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November 18, 2003
Women and writing technology
Via wood s lot comes this phenomenal essay on women and writing technologies, of which the Web is of course only the latest.
To summarize this article would be to traduce it. Better you should go read it yourself. It is lengthy, but some of the very best bits are near the end. Note especially the reactions by faculty, students, and IT staff to a women’s studies course involving computer technology.
The writing exercise mentioned late in the article would make a good meme: “Hand in a brief description of your experience with computers.” I invite such descriptions in the comments to this post.
Posted by Dorothea Salo at 01:43 PM in Academia | Permalink
Comments
There is some good stuff there, but as in many academic pieces that stuff is buried amid impenetrably long paragraphs with florid sentences, jargon ("narrativized," "orality," "elide"), and a structure that puts the hardest slogging first (in the summary) and the enjoyable and understandable material at the end. Pity. It needs a good edit for the Web.
Posted by: Derek at Nov 18, 2003 4:30:47 PM
Dorothea, I'm taking you up on your meme. My 500-word essay is here.
Posted by: nichole at Nov 19, 2003 11:42:39 AM
Derek, while I do think "narrativized" is unfortunate, I'd suggest that the definition of "jargon" often depends on one's field. Father Ong's book is a well-recognized classic in a number of fields, so perhaps "orality" is jargon from people who write about literacy like "truss" is jargon from engineers or "swidden" is jargon from anthropologists. In fact, significant portions in the middle of King's fascinating essay seem to address your concern -- and connect it to Dorothea's excellent homework assignment, as well, which I've actually assigned in a class I co-taught a couple years ago on writing technologies.
The assignment, which my co-instructor and I worded as "write a narrative of your experience with computers", came at the beginning of the semester as the end of an initial sequence of assignments: on the first day of class, we had stations set up around the room where students would write with stamps in clay and styli in wax, with calligraphic pens & ink on vellum, with an old manual typewriter, with pencil in a small pocket journal, and then write a reflection (in the medium of their choice) examining those experiences with writing technologies in conjunction with an analysis of their histories with literacy -- and then moved on to do the same sort of sequence with computers.
To make a connection to the spirit of Dorothea's link: the assignment was intended to prompt a foregrounding of and thinking about the ways in which technology is not an invisible instrument but a concrete cultural and political practice. Cynthia and Richard Selfe do an extraordinarily powerful job of that in this essay, which I highly recommend.
Posted by: Mike at Nov 19, 2003 7:37:48 PM
Wow. Fabulous essay. For some reason it made me think of the Yao women of Jiangyong of China, who dveloped and used a women-only language. What makes this different from other languages? Were they to develop technology independently to distribute this language, what would they have created? Don't know where that train of thought came from...
If it jogged this loose, I guess I'll have to take up the assignment. More later.
Posted by: Rayne at Nov 21, 2003 1:30:00 PM
