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By Daniel Johanne…, 16 June, 2021
Publication Type
Language
Year
Publisher
Pages
1-19
Journal volume and issue
2
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

This paper examines the history of the learning theory "constructionism" and its most well-known implementation, Logo, to examine beliefs involving both "C's" in CSCW: computers and cooperation. Tracing the tumultuous history of one of the first examples of computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL) allows us to question some present-day assumptions regarding the universal appeal of learning to program computers that undergirds popular CSCL initiatives today, including the Scratch programming environment and the "FabLab" makerspace movement. Furthermore, teasing out the individualistic and anti-authority threads in this project and its links to present day narratives of technology development exposes the deeply atomized and even oppositional notions of collaboration in these projects and others under the auspices of CSCW today that draw on early notions of 'hacker culture.' These notions tend to favor a limited view of work, learning, and practice-an invisible constraint that continues to inform how we build and evaluate CSCW technologies.

DOI
10.1145/3274287
By Daniel Johanne…, 15 June, 2021
Author
Publication Type
Language
Year
Pages
66-67
Journal volume and issue
127
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

Phew! What a journey betwixt East and West that was, the mere description of the process of the process-poem. What [Jonathan Stalling] allows to subtly unfold in these poems are two popular visions of China dreamt up by the West (and it would hardly be controversial to say that the Westerner's dream of China has woven itself thick into the fabric of Chinese reality). The beginning of each poem - here, "Please speak a little louder. I can't hear you" - evokes the businessperson's China, the tourist's phrasebook in which language is a tool, the straightforward economy of exchange in which nothing is lost in the gulf between languages - because nothing has really been said. The end of each poem sounds like a garbled version of appropriated ancient Chinese wisdom and culture: the ending verse, which begins with "persuading guests to drink wine / one silk thread at a time" sounds, to my half-trained ears, like a parodie condensation of the great poet Li Bai mixed into the I Ching with a dash of Confucius to finish. I love that these poems receive their movement from the contingencies of language itself - passing sometimes across the smooth surfaces of sense, other times along the striated channels of sound - to get from language as utility (sensibility) to language as poetry (senselessness). Certainly these poems function as a gentle critique of Orientalism and are a testament to the infinite pliability of language. But the contingencies that are the poems' internal connective tissue produce accidental beauty along the way: the double, parallel descent of the shape of the poem, for one; and lovely lines like "rest on a mourning shrine / sins dark / veiled, narrow pass" all the more gorgeous for having travelled through the tumultuous waters of translation.

There is so much more I want to write about yet there's so little room, but shout-outs to: Laura Solórzano's post-Steinian gem of a poem (p. 189); Bela Shaycvich's hilarious drunken correspondences on the tasks of the translator (p. 56-57); Desmond Kon ZhîchengMingdé's masterly sestina (p. 193). By way of a cautious conclusion: The Animated Reader is a worthwhile thing; it serves as a whirlwind intro to some stellar and inventive writers; it's mostly a fuckin' blast to read because it hitssomanydifferentkindsofpleasurenodcs; and it reminds you how potent the poetic form is, and that poetry will not be slain by new Internet for ms, but will forge a head, procreating gloriously with them.

By Daniel Johanne…, 15 June, 2021
Publication Type
Language
Year
Pages
97-113
Journal volume and issue
48.1
Record Status
Abstract (in English)

Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.

DOI
10.1177/0021909612440421