Writing Process

Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.) Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant…

Read more HCI and the Essay

In my recent post on discourse analysis versus close reading, I got into a discussion in the comments on the origin of the critic’s understanding and the role of subjectivity, objectivity, and so forth. In the course of that discussion (and I’d like to thank Jeremy Hunsinger for his part of the discussion that helped…

Read more The Essay and HCI

The School of Visual Arts in New York is now offering an MFA in design criticism. Though the program is oriented primarily to traditional design areas–urban planning, product design, and fashion–I think what they are doing should also be something that people in HCI should care about. Pointing out the primary role of design in…

Read more MFA in Design Criticism

 BASIC THESIS:  Goffman’s theory of front stage and backstage is being blurred by technology, more specifically YouTube.  Behaviors that Goffman saw as backstage are being moved to the front stage because of the availability of this new technology.  People are posting videos of themselves on YouTube, behavior Goffman would consider backstage, to a very large…

Read more My argument for final paper (YouTube and Goffman).