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.