A typographic engineer, Connare was working at Microsoft in 1993, when he was asked for his input on a new program’s fonts. “When I loaded the CD a little dog came up. He talked in a speech balloon like you would get in a newspaper cartoon strip, but it was in the system font Times…
Death is universal, so one day I’ll face these decisions. I just asked my tween to put down her Legos and my teen to put down his algebra, so I could tell them that when I’m dead, I don’t want them to pay for a fancy coffin, or cushions, or an open casket. I told…
This project looks promising. I’ve donated the money I was going to spend on a haircut. We’re keeping our UI super simple. The experience is entirely sound and story: Writing + Voiceover + SFX + Music. With either a spoken word or a simple tap on the screen you can listen to the drama unfold…
Doing things correctly earns you points on an assignment, but English is one of those majors (I’d include the various arts on the shortlist) that encourages bold thinking, which leads to deeper learning. According to Steve Strauss, “Reading Chaucer, making sense of it, writing a term paper on it, and then being able to defend…
There will always be a public appetite for reporting on baseball, movie stars, gardening and cooking, but it’s of no great moment for the country if all of that work were taken over by amateurs or done by machine. What is of great moment is reporting on important and true stories that can change society.…
A fascinating text from an alternate history. “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” Eisenhower wrote. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery…
“Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.” That was really quite thrilling. In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface…
I mostly use my 4-year-old Kindle for the text-to-speech function, since the Kindle app on my university-supplied iPad duplicates all the other functions. Bring on the innovation. I can imagine buying a new e-reader, but so far have seen nothing worthwhile. But that was the Kindle 2. I assumed that the difficulties with the machine…
Wonderful, inspiring article that uses text, photos, and audio samples to tell how a researcher remixed wordless sounds to create an artificial voice for a voiceless child. Patel can take that sound, run it through a computer and find out all kinds of things about how that person would sound if that person could speak…
The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored. For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she told…
“Avoid reading so as not to taint your creative brilliance; ignore any rules of grammar and syntax that are too complex and boring; and never, ever revise.” — writing tips never given by successful authors Lovecraft is not my favorite author — in part because the horror conventions he experimented with are now so common…
Tonight we’ll be blocking my big scene as FDR in Annie. In this speech, delivered to students at UNC, Roosevelt is more playful than he is in his better known more formal speeches (his first inaugural “The only thing we have to fear” and the Pearl Harbor “A date that will live in infamy“). Here.…
My daughter delivered the opening “Marley was as dead as a doornail” speech as the narrator in the Stage Right! homeschool production of A Lyrical Christmas Carol. My son played Scrooge. The show was great. During the bows, I was already pretty misty-eyed when my daughter threw her arms around Scrooge and proudly announced, “He’s…
On my to-read list once I post midterm grades. As computer software has become increasingly central to commerce and creativity, lawmakers have retrofitted it into preexisting legal regimes to regulate its production and distribution. Currently in the United States, software is eligible for protection under patent law, copyright law, trade secret law and the First…
I’ve taught an online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course about four times now. This fall I’m getting ready to teach my first online section of an American literature survey that I’ve taught multiple times before. Because Seton Hill is a very high-tech school, I have few technical worries, but it will be different teaching…
When I am insanely busy during the academic year, I relish the time before I fall asleep, as time I can think about anything at all. If it’s productive and interesting, I’ll stay awake. If not, well, then I won’t waste much time before I conk out. In an attempt to carve out enouth time…
My undergraduates are working their way through N. Katherine Hayle’s My Mother Was a Computer. They told me that they benefitted from the notes I wrote the other day, so I’m continuing the effort. In Chapter 3, Hayles reminds us that the “worldviews of speech, writing, and code” are not merely theories, they are…
Hayles is an established authority on a humanities-centered approach to human-computer interactions, and My Mother Was a Computer (2005) is her third book on the topic. At times she writes with the expectation that her readers already know some foundational topics that she may have spent more time introducing in her previous books. In the…
According to my 9yo daughter, “It’s completely and utterly stupidulous.” Pancho McFarland, an associate professor of sociology at Chicago State, fears the policy could restrict all types of communications by professors, including speaking engagements. “It will put a chilling effect on our ability to speak in a number of venues,” he said. “It is part…
A Twitter friend made a critical comment about homeschooling that I thought warranted a reply. I won’t repeat his comment here — after a brief reflection, he modified his statement, and suggested that people who are doing homeschooling right have a too-low profile. While I don’t pretend my kids are perfect, or that they don’t…