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In: Annette Vee
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The English language is a tough one to master. It’s a language full of contradictions, exceptions to seemingly nonsensical rules, and confusing homophones. English Compositionists have spent decades studying how we learn to read and write it, and for most of that time, studies have focused on the language itself; using pens, pencils, and paper—or even a typewriter—little else would likely interfere with or distract from a basic writer’s journey toward mastery. Our April 5, 2021 guest on the podcast, Dr. Annette Vee, studies how writing, and the entire concept of literacy, has changed since the proliferation of digital technologies. For a student to be considered “literate” in an English Composition today, they must not only master the ins and outs of English itself—the minutia of commas, i-before-e, their/there/they’re—but also the computer or device they use to compose: the administrative and participatory tasks of their class’ Learning Management System, their word processing application, the host they send and read class-related emails through, and so much more. And as Dr. Vee points out, a student or employee who pursues a career that uses computers might also be required to learn a programing language before they are considered truly “literate” in the language of their professional world. A lot more goes into language-based literacy today than just words on a page. Dr. Vee is Associate Professor of English and Direction of the Composition Program here at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a participant and Co-Leader of our Sawyer Seminar, originated in the fall of 2019 (And Read More

By:
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In: Lara Putnam
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What does it really mean to do research in the digital age? We might have what seem like an easy set of answers: doing research means using Google, managing citations using organizational software like Zotero or Easy Bib, collecting and integrating quotations (we might use Endnote or Scrivener for this), accessing archives (some of which are physical, but most of which are not), and then presenting that research using a word processor. But again, what does this really mean, especially when we consider that for most of human history, research looked nothing like what I’ve just described? If a search engine does not exist, nor the Internet, neither do any of the ways we access information as it exists separately from geographic space and necessarily longer durations of time. Before such massive accumulations of digitized texts, a researcher would likely have to travel to a specific archival or fieldwork site to accrue knowledge that could only be gained in that specific way: driving to the airport, stepping on a plane, travelling to that location, and spending a significant amount of time there. But today, all of that time, money, and attention can be saved and spent on engaging with the text itself; fieldwork can be supplemented increasingly efficiently with Zoom, Skype, text and email. Our podcast guest on April 2, 2021, Dr. Lara Putnam, chatted with me about exactly how these profound and rapid changes in research methods impact our daily lives, and how we think about the world around us. Dr. Puntam is UCIS Research Read More

By:
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In: Chris Gilliard
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The history of surveillance in the United States is a long one. Our guest for the podcast on March 31, 2021, Dr. Chris Gillard, studies this very fact; Dr. Gillard’s scholarship focuses on digital privacy, institutional tech policy, surveillance capitalism, and digital redlining—a term that he defined on the podcast as “the creation and maintenance of tech practices, policies, pedagogies, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against marginalized group.” As many of our Seminar guests have attested, too, access and relationships to contemporary digital technologies falls along racial, gendered, and classed lines, and the Internet—and the tools we use to access it—are made overwhelming by and for wealthy, straight white men in urban environments. And as Dr. Gilliard points out, access to the Internet is not the only thing historically minoritized groups are robbed of; these groups are also overwhelmingly stripped of their autonomy and privacy online. Although worries about CCTV and post-Patriot Act wiretapping seem especially twenty-first century, eminent scholars have recently illustrated how the very foundation of our nation, including its formation of racial and class differences, depended on the institution of surveillance. In her groundbreaking Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne makes clear the connections between “the Panopticon, captivity, the slave ship, plantation slavery, racism, and the contemporary carceral practices of the U.S. prison system,” illustrating how contemporary surveillance technologies of all kinds have been formed and informed by the U.S.’s methods of policing and categorizing Black life under slavery (Browne pg. 43). This is evident all Read More