Rhetoric: April 2008 Archive Page

Wired:

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or "human collectors," as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry.

The Army game features a virtual detainee and interpreter; the player-interrogator speaks through voice-recognition software to the virtual interpreter, who translates the questions to the prisoner. Designed for rookie interrogators and more experienced personnel needing a refresher course, IEWTPTHICC teaches the player how to work through an interpreter, use culturally appropriate speech and analyze a detainee's body language, according to Lt. Col. Cherie Wallace, deputy head of the new systems training and integration office at the Army intelligence center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Imagine that, since childhood, you've been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you've kept a weblog.

Imagine that, since 2003, you've taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). 

Recently, after about five years of on-and-off research, you published an article that included archival material about the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure.  Thanks to the kindness of innumerable e-mail contacts, you have been able to study the source code -- recovered from a 30-year-old backup tape -- that had been considered lost. 

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files.

Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.

Yesterday was my daughter's sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog.  Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing.

Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party of Smart Carolyn from the Moon (Smart Carolyn is the character my daughter identifies with in the Captain Rod Gearhart steampunk stories I tell her at bedtime).  Smart Carolyn was disappointed that her Moon birthday cake wasn't what she expected, and had a temper tantrum in the Moon supply depot.  I told her about the Moon supply clerk who had traveled to five different supply posts searching for the right color frosting, and who felt very, very sad that Smart Carolyn from the Moon didn't even say thank you. 

My daughter sniffled a little in the dark, and then she continued the story for me: "And then Smart Carolyn from the Moon got over it, and realized that the store clerk had tried her best, and that's what was really important. And the cake was delicious."

So this morning I was in a pensive mood when I came across this blog, "Lies I've told my 3 year old recently."

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

The very last one on the list is the reason I blogged it. But I didn't include it here... go read it over on Heading East.

I'm not a student.  I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes.  I thought maybe you might know something about it.

In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page.  An example would be when a heading falls at the bottom of the page in a brief.  You put in a hard page break to put the heading at the top of the next page, but that leaves a rather large area at the bottom that you don't want some unscrupulous individual to fill with a paragraph that you did not write.  It has been common practice to use centered, spaced slashes indicating the text has stopped on this page and will resume on the next page.

My question is, is there a standard as to how many slashes are used and how far apart they should be spaced?  And, if there is a rather large empty space, should you place a second set a little further down?

/    /    /    /    /

I asked for permission to post this question here.  In the The Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers, a section on slashes does not mention the use described here.

I'm no legal expert, but my legal researcher (a bright 12-year-old named G. Oogle) reveals a case that "held that a virgule ('/'), when placed between two names, is unambiguous and specifically indicates the check is payable in the alternative."

It seems to me that the best thing to do would be to follow whatever conventions you observe in other published writing. If there is a specific rule, I'm not sure what it is or where to look.  Certainly there are plenty of legal blogs (blawgs) out there.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It's the kind of place where someone can say, "That reminds me of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric... inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio, and... uh.. .what's the other one?"  and it's likely that the others will get the joke.

While walking around the city after the conference was over, I had a vision of a future 4Cs conference that made me giddy. I'll tell you about it in a little bit. First, let me talk about the conference.