January 2012
2 posts
Why don't writers gravitate toward code?
That question has been a long-term puzzlement for me.
Although the last thing that the world needs is another definition for literacy, mine is fairly simple: Literacy is the manipulation of symbols. If we want to talk about mathematical literacy, computer literacy, or a traditional alphabetic literacy, I think that my definition holds up. “Manipulation” is a broad enough word to...
1 tag
Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of... →
Fascinating article that looks at the current outer limits of digital storage at the atomic level, including some of the implications for quantum computing.
December 2011
4 posts
“I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a...”
– Steve Jobs
The Anonymous Review as Confessional
One of the wickedly fun things about anonymous, academic peer review is what I have come to think of as the reviewer confessional. More than a few times I’ve submitted conference proposals or academic articles that somehow are taken very personally by the nameless reviewer on the other end, who then makes a sort of confessional digression from the actual review of my work.
Often this looks...
“No design idea is ever so great that accessibility shouldn’t be a primary...”
– Me
That you do, versus how you do
My field is rhetoric and writing, and particularly the digital side of that field.
As I’m thinking about how to talk about digital craft, it occurs to me (obvious though it might be to others) that when it comes to making digital things, how and why you do them is quite different than that you do them.
There are, for example, no shortage of people who create websites within rhetoric and...
November 2011
2 posts
Another New Blog
I really want to start blogging again. Truly. So, now I’m set up with Tumblr (still using someone else’s template, but that’ll change), which my blog.karlstolley.com subdomain now points to.
“When the tools are complex, when the artifacts produced are abstract, or when...”
– Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, p. 193