What is literacy?

Group: Diana Thrasher, Megan Boyce, and April Davis

Our group has defined literacy as a way of understanding or communicating. It also concerns comprehension and the ability to both retain and apply information. In deciding what literacy is, we also considered what it is not. To be illiterate does not entail stupidity. While it does have both negative denotations and connotations, illiteracy is mainly a disadvantage in that those who are illiterate don't have the proper tools to communicate.

extra credit....

While this episode of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life focuses briefly on mapping in the traditional sense (traditional in that the product is visual), it shows the audience different ways to view the idea of mapping through sight as well as the other four senses. Before the program delves into the exploration of five different types of mapping, the host, Ira Glass makes some interesting points about maps that echo the points Barton and Barton make in the article we read at the beginning of the semester. Glass points out that every map is the world seen through a different lens, and “maps have meaning because they filter out all the chaos in the world,” ignoring everything except for the things that pertain to the focus of the map. This reminds me of Barton and Barton’s discussion of exclusion (and also Kenneth Burke’s ideas about selection, reflection and deflection based on our terministic screens). I think the idea that maps are a representation of reality that have authors, that include and exclude, that are subjective—the ideology of the map—is a concept that isn’t really addressed in schools or as people learn how to read/use a map.

In the first act of this broadcast, TAL talks to cartographer Dennis Wood about his maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood of North Carolina. Although his maps are traditional in the sense that they are visual, the content and purpose of the maps are certainly not traditional. Rather, he uses his maps to tell a narrative about the neighborhood, through mapping jack-o-lanterns lit up at Halloween, the sewers and their manholes throughout the streets of the neighborhood, etc. As Wood tells TAL, his maps show the neighborhood as “a collection of patterns of light, sound, smell, taste and communication with others.

In TAL’s second act, Toby Lester discusses how he uses the sounds around him to map his world in Boston. As he began a new job, Lester noticed the background noises produced constantly by the machines that he used to do his job. He discovered that certain combinations of these sounds produced “positive” and “negative” sounds that affected his mood and the way he worked.

The third act of the program examined the electronic nose created in Pasadena, CA by Cyrano Sciences. The purpose of this device is to “chart the world’s objects through smell.” The narrator explained that, just as a child has to learn new smells, the nose has to learn each smell for the first time, building up a “smell archive,” so that it can have something to compare new smells to. As TAL suggests though, the difference between the electronic nose and a human being’s sense of smell is the way we process smells and relate them to experiences we’ve had.

In the fourth act in the broadcast, magazine writer, Deb Monroe discusses her obsession with mapping her body through her sense of touch. With this obsession she became a hypochondriac, looking for lumps and irregularities that could signal a disease or sickness.

Lastly, Jonathan Gold, a food critic in Los Angeles, recalls his mission to map Pico Boulevard from end to end by eating at every restaurant and food cart along the street. His goal through eating at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard and mapping the street based on a sense of taste was to help readers everywhere be less afraid of their neighbors through the medium of food. Throughout this process of eating at every restaurant, Gold discovered that a lot of ethic groups are represented in the food.

Reflecting on the mapping explored in this program and in light of our reading of Barton and Barton, I think it’s important to consider the impossibility of maps being anything but subjective. The quote at the beginning of the program—that maps are how different people see the world through different lenses—is relevant and important here. Just as I mentioned before, this idea is not one that is necessarily presented in schools. As Barton and Barton suggest, we need to be aware of this fact and consider it not only in making documents (maps, or anything else) but also in reading documents, maps, etc.

The Helvetica Hegemony

How an Unassuming Font Took Over the World

This is an interesting slideshow/article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Helvetica typeface. Apparently it's everywhere...

Extra Credit Responses

1.
Antczak, Frederick J., Cinda Coggins, and Geoffrey D. Klinger. Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
This book is for teachers and students in the professional communication field. It focuses on an array of topics ranging from the English language to report writing.

Hope, Diane S. Visual Communication: Perception, Rhetoric, and Technology. Creskill: Hampton Press, 2006.
This book is for teachers and students in the professional communication field. It focuses on visual communication, visual perception, and the relationship between communication and technology.

Kostelnick, Charles. Shaping Information: the Rhetoric of Visual Conventions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.
This book is for teachers and students in the professional communication field. It focuses primarily on visual communication.

2. The radio program, “This American Life” (TAL), focused on five different kinds of maps, each one based on one of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. While I must admit that the sound mapping concept seems a bit far-fetched, I do realize how it and the other four senses can be used as a means of charting the world. Moreover, hearing these various people’s interpretations of how to map according to these senses has somewhat made the orals list more relevant to me. As I listened to the program, I thought of some examples that could serve as justifications for a couple of these ideas.

Visually speaking, my favorite map of the bunch was the jack-o-lantern map. I have often wondered about what common item or entity people in my neighborhood shared with my household. Were the Sisks next door Magnavox or Sylvania people and how many television sets did they have? What if they didn’t even own a television? To make matters worse, I didn’t know how I would begin to synthesize the information even if I had it. Perhaps if I had read the Barton and Barton article or listened to this program first, I would have known that context plays a huge role in the placement of information on a map, and that it is more than just a matter of aesthetics. Maybe after doing the research, I would have discovered that some of the families without televisions belonged to strict religious groups that forbade followers to watch television, or that some families were too poor to own many or any at all. In the jack-o-lantern example, most of the people with pumpkins on their porches listened to the broadcast and were affluent. Mapping in this way really puts things into perspective, so to speak.

Act three of the broadcast focused on smell and the creation of the electronic nose. Nancy Updike's report introduced some smelling capability similarities and differences between humans and the machine. As of now, the electronic nose can recognize a few smells, but not many. Updike points out that while there are several similarities, the main difference between the human and electronic nose is the human brain. Her comment made me think about the difference between practical writers and professional communicators; ultimately, discriminatory, selective reasoning and judgment is the difference. On another note, the idea of mapping according to smell made me think about the Discovery Channel and my understanding of how animals mark their territory. Animals have very unique scents. For large, territorial animals, like bears and lions, scent and location mean everything. Typically, they rub themselves on trees or urinate on shrubbery to mark the boundaries of territory and ownership. In doing this, the patriarch informs vagabonds that other lions live in that area and in a foreboding way, "directs" them to venture elsewhere.

Extra Credit

We learn about maps throughout our entire education, from scavenger hunts and pirates to learning the geography of the world. However, we are taught only a very narrow definition of what a map is; we’re taught that it’s a piece of paper that takes us from one location to another. Maybe eventually in our education, we are taught to map out points on a graph for math class or map out an essay, but rarely are we taught that maps do not have to be some kind of image on a piece of paper or screen. However, the “This American Life” program on maps re-conceptualizes the definition by exemplifying unusual kinds of maps, taking our perception of them beyond the direction-oriented sheet of paper that we are used to.
The “This American Life” (TAL) program gave examples of five different kinds of maps, each one created through one of the five senses. The first of these sensory maps dealt with sight, which I initially thought would be about everyday maps. However, I was pleasantly surprised when the cartographer Dennis Wood described his intention of making a novel with the numerous maps he made of his neighborhood. He mapped things that initially appear to be unmappable like maps of the underground system of manholes, of the power lines, of traffics signs, of jack-o-lanterns, and so much more. Wood’s maps make his neighborhood come alive, with each map describing a different aspect of where he lives, making his neighborhood really come alive.
The second section of the program dealt with mapping the landscape of background noise from our everyday lives, which was undertaken by a musician, Toby Lester. As Lester began a new job, he began noticing the various sounds around him, such as the loud office heater, the hum of his computer, and his phone’s ring. He eventually began harmonizing with all of these sounds and recording the various feelings associated with each musical tone. Lester found that many of the sounds from our background noises (whether individually or combined) create sadness, stress, and anxiety. This, according to Lester, is one possible aspect as to why our society is so anxious, bored, and unhappy.
Next, TAL provided discussion on mapping smells, as they discussed Cierno Science’s robotic nose. According to the reporter, this robotic nose looks like a small table with a circuit board and a microprocessor that sniffs through a small tube. The reporter goes on to explain that the robotic nose is only programmed to identify a few smells (solvent vapors, decaying bacteria, and perfume) and must learn to identify other odors over time. Eventually, the robotic nose’s creators hope to develop a handheld version of this device that can detect landmines, diseases, poisonous gases, and counterfeit money.
TAL’s fourth discussion dealt with mapping via touch and tells the story of Deb Monroe, who has been mapping her body through touch for several years. Years ago, Monroe read a magazine article on breast cancer and eventually convinced herself falsely that she had the disease. Ever since, she has become preoccupied with her body and has developed hypochondria, where she actually convinces herself that she has various diseases. She spends her days poking and prodding her body, trying to find anything that could be harmful, inevitably creating an inaccurate map filled with landmarks that aren’t even there.
The final map discussion in TAL’s program discussed mapping taste, in which the TAL reporter interviewed food critic Jonathan Gold. In the mid-1980s, Gold began mapping the different foods/restaurants on Pico Boulevard in Las Angeles. He wanted to create a map of sense that would get him from one end of Pico to the other (which is several miles long). By creating a set of rules, he eventually ate at pretty much every restaurant on Pico (with some exceptions based on his rules). After visiting countless restaurants, Gold found that the majority of ethnic groups are represented through food on Pico. His goal through this map-making process is to make people less afraid of their neighbors through food.
A discussion on echolocation would be an excellent addition to this program, as it is a mapping technique used by animals and humans alike to “see” their surroundings when their eyes fail. Rudimentarily speaking, echolocation occurs when an animal (e.g. a bat) sends out sounds waves by making a noise, which are transmitted uninterrupted until they hit an object (e.g. an insect). The sounds waves then bounce back toward the animal, which enable it to then identify the object based on the sound of the echo. (Here’s a very basic version of this phenomenon http://members.aol.com/bats4kids/
echo.htm).
Some blind individuals have the ability to use echolocation as well like Ben Underwood, who uses echolocation (among his other senses) to navigate his world of darkness (Here’s a very interesting YouTube video on Ben and his abilities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpBm4KoWsrY). These individuals seem to be innately capable of using echolocation and use clicking noises or the noise from a cane to create the sound waves necessary for the process to work. As seen in the video about Ben, echolocation allows blind individuals to see the world around them with amazing accuracy. Those of us fortunate enough to have our sight often take it for granted, and we probably would not know how to begin mapping our surroundings without it. Echolocation seems impossible, but those who rely on it every day know that it is a remarkable way to map their world.

3 points and a question - Krug

1. Nowadays, usability testing findings are not written in long reports with suggestions on how to improve the website. Krug holds conference calls with Web teams to introduce the findings and then collaborate on how to fix the problems.

2. For most website usability testing all you need are a group of "people who have used the Web enough to know the basics" (139).

3. Two types of usability testing: a) "get it" testing - "show them the site, and see if they get it," look to see if the user understands the purpose of the site, the value, the organization, how it works, etc. ( 144) b) key task testing - ask the use to do something and watch how they do it

Question: What are some examples of usability testing the class has conducted or participated in?

Week 15: 3 points and a question

• Krug suggests that it is much better to test a few people several times throughout the design process than to test many people just one time. “Design is an iterative process. Testing isn’t something you do once. You make something, test it, fix it, and test it again” (135). By testing multiple times, the designer is able to see what works and more importantly what doesn’t work, make changes and then test again. Once changes have been made to the original design a second round of testing will likely uncover other issues that the first tests didn’t uncover.
• You should review the results of a usability test as soon after the test as possible.
• In reviewing the problems people saw during a usability test and deciding which problems need to be fixed, Krug offers some guidelines about deciding what to fix and what not to fix. He suggests avoiding “kayak” problems, resisting the impulse to add things where test users had trouble doing/getting something, taking “new feature” requests with a grain of salt, and changing the obvious and easy-to-fix problems.

Question: Can we (and should we) apply these usability testing guidelines to documents other than websites?

Look what I found!

So my mom sends me a lot of chain emails (I feel like I am in fifth grade again). Anyway, she sent one to me the other day with a whole bunch of weird facts. So, I came across this, and it reminded me of our class because I am pretty sure we talked about this at some point in the beginning of the semester, but we couldn't find it. So, here it is for some fun...


I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Paper Topic ?

Dr. Fishman,

I was thinking about doing my paper about the interplay between text/diction choices and their corresponding visual elements. In other words how visual rhetoric doesn't stand alone, or perhaps is improved by text and looking at the connections between the two. I don't have a piece in mind to examine yet, but I was wondering if that seems like a good angle to approach the paper from. Too broad? Too narrow?

Thanks,
RJ