Valeria26's Blog

Being a third student myself I am accustomed to the tradition of much of my academic world only being available to me online. While unfortunately I’m a firm fan of the material world of print, I am at the same time accepting and appreciative of the vast amount of knowledge that is at my fingertips, something that was not available until quite recently in the academic world.

            Price’s essay on the electronic scholarly edition is one which is accepting of the inevitable fate that in the near future it appears that most “scholarly work will take digital form”. The problem according to Price is that in this digital age a vast amount of scholarly print is not digital and is therefore not being consumed fully or properly. The main reason for this he claims is that the people in charge of archives for example literary and historical scholars are not trained or prepared for the technological world whatsoever. The point Price makes is that the digital world is a much more flexible world than the world of print. The digital world is endless there a re problems here with the cost of publication due to size restraints or colour restraints, digitally there is unlimited freedom for the sharing of information. While this seems a positive development it does bring with it some negative aspects. The requirements of the people needed not to mind the amount of people needed in addition to the vast amount of time to would take to carry out the task is costly. These are not projects that can be undertaken alone. Price explains that a big amount of collaboration would have to take place between archivists, librarians, funding agencies, students to name but a few. There is also the technical side of things that must be taken into account the people with the knowledge of the actual technology.

            An interesting point raised by Price is on the idea of the vast audience that suddenly becomes available to scholars when they enter the digital world. Before the cost and distribution of the material articles entailed that only a limited number of people would ever get to encounter their work . However the dawning of the digital reassures scholars that there work can be distributes on a worldwide scale in a short space of time. Price concludes that the benefits socially of free online resources cannot yet be fully understood.

            Price’s work is an interesting piece it is frustrating to think of the immense archival material and scholarly material that is present in the world today but is unavailable to most because of its fragile or inaccessible nature. It seems according to Price that it will be a long time before everything becomes digital because of the costs and intelligent collaboration required to digitalize everything. On the plus side there is already a vast amount of information now digitally available that was not there ten years ago. The impact of technology really only has been a positive one for the scholarly world as information and ideas can now be shared with a global audience and they quite often have the ability to respond to the information they are provided. Which can only lead to healthy debate and the furthering of ideas and theories.

            In conclusion Price’s piece is a highly interesting and insightful one into the world of scholarly editions, a brilliant simple introduction to the topic for any reader.

Being a newcomer to the world of blogs and blogging in general, apart from my very brief attempts at keeping a very personal blog in a diary format on a social networking site, I found Aimeee Morrison’s piece highly enjoyable and quite interesting. My basic understanding of a blog was that it involved publishing my own thoughts and views on the world and life in general on the web for all to see. I thought there was something prestigious or powerful tied up in blogging the ability to change a persons opinion or to give insightful information from your own perspective on things that truly interested you. The ability to share your thoughts with others that a person would only read it if they had a genuine interest in what you had to say. It turns out my idea of what blogging entails was very limited and quite lacking in what the reality of the blogging world really is.

            Morrison’s piece begins by introducing the blog and what formats a blog can take. Blogs according to Morrison strech far beyond the scope of what I understood. She explains that a blog can be a journalistic, political, academic tool, it can be a source of entertainment or a way to bring people with similar interests together, it can be a way to earn a respectable income or a huge income and a manner in which aspiring persons can attain fame and recognition. It is not merely the personal device I thought it to be. Morrison provides the reader with a clear description of what a blog is, in its most basic form an online page made up of individual sections of text known as posts. These posts can include pictures, photographs, videos, hyperlinks, audio files and can be as short or as long as the writer desires.

            Morrison explains how one of the most interesting features of a blog is its function for conversation. A follower of a blog can comment on what the author has written, which allows for conversations to begin, questions to be asked, and most importantly ideas and thoughts to be shared. In the academic world this allows students to converse with peers and lecturers at a level which they may be more comfortable with, rather than raising questions in a large lecture hall. It also allows students to raise questions and share ideas which enhances their knowledge of a subject and questions can be answered from a much larger perspective than ever before.

            The blog as a tool for aspiring artists, writers, etc… is also very important as it provides people with a stage to put themselves out there and feel like their efforts are not going to waste. However this too is problematic as the blog world is now dense maze and trying to find what you are looking for or what interests you can be next to impossible. Morrison explains that there are now “special-purpose search engines” that can assist in tailoring your search results to your desires. There is also a “blogroll” which is a “sidebar link” that helps the reader to easily access other blogs of similar content.

            The world of blogging has vastly expanded in the last decade from its humble beginnings in double digits to literally millions that are active today. Aimeee Morrison’s essay is a fine introduction to the vast world of blogging but can at times be a little tedious to read and follow. As Morrison herself explains that the blog world can at times be static in terms of its problems with searching for information, this piece too can be somewhat static in places. However overall it is a very informative essay and does provide the reader with a proper introduction to the world of blogs.

Alan Liu’s piece on Imagining the New Media Encounter is at best complicated and convoluted. In saying that however I did draw some information from the piece. One of the key points Liu tries to put across at the beginning of his essay is how unsettling new encounters in the media world can initially be. There is something mysterious and pagan about the digital age and new inventions can at first seem very alien to our lives but we tend to be quick to assimilate and understand these alien forces. Take for example a social networking site such as Facebook, twenty years ago the idea of posting personal information and photos to a place that can be seen by a vast audience would have been unthinkable. But humans quickly became accustomed to the idea and there are now well over 300 million Facebook pages alone not to mind the countless others on different social networking sites.  We rapidly assimilated these digital privacy invasions into our lives.

There does seem to be a link here or a connection that could be established between how quickly we accept new technology into our lives and how we could transfer this acceptance to the academic world. While our academic lives are currently a mixture between print and digital it would seem to make sense to try and make it all digital. It would vastly open up the academic world on a global scale. Particularly in relation to future generations, Liu mentions making new media more accessible for future generations so they can take our generations and past generations developments even further and perhaps adapt the world of new media and internet culture further into their scholarly lives. Perhaps libraries will become a thing of the past. It was mentioned in the piece that it has taken generations to convert fully from the oral to the written in order to fully utilise it maybe the same process is underway with new media, a slow conversion. Liu introduces the example of Augustine discovering Ambrose reading silently which at the period in question was an unusual thing to do, this is an indication of how far we have come in terms of developments into the digital era and how much further we have to go.

            Another idea pushed through in Liu’s piece is tied into the idea of the power that is tied up in new media. Liu provides us with an example from Lévi Strauss, of a group of what appear to be a tribal people with a chief leader, who had never before encountered paper and pencils.

They immediately tried to mimic or imitate what Strauss was doing. The chief would reply to the anthropologist’s questions by scribbling and drawing lines on the paper and presenting it to him. Although he could not possibly have understood what he was doing he had a grasp of the power of communication that tied up in what he was doing and how it could further his knowledge. In the piece Liu mentions Leonard Dood and his report Communication in Africa, in which he describes an African man who each evening listened to the BBC news although he spoke no English. There is a sense that the African man understood the knowledge that was tied to the news, he could sense the power of it even if he could not understand it. This seems to make sense in our lives as we do are quick to accept new technology even though we do not understand how it works mechanically most of the time.

            These examples however are the only fully comprehensive components in Liu’s piece. Being a new comer to the subject of New Media I feel I gained very little knowledge from reading this essay. I would require a base of knowledge in this subject to have understood what Liu was trying to point out. Furthermore he consistently made references to the classics, which not having personally studied I found very time consuming and frustrating as I had to continuously look up all references he made.

Bibliography

• A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

The Influence of Technology on the Music Industry

[2] http://www.musicbizadvice.com/a_little_history_on_music_piracy%20.htm

[3] http://www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php

[4] http://www.riaa.com/faq.php

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/arts/music/10radio.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/arts/music/10radio.html

So this shiny new blog is for all things English, things yet that I don’t know of but over the coming months I will 🙂

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