Textual Medium Research Articles

Feedback: The impact of textual channel variance on student learning

The current study examined the impact of the medium and valence of feedback on student learning. Three textual media – handwritten, printed and computer-mediated – were employed as well as two forms of valence – positive and negative. Using a 3×2 factorial design a MANOVA was calculated to determine if there is a main effect for textual medium or valence, as well as if any interaction effect between the two variables existed. Such work parallels an earlier study by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. The results of this study are useful to better understand textual feedback and have pragmatic value.

‘Come a Day there Won’t be Room for Naughty Men Like Us to Slip About at All’: the multi-media outlaws of Serenity and the possibilities of post-literate justice

If legal theory has only recently become aware of the pain and problems of law’s textual medium what is to be made of a culture where information exchange through reading and writing becomes displaced by the visual and physical acts of icon manipulation? How is justice to be achieved in a coming post-literate age of quasi-hieroglyphics; that is the emerging media of graphic user interfaces on touchscreens? In a ‘software-sorted society’ (Murakami Wood and Graham 2006) can there be something external to the code that can be justice? Further, can this justice be more than just a refugee of earlier legalities, but be a true measure of the emerging techno-totality? Notwithstanding the remaining challenges of poverty, violence, gender and rights bequeathed by the past to contemporary legal thought, it is at this nexus of medium, justice and power being birthed by the leap to digitality that ‘the future’ confronts legal thinking.

O ciberleitor infantojuvenil: identidade e literatura digital

This article aims to reason about the issue of children's and adolescent’s identity as literature readers. The main point of discussion concerns possible transformations of the reader’s identity deriving from transformations affecting the textual medium. Initially, we discuss the concept of reader's identity from the point of view of Cultural Studies. The main argument is that the reader is a category in permanent historical construction and transformation. In the sequence, we present an overview about the possible relations between literature in paper and literature in digital media, with an emphasis on specific characteristics of reading in digital environmentn. We finish the article with an analysis of some processes involved in the reading of digital poems produced by Sergio Caparelli and Ana Claudia Gruszynski, adapted from Capparelli’s work Visual Poetry, that was published originally in hard copy in 2000 by the Global Publishing House.

Dated Photographs: The Personal Photo Album as Visual and Textual Medium

This article concerns the practice of making inscriptions in personal albums from the second half of the nineteenth century. The overall aim is to discuss the implications of this practice for interpretation and to investigate the cultural ideas and concepts embedded in it. The results are based on a close study of the heterogeneous collection of photo albums held at the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum), a museum of cultural history, in Sweden. Unlike personal photo albums produced after 1900, it is rare to find dates in personal carte-de-visite albums. Rather than a mere lack of data, this may indicate a different relationship between photography, time, and identity; pointing to a significant change in the vernacular uses and functions of photographs. The personal photo albums were conversation pieces that functioned better without text, as the images could prompt social contact in the form of inquiries and discussion. Later on, albums took on a character more reminiscent of a personal diary. The fact that so few privately circulated nineteenth-century portraits are dated indicates the relations between photographic portraits and painted portraits and furthermore it displays the similarities and differences between instrumental uses of portrait photography and private games of reading faces.

Material text, immaterial text, and the electronic environment

Digital modes of editing ask us to re-examine the past century of editorial theory and to situate emerging editorial approaches within this history. Using the computer as a new textual medium has brought about a renewed interest in the conditions for representation. This article concerns itself with how books and computers, respectively, represent texts, and how critical editing mediates or organizes those representations. It was written in 1997 as a critical response to J.J. McGann's essay 'The Rationale of Hypertext'.

Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy

Andrew Keen Vs the Emos: Youth, Publishing, and Transliteracy

Criticism of Henry II's expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury's miracles of St Thomas Becket

The long collection of miracles of St Thomas Becket written by William, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1172 and c.1179 is, like many other examples of the genre, a rich source for attitudes towards sanctity, relics, and pilgrimage. A far more unusual feature of William's text is the author's criticism of the recent English presence in Ireland. William's comments on this score amount to a loaded stretching of the normal parameters of his textual medium, resulting in an evaluative engagement with current affairs of the sort that we would more normally associate with reflective forms of history-writing. William's criticism focused in particular upon the expedition to Ireland undertaken by King Henry II (October 1171–April 1172), inverting the very rhetoric that Henry had used to justify his Irish adventure. William was not himself Irish, as has sometimes been supposed, nor was he registering his institution's frustrations about its exclusion from the new ecclesiastical order in Ireland, as might be implied by the traditional but questionable ‘Canterbury plot’ interpretation of the much-debated papal bull Laudabiliter. Instead, William was skilfully engaging with current debates about the rectitude of Henry II's Irish expedition, and more broadly contesting emerging prejudices about England's ‘uncultivated’ neighbours, in order to effect a subtle critique of the king's involvement in Becket's murder.

Novel testaments: Balzac’s fictional wills

This article examines the prominent role played by wills in LaComedie humaine. After tracing the increasing complexity of Balzac’s treatment of a number of literary and theatrical stereotypes with regard to testators and inheritance, it looks beyond the realms of characterization and plot to focus on the way Balzac’s fictional wills are, by virtue of their concern with language and the authority of the word, part of the novelist’s self-conscious reflection on his textual medium. The exemplary status of the will with regard to Balzac’s own activity as writer stems from the way its authority is, in fact, problematic. The numerous instances of unsatisfactory wills in his fiction are, through their links with a thematic obsession with the copy, a reflection of the way the representation of the real is consistently threatened by circularity, sterility, and the counterfeit.

Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work

Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work

Consuming Colonialism: The strange case for the marketing of empire

Although, initially, Britons at ‘home’ and abroad in the nineteenth century experienced empire through the writing of the time, present-day readers have gone beyond the textual medium to revisit British India again through the contemporary marketplace. From the pashmina shawl, the furniture of Pottery Barn, to Hollywood epics, ‘India’, in all of its imperial domestic glory, is everywhere. This essay explores the current North American retail marketing trend of home furnishings that have been termed ‘British Colonial’ in style and appearance, considering, in particular, the exclusive nature of both the products and the target audience to which they are being sold and the rationale for the resurgence of such commercial interest in Queen Victoria's empire.

This issue of JAN

This issue of JAN

Poetry as an aesthetic expression for nursing: a review.

To provide the reader with a basic understanding of the elements of poetry and to review poetry's contribution to nursing. The review will examine the poetry written by nurses, poetry's effect on the profession, and its use in education, patient care, and research. Classic and current sources of poetry, which enhance the understanding of poetry and how poetry has changed over time are reviewed. The review of nursing literature was conducted in works published in the English language using the keywords: poetry, nursing, and aesthetics. The initial search included all nursing literature with the above keywords from 1960 to 2001. Articles from relevant journals and textbooks, which could contribute to the understanding of the use of poetry in the field of nursing, were included. The use of poetry in the nursing profession provides us with the opportunity to gain new meaning and understanding about the profession and the clientele served. Poetry is a rich textual medium that can assist in illuminating nursing's core belief about the uniqueness of the nurse-patient relationship, and enhance the 'art' of nursing and 'ways of knowing'.

A three-dimensional human agent metaphor for modeling and simulation

The use of metaphor can be a potential aid to the novice modeler in several ways. Metaphor can imbue abstract ideas with concrete properties, thereby making the abstract ideas more accessible. The analogies suggested by metaphor might also aid reasoning about modeling and implementation problems. Another potential benefit of metaphor in modeling is the improvement of mental retention of model architecture and functionality. Traditionally, models and programs have been produced in a two dimensional (2D) or textual medium. However these media may be inferior to a three-dimensional (3D) medium in the development and use of metaphor, as the concrete properties that metaphors often provide are real-world phenomena, which are naturally 3D. We developed an example of the use of metaphors in modeling and 3D simulation. The example consists of a simplified operating system task scheduler along with associated hardware devices, developed in a VRML environment using VRML PROTO nodes. These nodes are designed as modular objects based on real-world metaphors. We were able to construct a set of metaphors and prototypes that may, if extended ease the modeling and design of agent oriented systems for novices. A proposed extension of one metaphor presented in the research is the synthetic human agent.

Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy

What is new about the so-called 'new media'? Enthusiasts often assume that digital media must break radically with the aesthetic and cultural traditions of their predecessors. However, new media and new genres are best understood by examining the ways in which they refashion or 'remediate' older forms. Computer graphics, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web define themselves by borrowing from and remediating television, film, photography and painting, as well as print. Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting; digital photography remediates the analogue photograph; the World Wide Web refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium. Furthermore, older media can remediate newer ones. For example, television is making such extensive use of computer graphics that TV screens often look like pages of the web.