Event Title

The Procedural Sonnet; Queer Classroom Space

Presenter Information

Corey Sparks

Location

CB1-212

Start Date

4-11-2017 10:00 AM

End Date

4-11-2017 11:00 AM

Description

The Procedural Sonnet: A Demo (Corey Sparks)

https://youtu.be/D9tVnpDVEhs

This talk and game demonstration introduces a long-term project called the "Procedural Sonnet." This project, located at the intersection of electronic literature, digital storytelling, gaming, and poetics seeks to connect premodern literary forms with contemporary digital platforms. Ian Bogost has declared that certain video games operated less according to a logic of representation—a category long fundamental to humanistic inquiry—but rather according to a "procedural rhetoric." For this presentation I will use Twine - a narrative hyperlink game platform - to "play" a sixteenth century sonnet. In doing this, I want to use Bogost's concept of proceduralist rhetoric to complicate a highly-recognizable poetic form. The "Procedural Sonnet" project prompts several questions: "To what extent does poetic form act as Bogostian 'procedure' or not?" "How does playing a poem on Twine foreground the procedures assumed by a largely narrative platform?" "In what ways does 'playing' a sonnet open up new interpretive frameworks for both poetry and digital games?" For Bogost, proceduralism is characterized by the fact that "in [such] games, expression is found in primarily in the player's experience as it results from interaction with the game's mechanics and dynamics." In foregrounding the "mechanics and dynamics" of a game over more the more traditionally-analyzed categories of visuality or textuality, Bogost, I argue, hits on fundamental questions not just about games but about poetic form - especially, in terms of the longue duree of English literary history, the sonnet. This talk and game demonstration juxtapose a new technology - Twine - with an old technology - the sonnet - to think about the conference's theme of "possible worlds." The titular possibility foregrounds a sense of futurity; my project's use of the sonnet form nonetheless complicates both Bogost's concept of "proceduralist rhetoric" and the narratively-oriented Twine platform. I thus suggest that we can look to "old things" to help us think about "possible worlds."

PD (30m) Queer Classroom Spaces: Using Social Media and Digital Tools to "Meet Students Where They Are" (Kristin Lafollette)

As a digital humanities scholar and instructor, I have always struggled with knowing what, if any, rules I should make in my classroom about electronics usage such as cell phones, tablets, etc. A computer-mediated writing class I took in my doctoral studies with digital humanities scholar, Dr. Kristine Blair, led me to reevaluate the policies I have in my syllabi and enact in my courses when it comes to student usage of electronics. During the course I took with Dr. Blair, we were required to complete a technology literacy narrative using a digital tool. I chose to use the social media outlet Instagram to complete this assignment, and in completing this project and seeing the final product, I saw and understood the immense value of social media outlets and how they can be integral to helping students complete multimodal assignments in writing courses and beyond. I often had difficulty getting my students to focus in class when they were constantly looking at their phones, surfing the Internet on their computers, and playing games on their tablets. When I began implementing assignments and in-class activities that utilized the tools that students were already familiar with, they became more engaged, learning outcomes and course concepts were more easily grasped, and assignments were more approachable. In addition, as I delved further into my study of women's, gender, and sexuality studies during my doctoral program, I saw the ways that queer theory provided a lens for which to understand this shift from the normative to the non-normative; instructors typically discourage students from using their phones and other electronics in class, but a queering of this norm and allowing students to harness the potential of these digital tools works toward helping students complete assignments that are more creative and rhetorically-aware. Drawing on work from multimodal and queer studies scholars like Claire Lutkewitte, Jonathan Alexander, and Jacqueline Rhodes, this roundtable starts with a discussion of my Instagram project and how I worked toward implementing social media outlets (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) in my classroom spaces. This will lead into a group discussion and brainstorming of the ways instructors can utilize these tools in the classroom to create activities, develop assignments, and queer the classroom experience to involve more digital tools to "meet students where they are." Students already have knowledge of and an interest in these tools, so helping them understand that they are already composing using these methods can give them opportunities to create rich, multimodal work that takes some of the pressure away from completing academic work. This discussion will start with a discussion of writing studies but will be applicable to any discipline/classroom space.