Introduction to Language and Technology

 

ENG1710, D518

TTh 2:15PM-3:55PM

V103B

 

Professor Ellis

Office/Hours: Namm N520, TW 4:00-5:00PM or by appointment.

jellis@citytech.cuny.edu

http://dynamicsubspace.net

 

Course Description

In this rewarding and challenging introductory class, we will endeavor to understand the deep and complex relationship between human language and human technology. You will apply your insights and discoveries to a major research project focused on a single form of technology-mediated communication. What you learn will have important significance to a successful career in technical communication. We will raise these issues during lecture and discussion. The catalog course description, objectives, and prerequisites are attached.

 

Required Texts

Available online by direct link or via the library’s database holdings (requires on-campus network access and/or activated library card account).

 

Recommended Resources

• “New Media Dictionary” in Leonardo. Search JSTOR via http://library.citytech.cuny.edu.
• David McMurrey, Online Technical Writing, https://www.prismnet.com/~hcexres/textbook/.
• Purdue OWL, Professional and Technical Writing, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/4/16/.
• Purdue OWL, APA Style, https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/.
• Laura Portwood-Stacer, “How to Email Your Professor (Without Being Annoying AF),” https://medium.com/@lportwoodstacer/how-to-email-your-professor-without-being-annoying-af-cf64ae0e4087#.1m6lc0rkd.

 

 

Required Resources

• Computer access, word processing software, and a means of saving your work securely.
• Access to your City Tech email.
• Activate your library account at the front desk of the City Tech Library for journal access via your library account number.
• Access and accounts at openlab.citytech.cuny.edu and other designated website.
• Flash drive for saving your work and/or having scratch space for in-class project work (always bring to class).
• Cloud-based storage for saving a backup of all your work.
• Apps for your phone, tablet, and/or computer that can open TXT and PDF files for reading.

 

Grading

Assignment	Description	Percentage of Final Grade
Daily Writing, In-Class Assignments, and Pop Quizzes	After each class, students will write a 250-word minimum (writing more is recommended) summary of the reading and discussion in their own words (quoting is acceptable if properly cited but quotes do not apply to the minimum word count). These are due at the beginning of the next class. Any material quoted from the reading should be cited according to APA style (see “Required Format for Papers” for more information).	30%
Final Project Research Paper Proposal	Before endeavoring on the final project, students will write a 250-word proposal for a research paper that explores a contemporary technology through the lens of language and technology. The proposal should pose a question to be answered in the research paper, identify and describe the technology being investigated, and attempt to answer the research question with the knowledge already held by the student. On a separate page, students will write a working bibliography in APA format of at least ten article sources they plan to use in their research (five of these articles may come from class readings, and the other five must come from library sources).	10%
Final Project Research Paper	Based on the final project research paper proposal, students will write a 2500-word minimum research essay responding to their research question. This project requires at least 10 cited sources (five of these articles may come from class readings, and the other five must come from library sources. Other sources are permitted after the 10 required sources).	30%
Final Project Presentation	Each student will have an opportunity to present a condensed, professionally delivered presentation based on their research paper. It must be between 5 and 10 minutes in length, and use PowerPoint as the visual component of the presentation.	10%
Final Exam	On the last day of class, students will respond to written questions about the class readings, lecture, and discussion.	20%

 

Policy for Late Work

Assignments submitted late or exams taken late will incur a 10-point reduction for each day that they are late. However, no assignments will be accepted after the last day of class. If a student knows that work cannot be completed on time, he or she should contact me or visit my office hours to discuss.

 

Attendance and Lateness Policy

The expectation for successful and respectful college students is to arrive on time and attend all classes. The college permits students to miss 10% of a class (three absences) for whatever reason. In our class, each additional absence will reduce your final grade by 10 points (equivalent of a full letter grade). Missing too many classes will obviously result in failure of the class. Also, an absence does not excuse you from any assignments or exams. Use your absences wisely. Arriving late or leaving early will, depending on the specific situation, count as a full or partial absence.

 

Required Format for Papers

All formal writing and citations should follow APA guidelines (see the Purdue OWL APA section for more information: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/). Remember in your research paper that quoting is far more persuasive than paraphrasing, and in either case, your use of others ideas or writing must be properly cited to give credit where credit is due and to maintain your own academic integrity.

 

College Policy on Academic Integrity

Students who work with information, ideas, and texts owe their audience and sources accuracy and honesty in using, crediting, and citing sources. As a community of intellectual and professional workers, the College recognizes its responsibility for providing instruction in information literacy and academic integrity, offering models of good practice, and responding vigilantly and appropriately to infractions of academic integrity. Accordingly, academic dishonesty is prohibited in CUNY and at New York City College of Technology, and is punishable by penalties, including failing grades, suspension, and expulsion. The complete text of the College policy on Academic Integrity may be found in the catalog.

 

Tentative Class Schedule

 

Week	Day	Date	Activities and Due Dates
1	T	Aug 29	Introduction to class. Discuss syllabus, assignments, and readings.   Read aloud and discuss Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”
	Th	Aug 31	Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” https://goo.gl/dxjXED.
2	T	Sep 5	Victoria Fromkin, “What is Language?” from An Introduction to Language, http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/pdfs/fromkin_what_is_language.pdf
	Th	Sep 7	Nicholas Wade, “Early Voices: The Leap to Language,” The New York Times (15 July 2003), http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/early-voices-the-leap-to-language.html?pagewanted=all.
3	T	Sep 12	Salikoko S. Mufwene, “Language as Technology: Some Questions That Evolutionary Linguistics Should Address,” http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/publications/Language%20as%20Technology.pdf.
	Th	Sep 14	Walter J. Ong, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Ed. Gerd Baumann, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f08/ong_article.pdf.
4	T	Sep 19	Bruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity,” Technology and Culture 8.1 (Jan 1967), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3101522.
	Th	Sep 21	No class.
5	T	Sep 26	Jacques Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Substance 4.10 (Autumn 1974), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3683950.
	Th	Sep 28	Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” https://wayback.archive.org/web/20120214194015/ http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html.
6	T	Oct 3	N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chapter 1: “Toward Embodied Virtuality,” http://www.ituniv.se/infoglueCalendar/digitalAssets/1783813728_BifogadFil_Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf.
	Th	Oct 5	Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1: “The Medium is the Message,” http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf.
7	T	Oct 10	Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone Film Typewriter,” October 41 (Summer 1987), http://www.jstor.org/stable/778332.
	Th	Oct 12	Charles Kostelnick, “Typographical Design, Modernist Aesthetics, and Professional Communication,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 4.5 (1990), http://jbt.sagepub.com/content/4/1/5 or Kostelnick-Typographical-Design-Modernist-Aesthetics-and-Professional-Communication.
8	T	Oct 17	J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4.3 (Fall 1996), https://muse-jhu-edu.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu/article/8107.
	Th	Oct 19	Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, “Introduction,” http://composingdigitalmedia.org/f15_mca/mca_reads/Gitelman-Always-Already-New-Intro-excerpts.pdf.
9	T	Oct 24	Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community,” Technology and Culture 46.3 (Jul 2005), http://www.jstor.org/stable/40060901.
	Th	Oct 26	Lev Manovich, Language of New Media, Chapter 1: What is New Media?,” http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Manovich -LangNewMedia-excerpt.pdf.
10	T	Oct 31	Lev Manovich, “Notes on Instagrammism and Contemporary Cultural Identity,” http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/notes-on-instagrammism-and-mechanisms-of-contemporary-cultural-identity.
	Th	Nov 2	Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015), http://muse.jhu.edu.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/article/589981.
11	T	Nov 7	Donald C. Jones, “Thinking Critically About Digital Literacy: A Learning Sequence of Pens, Pages, and Pixels,” Pedagogy 7.2 (Spring 2007), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/215284.
	Th	Nov 9	Anil Dash, “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media,” https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3#.1shykvyun.
12	T	Nov 14	David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerald Alberts,” When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960,” Technology and Culture 55.1 (Jan 2014), http://muse.jhu.edu/article/538908/.   Final Project abstract due. Discussion of these during class as an impromptu oral presentation and discussion.
	Th	Nov 16	Marie Hicks, Introduction to Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (2017), https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/Introduction%20Programmed%20Inequality.pdf
13	T	Nov 21	No class.
	Th	Nov 23	No class.
14	T	Nov 28	Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/inc.pdf or https://web.archive.org/web/20150915102433/http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/inc.pdf
	Th	Nov 30	William Hart-Davidson, “On Writing, Technical Communication and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication,” Technical Communication 48.2 (May 2001), http://www.ingentaconnect.com.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/ contentone/stc/tc/2001/00000048/00000002/art00005 or http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.464.4276&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
15	T	Dec 5	Final Project studio time.
	Th	Dec 7	Final Project studio time.
16	T	Dec 12	Final Project studio time.
	Th	Dec 14	Review of course readings. Remainder of class is studio time. Final Project due via email attachment (Word docx file, subject ENG1710) Final Project presentations during class.
17	T	Dec 19	Take home final exam due at beginning of class. Final Project due via email attachment (Word docx file, subject ENG1710) Final Project presentations during class.