Category: Weekly Response

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Milagros’ Post for 10/30

This week I decided to reflect on Ochoa’s “Aurality”. As soon as I started to read the introduction, I was already hooked because she was talking about  Latin American country. But then this statement came “The apparent lack of documentation of a collected folk corpus has often led to the assertion that in the nineteenth century there were very few studies of folk expressions in Colombia.” (Ochoa, 1) This really made me think about history as a whole because there are a lot of things that we don’t really know about but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. What if there is actual documentation but someone just decided to ignore it and make whatever it is they want their own? This also can lead to “the use of inappropriate methodologies in the study of local expressive culture,” (Ochoa,1) which basically leads to people looking or thinking a certain way about a culture because what has been presented isn’t correct. But why is this such a normal thing and who is there to really stop these kind of things from happening if the people that actually lived through these times are no longer present? I think this is why it’s so important to know one’s true history and culture and to pass it down to different generations because it’s so easy to forget these things.

Work Cited

  • Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press, 2014.
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Michael Farias Blog Post for October 30

For this weeks blog post, I chose to write about Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s “Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia”. The main reason I chose to write about this writing in particular is because the author is from Colombia just like myself. Ochoa talks about many artists in Colombia. Ochoa herself is an artist specifically a musician and she is the chair of the music department at Columbia University. She talks about things like the botanical aspects of Colombia. Colombia is not very known for this but we have many different types flowers throughout the country. People mainly associate drugs and great coffee with Colombia but the truth we are so much more. We have a coastline with great beaches and places for tourists to stay. Pablo Escobar is not the only famous person from Colombia but he is always the person we are asked about. If your thing is music you ask me about Shakira, if it’s soccer ask about James Rodríguez, and if it’s reading ask about Gabriel García Márquez. We are past narcos era so people should stop asking us about it.

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Jessica Colasacco Week 9 Blog Post

This week, Johanna Drucker’s article “From A to Screen” stuck out to me the most. In this article, she states “We take the virtual letters as things, mistaking their appearance for substance, and we also overlook the agency of alphanumeric code, taking it for granted.” This is extremely true. When we see a letter on our screen, we can tell if it is from a different font but do we ever really question where that font is coming from? Before class today, I had no idea that there was an entire folder on a computer that held all the fonts that are freely available for everyone to use. These letters have significant meaning to us but how do we distinguish between them? Does an A in Times New Roman differ from an A in Ariel? Is the difference importance to us as humans that use this letters everyday? In Spanish, the letter A is pronounced as “ah” where as in English we say “aye”. But, the pronunciation of the letter A can change depending on where it is located in a word. In the word “apple” it is pronounced as “ahh”.  It is importance to recognize how the letter A gained its meaning, from writing and then further, to the screen.

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Isaac Espinoza 10/22 Post

“Documents are important not because they are ubiquitous, I should be clear, but rather because they are so evidently integral to the ways people think and live”

Documents as said by Gitelman are forever entangled to power.  Once an idea is “put on paper” its as if it gains value. People are more likely to believe something that is written in a book or an article online than their best friend who is talking freely from thought. Even though the idea that is now on paper was once a thought and probably expressed orally before it was documented.  I don’t agree with the first part of the quote that mentions the ubiquitous property of documents and how this doesn’t make them important. There is nothing more powerful than a convincing idea that is spread to the masses. If documents were not ubiquitous they would not have nearly the same impact on people and their lives.

Gitelman, Lisa. “Paper Knowledge.” May 2014,

 

 

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Oct. 23

The visual representation of numbers and quantitative data, with things such as graphs and tables, surfaced in the 2nd century. However, the 17th century brought the modern concept into fruition. However, the question related to these visuals always centered around how to make it comprehensible and relevant to the topic. These graphs and tables such as,

condense a group of data into something recognizable and easy for the reader to digest. Furthermore, what these visual representations really add to an article or study is the ability to reveal huge conclusions with a visually pleasing picture representation. Such as:

The easy to understand graph represents an entire years amount of sales both domestically and internationally. Proving just how important visuals are to fully understanding a vast topic involving massive amounts of quantitative data.

 

Few, Stephen. “Data Visualization for Human Perception.” The Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/data-visualization-for-human-perception.

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Carolyn Pena Blog Post Week #8

In “What is Visualization” Lev Manovich writes “The meanings of the word “visualize” include “make visible” and “make a mental image.” This implies that until we “visualize” something, this “something” does not have a visual form. It becomes an image through a process of visualization.” (Manovich 11) I find this quote very interesting because visualization has its own process when it comes to age as well. When we are babies, we don’t create a mental image because at this age we are learning to associate certain words with certain subjects. As we get older we already have word associations and that is when we start creating mental images to help us in our everyday lives. Visualization in my opinion is another important factor in Communication. Without visualization it would become harder to describe things to people and get a point across to the audience. We are talking about the importance of an email and how often brands think about what they are going to do to catch the audiences eye and these are usually well thought out depending on what audience they want to capture. They have to visualize different ideas and multiple ideas to create the best one. 

Manovich, Lev. “What Is Visualization?” Paj:The Journal of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Dec. 2010. journals.tdl.org, https://journals.tdl.org/paj/index.php/paj/article/view/19.

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Marisa Brincat’s Blog Post for 10/22

”Documents are integral to the way people think as well as to the social order that they inhabit” (page 5, Gitelman)

I agree with this statement because documents are truly an important asset.  They could be used for information, a depiction of time, and can also influence the way in which people make decisions and form theories. I believe without documents, human life would not be as advanced as it is today. All thanks to documents, we are able to advance in life and learn all kinds of new things. We are able to take a piece of time and freeze it just by writing words onto paper. This quote definitely shows that documents are truly an important part of today’s world even when we live in a digital world.

Sources: Gitelman, Lisa. “Paper Knowledge.” May 2014,

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Anthony Sierra Week #9 Blog Post

For this week’s blog post I’ve decided to reflect on Johanna Drucker’s “From A to a screen”.  Drucker highlights how we have advanced drastically from print to typing on a screen.  We as a society never questioned the functions of typing, we found a system more efficient and faster than manually writing  something out. On page 72, Drucker states “However, the unique reaction triggered when a keystroke communicates with an application in my system tells me nothing about the identity of letters in an ontological sense.” We can type in any sort of font we choose just by changing the settings, not truly understanding the meaning and history behind these written fonts. Ultimately, we have been taking our resources for granted because of how much it benefits us without any repercussions.

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Michael Farias Blog post for week 9 for October 23

For this blog post I decided to write about Johanna Drucker’s “From A to Screen”. I like the way she begins by asking how things appear on a screen when we want them to appear. She compares typing to alphabet soup by asking if that is that’s how letters form together when it comes to typing. This is something that really sticks out to me because nobody really questions exactly how computers work. We give them commands by typing letters and they understand these letters and give us results almost instantly. Nobody questions or tries to find out exactly how computers work and most likely nobody will and technology will keep advancing. Who knows what will be next.

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Milagros’ Post for 10/23

This week I decided to reflect on Johanna Drucker’s “From A to Screen”. One sentence that really stuck out to me was “We take the virtual letters as things, mistaking their appearance for substance, and we also overlook the agency of alphanumeric code, taking it for granted.” (Drucker,71) I really just think we take everything for granted when it comes to technology and we kind of sometimes don’t really know how to take care of certain things. I know when it comes to my phone, I have cracked my screen more than twice but I never really thought about the people who actually make the screens for us. I agree with Drucker when she says this because it is very true in the way that we just type and read things on a screen. “The production of a “letter” in a digital environment is an effect of multiple, distributed processes, each of which participates in it..” (Drucker, 73)  To think that its not just one single letter that we are pressing but there are different multiple processes that are allowing this to happen is crazy. When people just type and see letters on a screen, we don’t think about the coding that takes place or the processes that do help this to happen so just reading about this and learning about this is very interesting and eye opening.

 

Works Cited

-Drucker, Johanna. “From A to Screen.” Comparative Textual Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pp. 71–96,