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

Mode-bending

To change the semiotic mode of Task 1, I created the above podcast: the audio transmission field notes of Scout 150294, intergalactic explorer visiting Earth in the year 3021. The pandemic’s over by then, surely, but I’m not sure we’re still around, but at least it seems flora and fauna have reclaimed their space.

1000 years into the future, my bag is missing some items of value, but most of them are still there. Scout 150294 describes the objects in the bag in a manner that is somewhat strange but indicates they have some knowledge of Earth’s history, resources, and languages. The field notes are almost purely observational with a bit of interjected comments here and there.

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To create the podcast, I recorded my voice in two takes using Adobe Audition and changed the pitch to create the voice of Scout 150294. I made a grave error in using the year 2021 in the narrative, which meant I had to go back after I had completed everything to fix it so that the recording is set in the future. I then imported the mp3 file into Mac software GarageBand to integrate space transmission/Sci-Fi sound effects into it to add to its authenticity as a futuristic mission to explore the Earth.

The semiotic mode for the original task was an interactive visual with an autobiographical typographic text, and this remix, or semiotic remediation, of the task was a Sci-Fi nonfiction narrative from the perspective of an intergalactic explorer. In my years teaching English Language Learners, I learned the value of asking students to create meaning and demonstrate their understanding of texts by using a mix of mode-bending and genre-bending, which students often did by creating collaborative posters where they drew images, used symbols, and alphabetic text, and through handwritten and digital work creating visual representations of text. Through West Ed’s Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) model, an intense professional development that drove our school’s curriculum and instructional practices, we learned about text re-presentation, or remediation.

When I began my teaching career in 2007, mp3 players were barely iPods, the smartest phones were Blackberries, and we relied on the school computer lab or 2-4 per classroom for students to share. Technology has now become so ubiquitous that most students have access to their own device, more schools have 1:1 device/laptop per student programs, and more than ever students and teachers are well equipped for a new pedagogy that encourages students to transform and remediate text to create meaning and understanding and to have agency over the learning process. (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). While I think ubiquitous access to today’s technologies affords teachers and students teaching and learning opportunities, access alone does not solve the issue of the digital divide or necessarily lead to more (digitally) literate teachers and students.

Members of the New London Group (1996), Dobson & Willinsky (2009), and others were right to be concerned about the widening of disparities, and what this means for literacy pedagogy, particularly in a new global economy and education landscape shaped by neoliberal capitalist forces, in which technology is seen as a panacea for education and upward economic mobility. I am keen on Warschauer, mentioned in Dobson & Willinsky (2009), his and others’ critical analysis (Warschauer et al., 2011) of 1:1 programs that challenges the ideas of Negroponte (also mentioned in this text) and a digital utopia where the world’s poorest children can pull themselves out of poverty by simply having access to technology. My own ideas about the power of ubiquitous technology and access have been challenged by recent reading of digital education scholars at the University of Edinburgh such as Bayne and Ross (featured in this week as they lay down why we must rethink referring to teachers as digital immigrants and students as digital natives), and others such as Williamson and Knox. Collectively their scholarship confronts ed tech and tech companies and their economic power that has an unduly influence and stronghold on where education is headed and warns of diving headlong and naively into believing more technology in education will increase academic and literacy outcomes.

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As a final reflection on the task, I used Adobe Audition, and I pay a $29.99 USD/month fee for Adobe Creative Cloud. I used GarageBand, which is free for iPhone and Mac users, but I had to download a 10gb pack of sounds to be able to get the sound effects I used. If schools, teachers, and students are on limited data plans and budgets, how feasible would it be to license Adobe Creative Cloud or use those precious gb for access to more sound effects? Teachers and students depend on freeware and the exchange of their data privacy and digital security for access to apps that allow them to unlock their creative potential and use technology to re-mediate texts, but they may be unaware of the hidden costs to themselves and the education system as a whole.

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References

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2009). Multiliteracies: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4:3, 164-195, DOI:10.1080/15544800903076044

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

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

Warschauer, M., Cotten, S. R., & Ames, M. G. (2011). One laptop per child Birmingham: Case study of a radical experiment. International Journal of Learning and Media, 3(2), 61-76. http://www.doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00069

An emoji story

This week’s task invited us to explore the perilous world of using the semiotic mode of the emoji to create a narrative text by recreating the plot of a TV show or movie. Below I have created an emoji plot summary of a TV show available on Netflix (in the U.S. and Canada!) The title, which is one word in reality and loosely imagined here, appears on the first line, and the following summary covers the first episode and goes a bit further into the first season.

If you’re curious about what show this is, click here to watch the season 1 trailer.

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An emoji is a pictogram, defined as “a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object,” and though the emoji library continues to gradually expand to represent more words and ideas, it is still fairly limited (Wikipedia, 2021). In his discussion of the breakout of the visual in the late age of print, Bolter refers to the limitation of picture writing, a precursor to emoji as a mode of electronic picture writing, to convey a narrative (2010). In picture writing or depiction through images, as Kress (2005) describes, an author can draw what they like in order to communicate meaning, and the mode is superior to using words whose meanings can be vague. In picture writing, Bolter describes each element existing “between linguistic and pictorial meaning” and that “when the picture text is a narrative, the elements seem to aim for the specificity of language” (2010, p. 63). In my experience, emoji as pictograms function best when they are used to communicate a short message or basic idea quickly and efficiently (such as a thumbs up to represent an affirmative response such as “yes” or a heart to represent “I love you”) or when they supplement alphabetic texts rather than replace them completely. In this attempt to produce a more complex narrative, I found myself struggling to find emoji to communicate specifically what I wanted, even after taking time to scroll through the library and even search emojis by word, as shown below.

Prior to beginning this task, I was somewhat naive in thinking the emoji library would allow me great freedom in communicating my ideas effectively, and I ultimately found it very frustrating and limiting mode to use for an extended period of time. When I found myself struggling, I started adding more and more emojis in the attempt to be more descriptive or specific, and as a result, my sentences become a convoluted mess. Though my attempt to use emojis to create a clear, specific narrative was in earnest, the limitations of the mode may mean the reader will likely be confused and the meaning of my chosen emojis obfuscated.

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I chose a TV show I’ve been binge watching, as it’s fresh on my mind, but I did not choose it for its ease in translating visually through the use of emoji. My mother recommended the show to me, has seen the show in its entirety, and she agreed to read my emoji plot summary to see if it was comprehensible. I sent her the plot summary in a text, and we FaceTimed so I could hear her read it aloud and see how she did.

In Zaltzman’s podcast interview with internet linguist McCulloch, they discuss emoji as a semiotic mode which relies heavily on the reader’s ability to interpret emoji meaningfully as influenced by a number of factors including the reader’s experience, cultural, and linguistic contexts (2019). My emoji plot summary takes a bit of a risqué turn when I begin using common vegetables and fruits, and my mom did not have the same cultural knowledge or experience necessary to interpret those symbols in the way I intended. As someone who has used formerly used dating apps, currently uses social media apps and text messages regularly, the eggplant and peach are used in some contexts to represent sexual connotations. As McCulloch says, “if you’re going to have emoji convey these additional meanings, those can’t be universal because somebody has to tell you that the eggplant is obscene and not just a vegetable.” Awkwardly, that’s what I had to do!

Though we have discussed the show several times in the past week, mom struggled to understand what the heck it all meant and make the leap to realize it’s the same show she knows I’ve been watching and we’ve been talking about. Even when I returned to the emoji plot summary later in the week, I had some difficulty interpreting what it all meant.

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References

Bolter, J. D. (2010). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004

Pictogram. (2021, February 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram

Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). The Allusionist 102. New Rules [Audio podcast]. The Allusionist. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules

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Manual scripts and potato beet printing

I chose the crafty route for this task, and while we didn’t have potatoes at home, I bought a 5 lb. bag of beets last week and had already boiled and peeled a few that had been waiting patiently in the fridge for someone to eat them. Honestly, I couldn’t think of better use for these beets and transformed them into letters; they are self-inking vegetables, after all.

I printed the word tacos, because it’s my favourite food, and Taco is my nickname. I celebrated my birthday earlier this week, and my family sent me one of those round taco/burrito flour tortilla blankets, with the following note written by my niece.

With that introduction, I go full taco(s) mode and present to you a brief 43 second timelapse video of the manual script beet printing process.

The delightful chore of manual beet printing

It didn’t take me long to create the letters, however I do realize cutting cooked, sliced beets is much easier than carving raw potatoes and so creating manual letters with this alternate vegetable was a bit of a shortcut. It took me much longer to piece together a filming setup to hold my iPhone above the cutting board and paper so I could create a timelapse bird’s eye view of the process (details in footnotes).

The curved-tip knife I used wasn’t as easy to maneuver, especially in cutting circular lines in the a, c, o, and s, but I did my best without obsessing over obtaining perfection with each letter. After all, I had more cooked beets to work with. Any error wouldn’t have taken much time or additional resources to recreate. Straight lines were easier to cut, but even my letter t wasn’t proportionally perfect, with a thicker cross stroke than the downward stroke. The letter o had some little devil horns I failed to cut away, so I just made sure to use the other side of the o when printing. I imagine carving these letters in a potato would have been much more labour intensive and any errors would have been difficult to remedy and used up more resources.

I managed to print every letter clearly on the page without smearing anything, but I didn’t drop the letter a exactly where I wished. Still, I don’t think the prints look half bad. This was a fun diversion, but would I want to create letters and print a whole text this way ? Absolutely not.

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The manual printing process made me thankful that we are no longer reliant on handwriting or letterpress printing or even manual typewriters to produce quality works of writing. I felt for the monk in Harris’s (2018) podcast on the history of the printed book and how soul-crushing his job must have been when I heard the following, which he had written in the margins of the book he was hand scripting:

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, twists your stomach and your sides. The book which you now see, was written while I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.

The monk’s experience and job copying books was not a willing task he performed, it was his duty. What did he gain from his careful, diligent hand scripting? What undue stress fell upon him for the monumental task for which he was designated? Did he recognize his unique contribution to knowledge? When we write today do we recognize ours?

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Info about Film setup: I used a 2.5 foot tall drink table, a drafting tool called a t-square that looks like a ruler with a T, and a 7 lb handweight to hold the t-square down. The t-square has a round hole in it, and though I don’t know what its true purpose is, it was perfect for aligning my iPhone’s camera above the cutting board to take a timelapse video.

Voice-to-Text Technology

The premise of this week’s task was to use a voice-to-text technology to transform a story told with oral language into material text and to discuss and analyze the outcome. To complete this task, I selected Google Docs and its Voice Typing feature, was able to practice using the technology after reading this week’s course texts to take notes on what I had highlighted and to see how accurately my speech would be captured and transformed into written text. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised with the results and how well my voice was captured, because I have some issues with enunciation sometimes and can get mumblemouthed; I often have a difficult time with Siri when I send voice-to-text text messages and prefer typing to my language input being misinterpreted and mangled. I was impressed with how some lesson common words such as authors’ last names were captured and processed to accurately come out as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong.

As I spoke, I could see my words appear on the screen in real time and dots to indicate Google was working to transcribe them, but after pausing, I noticed whole lines of the voice-to-text reverting back to dots to indicate a second round of processing was occurring. I assume this is part of the technology’s AI process of matching text against all of Google’s data for a more intelligent transcription, which is why the names Eric Havelock and Walter Ong’s names ended up perfectly spelled, though I didn’t have the same luck with the names Jack Goody and Ian Watt probably because of my poor enunciation, but I digress. The following is my unscripted, unedited personal narrative about gardening told orally and captured with Google Docs’ Voice typing feature. Inspired by Gnanadesikan (2009), I introduce my story with the following quote:

Writing takes words and turns them into objects, visible or tangible. Written down, words remain on the page like butterflies stuck onto boards with pins. They can be examined, analyzed, and dissected. Spoken words, by contrast, are inherently ephemeral.

and an accompanying word cloud image in the shape of a butterfly created at https://www.wordclouds.com/

Enjoy.

I started gardening when I move to Toronto which is a little bit Ironic considering that there’s a lot more land to Garden on in Texas but when I live there I live in Austin with roommates in apartments and really didn’t have my own space where I can grow things I declared myself to have a green thumb because I would kill any indoor plant that was given to me or that I purchased So eventually I just stopped buying them one of the things that it’s funny about growing plants indoors is that everybody over Waters them constantly and that’s what causes their death death by love and overwatering that first year in Toronto I grew tomatoes peppers basil planted some flowers like Marigold and has some peas growing up a trellis in the backyard we didn’t have much space and I had to lay down some cardboard and build a raised bed to make it happen but eventually the second year I used up a lot more space by making more red raised beds I really got into gardening do when we moved from Toronto to Niagara so I can go to school in the greenhouse technician program that’s when they really took off a lot of methods and the science behind growing and so that’s giving me the confidence to do what I do at my own home I’m really into native gardening as well as vegetable gardening and I really like growing weird vegetables but then sometimes it takes an effort to figure out what to do with them in the kitchen but my interest in gardening kind of stems from my interest in eating food and then learning how to cook food I like to eat at home as opposed to going out all the time now the focus has shifted a bit from gardening just for vegetables and herbs to planting a lot more native plants to attract pollinators and birds to the garden I really enjoyed this winter watching all of the birds come to the yard and eat from the feeders but also take away the seeds leftover on the plants that I didn’t clean up when they all died in the fall and early winter things like native Ironwood Woodland sunflowers echinacea and ask her little birds like juntos and sparrows are constantly picking at the ground and flying under the feeder to pick up the scraps of what’s left over that dropped but then they migrate toward those plants it really makes me happy that all these efforts are not being wasted in the summer it’s a particularly enjoyable for me to watch the bees and the butterflies and even lesser-known pollinators such a wise and beetles land on the flowers and is it a wide variety of plants need it or not it’s still pretty cool to see one plant that really kind of shocked me as far as having a lot of different diversity of pollinators visit it was still little native bees wasps swallowtail butterflies that lay their eggs on it visited the dill and I just couldn’t bear 2 remove it from the garden when it was really time to do so so in the spring I think I’ll have a lot of different little tail plants popping out from where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden The spring am starting more native plants by sowing the seeds while it’s still cold so they undergo the cold stratification. They need to pop up in the spring so things like golden Alexander and pearly Everlasting which are two flowers that are native and attract different native butterflies Elsa want to find my peppers and tomatoes this year even though I know how to start them because I really find that greenhouse-grown tomatoes and peppers do a lot better in the garden the ones I try to start indoors myself I’ll probably start some herbs and some brassicas like kale and brussel sprouts so I really haven’t had much success with the brussel sprouts last year when I started spinach and various lettuce says they did pretty well when I transplant them into the garden so I plan on doing that again I’ll direct sow some peas carrots beets radishes and other root vegetables probably a couple weeks before the frost date comes in May so that they give a little bit of a head start and I think I’ll do the same with lettuce as well since there really is a short. Of time in the spring you can grow it before it gets too hot in the summer in the weather starts to bolt or try to flower and become bitterThe other thing I want to do is correct a misstep I made last year when I planted some of my flowering plants on the bottom level of my garden the red plants like red cardinal flower and salvia against which is pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds what was the use of planting them far away in the garden and not being able to actually see the hummingbirds when they come to visit

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The goal of this task is to examine the differences in language patterns between oral and written language, and as an English and Communications instructor, there are a few things that stand out to me.

The spoken story is an unscripted and otherwise unedited work that was composed extemporaneously resulting in a stream-of-consciousness style text. From a writer’s perspective, there’s a lot of room for improvement especially in terms of focus and organization, which can make or break the quality of a written text. The output of my language became one big and heavy block of text, with absolutely no punctuation to frame words into meaningful sentences or separate sentences into organized paragraphs. I’m actually quite perturbed by the result.

In speaking, an author can read the room to adapt storytelling for the audience in ways that can’t occur in written text, and in this case, when the story is being dictated to a device that cannot indicate confusion or boredom or any other emotion that might drive the speaker to adapt their language in real time. And the flow from one sentence to another and cohesiveness may be considered weak in written text but might be more tolerable in the context of orality.

Haas (2013) poses the technology question: “What does it mean for language to become material?” and extends the question with a follow-up: “What is the nature of computer technologies and what is their impact on writing?”

When oral language becomes material such as in this task, the expectations of written text are immediately imposed upon it, and it becomes difficult to ignore the lack of writing conventions, particularly punctuation. The voice-to-text technology does not appropriately capture punctuation unless it is spoken aloud, which would have required me to familiarize myself with proper pronunciation commands, which I did not do. Upon reviewing the story, I see that when I said the word “period” a few times when speaking to indicate a period of time, that commanded the voice-to-text technology to create punctuation instead of the word “period.” The computer technology knows to exclude filler words such as “ummmm,” which I caught myself using a few times, even thought I was moderating my speech and would pause entirely in lieu of using filler words, which would be natural in oral storytelling.

The voice-to-text technology also chose to capitalize certain words that shouldn’t have been capitalized, and I wish I had an audio recording to match up with the voice-to-text writing to compare the two. When I said “where it all went to seed and dispersed All Over the Garden” did I put some sort of stress on the words all over the garden to indicate to voice-to-text that those words should be capitalized? I’m not sure.

Schmandt-Besserat & Erard (2009) refer to the advancement of technology and ways of writing, and in 2021, the technology allows for fairly accurate written output of oral input. Most of my grievances with the output are likely due to user error, or at least my unawareness of the language to use or ways of speaking that would produce all of the missing conventions of written English. But if I have to break up my storytelling with punctuation commands, my thinking is disrupted, and I’m not telling the story the same way I would without this type of moderation. With an increasing number of people giving technology more oral input, I foresee natural language processing advancing rapidly and voice-to-text technology creating more written output that mimics the qualities and intentions attached to our spoken language that translate to conventional written language.

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References

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2009). The First IT Revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (pp 1-12). John Wiley & Sons. doi: 10.1002/9781444304671

Haas, C. (2013). The Technology Question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy(pp. 3-23). Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203811238

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2009). Origins and Forms of Writing. In Bazerman, C. (Ed.) Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781410616470

I have completed Task 2 in CLAS.