A Reflection on Praxis 2.2 (2005): Why Wire the Writing Center

Reading vintage Praxis always gets me thinking about how far writing center research has come, and no issue manifests this sense in me more that 2.2 (2005): Why Wire the Writing Center.  I was transitioning from college to graduate school at the time of its publication, and although I was emailing regularly by 2002, the birth of email was still a relatively recent memory for me.  Really, I had just a hair more experience with email than I had with writing center work, which I’d entered into as an enthusiastic sophomore peer tutor at Penn State University Park.  Back in those days, we read papers on paper, and words such as YouTube, Facebook, or Prezi had yet to enter into our writing center lexicon.

Read More

The goal is to Communicate: An Interview with Eric Fischer

in ,

Eric Fischer is a visual artist and computer scientist based in San Francisco. He works with code to make art out of data he takes from public sources, and his images have been featured in MoMa's 2010 exhibition "Talk To Me" and in various publications including the Norwegian daily newspaper Dagbladet and American publications Esquire, Wired, and Popular Science. Eric is currently working on improving map accuracy and creating data visualization tools at a tech company with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Today Praxis Managing Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks interviews Eric on his work and his field.

Read More

bigdatabigdatabigdatabigdatabigdatabigdatabigdata

in

I think my conscious experience of 'big data' probably started when school administrators decided to put RFID chips in our school IDs and to require us to wear them in a visible spot on our shirts all day, every day. It seems like a bad idea - I don't know what data they would gather from tracking our movements around the school since we had a class schedule we were suppose to follow anyway - but someone in administration probably said the magic words 'assessment' and 'data,' and we got chipped. That was in junior high. Since then the push for data and the concomitant rise of 'big data' as a concept and a buzzword has been approaching critical cultural mass. As bigdata has become more ubiquitous we've gotten more and more used to being seen as data, as content; when someone steals our data to use as their own we say that they've 'stolen our identity,' as if we are reducible to the quantifiable aspects of our lives. More than this, our informational identity is a kind of online currency now: we constantly give away our information as the price of admission to 'free' social media applications, email service providers, and online sales aggregators. But is that actually good?

Read More