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 […]
It’s rare that my personal interest in football overlaps with my academic interests. The recent debacle surrounding the proposal of a “super league” is one of those moment. It even made national news in the US. First, here’s my take on the larger situation. Football is deeply intertwined with the cultures of most European nations. […]
This is becoming a bit of a recurring theme here. So, the first amendment… what ontological commitments are invested in the first amendment? what material-historical values regarding rhetoric? what understanding of media technologies is embedded here? Let’s start with the last question. Obviously there was writing and the printing press. Far less than half of […]
There’s a good argument for looking backward now to see the last ten years as the decade of digital rhetoric. Sure the term was coined 30 years ago by Richard Lanham, and some variation of digital rhetoric had already been at work for 10 years before that. But it’s the last decade that saw the […]
Unsurprisingly, when you search the web for information about “discord” in the online college classroom, you get results about unruliness or some such, but I’m talking about the application. There’s an insightful piece on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative titled “Discord: Gaming App to Rhetoric Class,” by Kristin Ravel and her students, that details their experience […]
Tomorrow I’m participating in a SUNY Writing Council webinar (at 2pm Eastern) on the challenges of teaching writing online, so here I’m working through some ideas of what I might say in my little 10-minute spiel. (If you are interested and want to know how to join, email me at Alex dot Reid at gmail […]
There’s this old Steven Wright line that goes something like, “I used to say I wanted to own the world but then I wondered ‘where would I put it all?’” That seems apropos here. To clarify, in higher ed circles the idiom “to own writing” would appear to mean claiming sole disciplinary-intellectual authority and control […]
Possibly in an effort to save folks some grief over the holidays, Trish Roberts-Miller offered this recent explanation of what she terms “GOP loyalists” and the effective impossibility of engaging in a rational argument. The basic yet intractable problem is that they are ensured in a propaganda feedback loop extending from their attachment to a […]
Kim Stanley Robinson as this great essay, “Dystopias Now,” which covers a lot of ground, but one of the central topics is his discussion of anti-anti-utopianism. Basically, you have to imagine a Greimas (or semiotic) square. I’ll just borrow the diagram from KSR. As KSR explains it, dystopias are the “not-concept” of utopias, where things […]
I’m reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence as a kind of light reading tangentially related to my scholarly interests. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligences spinning out of control. There are plenty of respectable folks out there who have echoed these worries—Hawking, Gates, Musk, etc. And Bostrom himself is certainly […]
Alex Reid