Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 46

Weekly Whaaa…?

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 46 is the week of 2024-11-11/2024-11-24.

Languaging Is Not Knowing

It’s been rolling around in my mind for a while, and this thought finally took a succinct form:

Languaging about something is very different from knowing about something.

This isn’t a groundbreaking insight to those of us with rhetoric, composition, media, communication, or cultural studies backgrounds, but it definitely does seem to be a novel insight to far too many people who uncritically teach information literacy or generative artificial “intelligence” tools.

“Language” as a verb can encompass everything from the media frames examined by Cultural Studies scholars through to what rhetoric and composition studies scholars like Asao B. Inoue have examined at length. (A relatively short and engaging example is Dr. Inoue’s Chair’s Address from the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication: How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?.)

Accomplishments of the Week

Internship Proposal

I wrote & submitted a proposal for the second of the two internships required for my English PhD program! (There’s a reasonably strong chance that I’ll need to revise the proposal, as it’s an atypical course, but we’ll see.)

If it works out, I’ll be asynchronously teaching an online course about Nature in Literature with Dr. Curt Whitaker, with whom I’ve previously taken a graduate seminar on Ecocriticism in the Renaissance. This internship course’s readings will be quite different, as it’s a Gen Ed elective and the bulk of the works are from last 100 years or so.

In addition to the literature, I’ll be reading & discussing recent research into generative artificial “intelligence”. This will be both from the angle of assessment of student work and of more broadly how these “GenAI” tools might fit into education.

Journal AI Policy

I’m on the editorial board of In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and we’ve been working for a while on crafting a policy that reflects our concerns about generative AI while also recognizing that there are a range of uses for these tools.

We published the journal’s AI policy, and have thus far received a warm response from our readers. That’s really heartening. I’ve also gotten some useful feedback on how the policy might be improved, too, which I’ll be sure to share with the other editors as we continue making refinements.

Viewing and Reading

Hot Frosty

Yep, we watched Hot Frosty. It was fun; very Encino Man meets The Knight Before Christmas, although the main character is played with more of a Manny Jacinto vibe. (It’s honestly a shame that the main character wasn’t actually played by Manny Jacinto, now that I think more about it.)

Policing the Crisis

I read another few chapters of Policing the Crisis, and it’s both disturbing and enlightening how applicable much of the analysis continues to be to our current times.

I’m increasingly glad I chose to add it to the first of my Ph.D. exam reading lists, the one about information control and making meaning.

Heartstopper

We’ve also been watching Season 3 of Heartstopper, which is fantastic and—as anticipated—somewhat heavier than the previous seasons.

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• Jessamyn West’s The mining of the public domain communicates insights earned through her deep experience with public domain repositories and some of her go-to searches when evaluating a new tool.
• Someone shared Ian’s Shoelace Site as a fantastic example of a single-topic deep-dive website, and I think it’s equally a fantastic example of earlier eras of websites that are still going strong.
• Another someone shared Moira Donegan’s excellent essay-slash-book-review Baby Talk: On pro-natalism and motherhood after Dobbs. It’s a great, if heavy, essay on what too many people continue unduly expecting of women—and although Donegan doesn’t expressly mention social reproduction theory, this piece definitely makes me want to find more resources that examine this same conundrum through that particular frame.