Reading the Riot Act

Wikimedia Commons: booklet from the
University of Reading

Sometimes the Atlantic Ocean can be such a nuisance.  If only we could take a quick T ride across the pond to check out the British Library exhibit,  Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, we could witness the origins of the English language as they are represented in texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, dialect recordings, and even "The Riot Act."  Dr. K pointed this out to me, and in checking our the exhibition, I also discovered the site's blog, which is definitely worth checking out.  Apparently, they have been posting the results of an ongoing "Map Your Voice" project, which encourages readers to record their voices onto a worldwide and interactive map of English.  A recent blog post lists a number of interesting pronunciation of words that differ from those recorded in the OED such as "controversy," "garage," "neither," "scone" (I've always wondered about this one!), "schedule," and "attitude."  "Schedule" is one of those words that I've always thought offered a clear distinction between U.S. (skedule) and U.K. (shedule) English, but apparently the U.S. pronunciation is beginning to gain some ground on the U.K. one.  Here's the explanation the blog offers:

"The OED distinguishes between 'shed' as a British English pronunciation and 'sked' as American English. Not surprisingly, then, all the North American voices use 'sked'. However, 25 out of 60 British and Irish speakers agree, while 35 out of 60 prefer 'shed'. We might, therefore, interpret this as evidence of recent influence from US English, but there could be other factors, e.g. the subconscious spelling association with similar words likescheme, school etc. which are clearly 'sk' for all speakers. It’s certainly plausible to imagine that schedule is first encountered in its written form rather than as a spoken form (I don’t imagine it’s a very high frequency word for young children), but perhaps there is indeed American influence at play, too."


Do we Americans have to take over everything, even people's schedules?  I would encourage all of us to check this out and contribute if we have a moment.

Want to be a Wikipedian?

Wikipedia as a printed book?

Just the other day I received the Fall 2010 issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART), which contained an essay I wrote called "Wikipedia as Imago Mundi."  The material should be familiar to those of you who know my interest in Wikipedia as a digital form of premodern collaborative knowledge production.  When I wrote this for SMART, I worried about the fate of an article about digital textuality in an exclusively printed journal, but as it turns out, my fears were unfounded!  Last night I received a kind e-mail from a reader of the article, who is not just a teacher of HEL, but also an active Wikipedian.  He informed me that he had already spread the word about my article to Wikipedia:Talk, which potentially expanded my audience a billion-fold (at least).  Moreover, he informed me about an active community of Wikipedians who serve as campus ambassadors about the proper use of Wikipedia.  I encourage you to check it out.  In any case, I find the generosity of this Wikipedian and the speed by which my article achieved a digital life to be incredibly telling about the effectiveness and efficiency of this form of knowledge sharing.

Commuting with the City Mouse

Steinhöwel's woodcut, Basel, 1501  

The following is the product of my most recent thinking regarding my new project tentatively titled, Veni, Vidi, Wiki: A Prehistory of Digital Textuality.  I'll be presenting this paper at UMass Boston's Research Center for Urban Cultural History (RCUCH) in a couple weeks and would love to workshop this a bit beforehand.

I think this paper speaks to concerns of our group, particularly the effects that the limits of textual environments have on discourse communities.  So please comment!

Here's the abstract (aka short version) if you don't have the patience for the rest:

Commuting with the City Mouse: Aesop's Fables and Academic Commentary

The instant message poses a formidable threat to literary interpretation.  While texting may contribute to recent demands for abbreviation, the desire for the instant message predates digital technology and has long plagued teachers' attempts to cultivate extended conversations about classroom texts.  The common readerly attraction to singularity and brevity often belies the interpretive multiplicity necessary for academic dialogue.  Perhaps no genre fully satisfies this appetite for the message more than the Aesopic fable.  Each brief fable is accompanied by a concise moral that readers can easily consume.  Yet, fabular interpretation has not always been so digestible.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throughout Europe, Aesop's fables were standard classroom texts that offered more than a kernel of moral advice.  As staples of grammar and composition instruction, readers paraphrased and elaborated upon the fables in extensive commentaries, which served as medieval hypertexts that subsequent readers could read, associate with other classroom texts, and extend through marginal and interlineal glosses.  The medieval fable then offered the opportunity for practice in literary elaboration and collaborative constructions of knowledge, a far cry from the instant message we have to come to associate with Aesopica.  Furthermore, this model of medieval fabular reading is based on the same principles as user-friendly digital environments such as blogs and wikis, within which commentary can be produced at an unprecedented rate.  This paper suggests that these modes of digital elaboration and dialogue recall and remediate medieval fabular reading and writing practices.  While the restrictions of print culture reduced and often eliminated commentary, the digital network drastically expands the field of interpretation for literary texts.   In particular, the wiki offers a cyberspace within which students and teachers can compile commentary about course texts outside of the classroom.  Most importantly, the inscription of classroom dialogue onto this digital palimpsest can mitigate the challenges of maintaining cohesive academic communities on a commuter campus such as UMass Boston.  As a new form of fable commentary, wiki-writing can attenuate the desire for the instant message and develop a new respect for the virtues of collaborative elaboration.

I don't mean to avunculize, but . . .

Dr. K just sent me this fun link to the "save the words" movement organized by Oxford Dictionaries.  For word nerds like us, this is a great interactive resource that jovially suggests ways to keep obscure words from ending up in the lexicographic dustbin.  A couple of my favorites are the cute "jobler," one who does small jobs, and "gleimous," a synonym for "slimy" that would be perfect for Tolkien's Gollum.  My least favorite, for obvious reasons to those of you who know me, is "magistricide," the killing of a teacher.  It makes me feel acrasial (look it up).

Happy New Year!    

Arthur's Two Historiographies in Alliterative Romance

Before I'm overwhelmed by a massive student paper deluge, I thought I'd try to draft my paper for the "Biopolitics" session organized by the Arthurian Literature Discussion Group for the upcoming MLA convention in Los Angeles held during the first week in January.  As I was working my way through this, I realized how HELish it really is (hopefully without the second "l"!).  My reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in particular, explores the meanings and histories of enigmatic words in the prologue such as "winn" (could mean "strife" or "joy") and "depreced" (could mean "conquer" or "release").  If you have any suggestions or comments I would love to read them.  

Arthurian Fan Fiction

Knight Reading in Bed, Bruce Linn 2003
(The Crying Globe)

I hope you won't mind if I share yet another piece of my recent thinking and writing, particularly about my teaching.  Next week I will be presenting this material with a few of my Arthurian Literature students to a group of new faculty at UMB and I would love to hear your thoughts.  It isn't focused directly on HEL, but it certainly is informed by a new and controversial genre of digital English, fan fiction, which is a rapidly expanding catalogue of literary works on the internet.  The writing below (which is just a draft - with obvious gaps), and the assignment it describes, was inspired by the following question: what happens when students don't just analyze texts, as third person observers, and instead inhabit them and write from the points of view of Arthurian figures?

4 U 2 No (or FYI, if you prefer)

Image from New York Times

The other day as I was walking through the halls en route to my Arthurian lit course I was stampeded by a distracted band of texters, eyes fixed on their phones.  They bounced off passersby (and me) as if they were balls in a pinball machine.  And they never missed a beat.

This behavior concerns me and this recent New York Times article suggests that my worries are well founded.  The anxiety expressed here is not new - that texting has changed adolescent brains and will have a negative effect on attention spans - but the comparison to the effects of television is novel, at least to me.  The great irony is that television-watching, which has always been demonized, comes off as the healthier of the two activities because it requires sustained attention, not the multi-tasking that Facebooking or texting encourages.

My question, which you've probably already anticipated, is what kind of effect will such behavior have on language use?  A friend of mine who is an active Tweeter told me that he no longer can tolerate lengthy texts.  Because texting and tweeting requires short and to-the-point text, longer works seem frivolous, superfluous, not worth the time.  What will then happen to the discursive text?

And the question that follows is: how should we respond?  Do we stop texting?  Do we limit Facebooking?  Or do we embrace these activities and change the way we learn and produce/consume text?  One alternative, which in some way responds to the latter, has been explored in another recent NY Times article.  Do we need go digital?  And if so, what is at stake for such digital texuality?