Discourse Chronicle

[I recently contributed a literacy narrative to The Ohio State University’s Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and now my story is available for viewing on its website. Any person may make a contribution at any time and researchers (undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate) will make use of them. From Cynthia. BK]

category: Gaming, Life, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

Microsoft has put up $1.5 million to start The Games for Learning Institute, a joint venture with New York University and other colleges. The goal of the research is to see whether video games — and not just software specifically designed to be educational — can draw students into math, science and technology-based programs. The institute has begun lining up middle school students to study. –Dave Kolpack

[Sources such as Linda Burch, chief program and strategy officer for Common Sense Media, claims that “There isn’t a lot of good research out there,” referring to shooter games. However, James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and LIteracy is a book-length examination of the first-person-shooter video game genre, recently revised and updated in a new edition. BK]

category: Gaming, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

[I realized again that much time passed since my last regular updates, so I thought I might share a few games keeping me busy. I am writing on Rock Band, Final Fantasy VII, and hopefully Street Fighter IV this semester. BK]

Rock Band

Final Fantasy VII

Street Fighter IV

category: Gaming, Life, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing site, will start to sell music and video games and experiment with new advertising formats to grow revenue, executives said on Tuesday.

[…]

Visitors to YouTube.com can buy songs from music videos they watch on the site by clicking on buttons that take them either to Amazon.com Inc’s MP3 store or Apple Inc’s iTunes store.

YouTube users will also be able to buy video games, such as Electronic Arts Inc’s sci-fi game “Spore” through the Amazon link.

Amazon and iTunes will share revenue with YouTube when users buy content through the partnership. –Yinka Adegoke

category: Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

A new feature called Xbox Live Party will let parties of up to seven people chat and share pictures over a television screen while simultaneously playing games. The Personality Plus tool will let users create customized avatars that will represent them throughout the Xbox world. –Paul McDougall

[I am interested in seeing how this new feature changes a gaming experience because of its multimodal possibilities, especially since players may already communicate using voice with a headset while playing with a controller, which demonstrates multitasking if nothing else. BK]

category: Gaming, Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Technology    

CT: Gentlemen, how do you think the comic arts will fare against the convergence of different forms of media with the Internet?

MTI: The graphic novel is the next important art form. It’s not necessarily going to replace fiction, drama and poetry. They will exist alongside one another and graphic novels will flourish as it already is. We already have almost classic works that everybody agrees are worthwhile products of the movement. That’s going to persist for a long time.

The thing the graphic novel depends on is the way that it is printed on paper and the layout on the page. If you’ve ever tried to read a textbook on the computer, you know it’s not the same experience at all. I don’t see how you could take a two-page layout of a graphic novel, for example, put it up on a computer screen and respond to it in the same way when it’s in print in front of you. I don’t think that the computer text is going to replace the printed book at all. We’ve got mega bookstores like Barnes & Noble selling books like crazy online. Someone must be buying them and there must be something in that tangible, physical reading experience that makes it different for people. I know it does for me.

Whether the newspaper is going to survive is another question. I’m not so sanguine about that. If anything goes under because of the computer, I think it will be the newspaper. I think comic strips will find another place to exist and the graphic novel will be around for a long time to come.

[M. Thomas Inge (MTI) interviewed as a member of a panel featuring professors discussing comic books and censorship. Inge is a well-respected professor and recognized as the grandfather of comic scholarship. I always enjoy talking with him at National PCA and I look forward to seeing him at MLA in December. Subscription required. BK]

category: Comics, Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

October 24, 2008 – ARTalks: Comics: A Medium in Transition by Scott McCloud, cartoonist and theorist. 6:30pm, Bowen-Thompson Student Union Theater.

[Sweet! I always wanted to listen to Scott McCloud speak about comics (regardless of his sometimes questionable worth in academia), but I never imagined he would come to BGSU. Maybe I could get him to sign my copies of his books (Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics).

On October 25, a gallery exhibit titled Graphic Language: The Art of the “Comic” Book opens at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery through October 5, which I plan on seeing for some ideas toward my dissertation idea. From Elizabeth. BK]

category: Comics, Life, Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

I am pleased to inform you that your proposal is accepted for presentation at the Comic Book in Popular Culture Conference to be held on the Bowling Green State University Main Campus in Bowling Green, Ohio, October 24-25, 2008. NOTE: The list of papers above is a tentative composition of your panel. The finalized panels with dates and times will be sent later.

[I submitted a paper about analyzing serial longevity as a rhetorical formula involving establishing conventions, innovating them, and returning to conventions. The example used is a story from Superman comics when Superman became Superman Blue. BK]

category: Acceptances, Comics, Life, Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

Graphic novels are a loose genre comprising lengthy comic books — often hundreds of pages long — that contain literary elements such as a plot and characterization. Some graphic novels feature favorite comic figures, such as Superman. Others are fantastical adventures, Japanese comics, or attempts to retell Shakespeare.

[….] He recommends adults curious about graphic novels start with “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” by Art Spiegelman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the author learning about his father’s experiences as a Jew in Poland during the Holocaust. –Laura Hancock

[I wonder what “loose” means here because both comic books and graphic novels are capable of achieving unity in an Aristotelian sense, although I believe graphic novels accomplish that task more successfully due to its independence from serials, but I notice nothing is said here about the content.

I commend Dr. Stephen Gibson for choosing Maus as an option for graphic novel reading, but as a starting place, I might suggest Will Eisner’s A Contract with God instead since that title is an “original” graphic novel. I recently fielded questions from friends and colleagues about how graphic novels might be incorporated into college English classes. For Introduction to Literature-type courses, I suggested titles such as Watchmen, Maus, Sandman, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen along with McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art. For Creative Writing, I recommended those same titles, except I would use Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative and McCloud’s Making Comics. BK]

category: Comics, Literacy, Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics    

From there, Brunetti arranges about 80 comic strips – everything from a few simple panels to snippets from full-length graphic novels – in a rough parallel to the evolution of a work of graphic fiction. We move from simple drawings and sight gags to densely illustrated, or experimental, examinations of sex, economics and the human condition. –Dan Murphy

category: Comics, Literacy, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics