Masters of Text

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In this episode, we offer two segments and spotlight three excellent texts.

In our first segment, we continue our discussion of S., the experimental novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. As we reflect on reading chapters 7,8,9, and an "interlude," we return to some of the main themes of the book: scholarship, love, identity, documentation, and collaboration. It's such an amazing book. You should really get yourself a copy, start reading it, and keep listening to us talk about it.

In the second half of the episode, Ames and her frequent collaborator, Phil Bratta have a conversation about participating in a radical dance workshop with Guillermo Gomez Pena and Sara Shelton Mann this past summer. 

And between these two segments, we want to point your attention to three excellent texts we've been reading and thinking about lately:

• "Crafting Malfunction: Rhetoric and Circuit-Bending" by Steven Hammer and Aimee Knight. (from Harlot of the Arts).
• "Buy-It-Yourself: How DIY Got Consumerized" by Elizabeth Chamberlain (from Harlot of the Arts).
• "Glitching Out with Casey Boyle" from the podcast, Rhetoricity, by Eric Detweiler.

This episode is available for direct download here.

Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here.

More Links:

• La Pocha Nostra - from Gomez Pena
• Guillermo Gomez Pena - Wikipedia entry
• Sara Shelton Mann - Home page

Do have other relevant links or resources to contribute? Please tweet them at us: @trauman or @amesthehawk or with the hashtag #MastersOfText.

In our first segment, "Vox Fabri, Vox Dea," Ames remixes the responses of 45 participants of the Tenth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. Organized around patterns of answers to two questions--"What's your favorite FemRhet moment?" and "What's you're way of making? This vox populi piece makes clear the magic and magnificence of this conference, one celebrating twenty years.

Our second segment recounts a local "microcasting" experiment produced at Columbia College Chicago's Parents Weekend. Ames and Trauman organized a participatory "making" session in which students and parents recorded different portions of a common audio text, which were then immediately combined into a short podcast for the participants to listen to and to take with them. Although the session didn't run perfectly, it was a fascinating (and largely successful) experiment engaging an audience as co-producers of a real-time microcasting.

In episode 6 of Masters of Text, Ames presents the first part of a three-section piece called “The New Work of Reading,” an experimental audio-autoethnographic piece in which she examines her own process of learning to read multimodal scholarship. This episode also features the third segment of our S. Project, a dialogue that focuses on what we thought about Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of S.. by J.J. Abrahams and Doug Dorst. As an interlude, Trauman offers a spotlight on a couple of texts he recommends our listeners check out.

Episode 5 begins with a segment in which Trauman reflects on how he employs an historical understanding of technologies as a central part of his textual design process. It’s pretty much the theoretical background for his design approach for conceptualizing the table of contents of the edited collection: The New Work of Composing [http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/]. In the second half of the episode, Ames and Trauman discuss a couple of audio editors that are absolutely outstanding for producing audio texts, soundwriting,  or podcast episodes. The episodes wraps up by encouraging listeners to attend the Computers & Writing conference this summer in Rochester, NY. The proposal deadline is this Friday, October 23rd! For more information about this episode, visit our website at http://www.mastersoftext.com

In this segment, Trauman interviews Ames about how and why it was she turned her written piece, “An Open Letter to Gurlesque” (which you can hear in Episode 3) into an audio text. Conversation ranges from discussion of the ways that two fonts on the page come alive through the voices of Ames and Arielle Greenberg, to Ames’s attempt at writing queer theory, to the ways that visual aspects of text such as footnotes become invisible in a recording. Ames ends by imagining at least one future iteration for the piece as an ASL video.  

In this episode, Ames and Trauman continue their conversation about Abrams and Dorst's novel, S. after reading the first quarter of the book. They find that's is fascinating. And damn difficult reading. And totally worth it. The second half of the show is Ames's text: "An Open Letter to Girlesque." It's smart, racy, and beautiful. No doubt a "must-listen."

In this episode, Ames and Trauman discuss a course they taught together this year. It combined writing, digital storytelling, and art activism. Also, Ames reflects on making an audio text as a present for her mom's 70th birthday.

In this episode, you meet us, the two hosts of the show, Ames Hawkins and Ryan Trauman. We talk a little about our backgrounds, how we met, and how this podcast came into being. In the second half of the episode, we discuss our first encounter with S., a novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. But the book is also a fascinating experiment with storytelling and "book-ness."