There are a number of ways to understand the term “computational rhetoric.” In no particular order, the first might be something like critical code studies in that one studies the rhetoric practices of coding. A second would be akin to machine reading in the digital humanities, doing rhetorical analysis of a large textual corpus, or […]
Author: Alex Reid
Associate Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
I imagine it comes as no surprise to academics across these fields that instrumentalism is typically a dirty word. It is epithet applied liberally including the rejection of coursework that is overly practical or focused on “how-to” (e.g. teaching writing), of degree programs deemed to be too focused on preparing students for specific careers, and […]
This is a kind of inside-baseball question, I think. For the typical English speaker, theory means something like speculation. In more academic/research contexts, theories are the conceptual basis for the work we do: e.g., a theory of evolution. The OED provides this helpful definition that is closer to what I had in mind as a […]
There’s a 2004 video interview of Katherine Hayles conducted by Arthur Kroker for C-Theory, where she discusses How We Became Posthuman, Writing Machines, and My Mother was a Computer. Her 1999 book traces the posthuman back to the beginnings of computers and cybernetics. Considered differently though, posthuman theory as we encounter it gets some start […]
The familiar posthuman natureculture of Haraway and others suggests, in its most basic form, that there is a material history for all things, even the most seemingly fundamental dimensions of space and time. It strikes me as a weird idea to try to grasp. I suppose on the one hand there is the Big Bang […]
As I’m guessing you know, Facebook has changed its name to “Meta” and headed out to colonize/discover/create a “metaverse.” It is a vision that at least in part has been propelled by the company’s acquisition of Oculus. What you may or may not know is that the term metaverse was coined by sci-fi author Neal […]
Following up on Ted Underwood’s recent post on the recent article “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” So yes my post title is a joke, but in my defense, they started it. Very briefly put, this is a conversation about natural language processing. NLP is about the nonhuman-computational processing […]
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posthuman computer vision
As I have been writing (albeit infrequently) here, my current interest is with the concept of “posthuman computer vision.” It is apparently a term that is not in wide use. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad news for me from a rhetorical perspective. Obviously computer vision has been a field of research for […]
Media archeology is a familiar term even though its history is not so easily traced. Certainly it has to do with philosophical lineages passing through Foucault and Kittler, but that’s only a start. When I started this blog, more than 15 years ago, I subtitled it “an archeology of the future,” in part because the […]
Computer vision is a massive field in computer science. I guess you could say it’s a subfield of AI. If it’s unfamiliar to you (wikipedia), it’s basically about how computers see things. There are many applications for computer vision. How many? Hmmm. Think of the many ways you use your eyes and then multiply that […]
Alex Reid 