SA#5 Wiki Analysis

Part 1: As far as comparing and contrasting the Michelle Citron and the Marshall McLuhan articles on Wikipedia, they are drastically different in every way, shape, and form. On the whole, the Marshall article is far more involved and structured significantly better. The depth of the Marshall article can be seen immediately just by the lay out of the table of contents. All the information is grouped nicely into sets and subsets. The information itself is more than the basic information given in the Citron article as well. General information such as birthday, occupation, a graph, and a short bibliography is all that is present in the Citron article. The Marshall article contains multimedia with it's use of pictures. The use of this intertextuality helps understanding aspects of the article and allows the reader to gain a better understanding of who this man was and what he did.

Both of the following articles are on Henry Sedgwick. The Stanford version is far more in depth, just as the Marshall article is. It is less interesting as well. At first glance it is nothing more than a huge block of text. This can be off putting to a reader, and with the boring tone it holds it can put the reader off even more. The Stanford article is a scholarly source, and holds far more weight in an essay. The resources used to gather the information in that Stanford article is more than twenty times as much as in the Wikipedia article. This means the Stanford article has its flaws ironed out a bit more. The Wiki article just seems short and stagnate when juxtaposed to the Stanford article, which makes me now doubt the creditably of any other Wiki article I read.

Part 2: I chose the Joan of Arc article from the Wiki featured articles. It is very well written and comprehensive, but an immediate issue I noticed were the amount of resources used to write the article. It had an astounding total of five sources sited. The structure and lead in to the article are great and it is structurally sound, it's also significant in length so there isn't a shortage of information. The article also has a plethora of images to support the text. Overall the main concerns were of the sources and the article being neutral and having no original research done to support the claims. 

The sources used in this article are reliable, but the is that there are only five sources cited. This if severely lacking when compared to the nearly one hundred sources used in the Stanford article read earlier. The resources must not be original too, which seems easy enough, but there are people who use Wikipedia as a place to spit out their own ideas and research. I didn't see that in the Joan of Arc article, but I can imagine if is fairly prevalent. Which leads to articles being neutral an unbiased. With so many controversial topics like same sex marriage and abortion,  it can be very easy for someone to push their ideals onto other people through Wikipedia.

Analysis: Wikipedia has a strict set of rules for posting to the site. Unfortunately, even though the information is similar to any encyclopedia or scholarly source, the site isn't held to the same standard. Which, when you think about it, is perfectly reasonable. With articles having as little one or no sources, or having only a sentence worth of information, being considered a serious source is hard to imagine. On top of that, having articles be totally unbiased is next to impossible to do.

The organization of an article is rather understated, but can make or break an article. How a work is divided up or how the information is displayed is integral to allowing the reader to fully grasp the ideas being put forth. How the articles are laid out with the inclusion of multitexts, be it pictures, graphs, or what have you, is another aspect that is key to keeping the readers attention and maximizing the amount of information reaching the reader.

I believe it will be rather difficult to finalize a draft destined for a Wikipage. Getting the information and writing an article is one thing, but doing so in a manner that is conducive for the requirements under the FA criteria is another. Articles posted to Wiki are torn apart by editors and other posters, changes are constantly happening to pages, and it would be impossible for the information to remain the same on a wikipage for more than a couple months. In the time I spent looking at the 'last date edited' sections on pages, not a single one was left untouched for more than three months. 

Stases and News: Let the Audience Decide

In reading both of these articles, a connection can be drawn between the stases and the audience and, in the case of the Killingsworth and Palmer article, the news and society/human interest. The main concern I had being how the stases can affect audience as well as the information to support the claims or argument that the stases is making. In delving into these ideas, the issue of scientific studies grabbed my attention as well. The overall validity of the news and the supporting claims they give for their arguments are in fact moot and pointless.

Fahnestock and Secor state that stases  "...operate as a set of potential assumptions or reactions. Their apparent logical order does not reflect an externally imposed requirement of validity" (431). In other words as long as the stases does not need to have a valid point, rather it could be a set of logical statements that draw the read to a certain conclusion on their own. This is can be seen in the Killingswort hand Palmer article  in the section about global warming in which information and statistics are given about how the earths climate is changing. The information follows a logical order due to a common theme of global warming. The reader is drawn to want to take action and stop global warming, even though the article does not state that the reader should do so.

Reading the statistics and supporting scientific studies lead me to another realization. In the Fahnestock and Secor article on pages 432 and 433, they say that the majority of studies and experiments do not have outcomes that support a thesis or provide a clear conclusion. However in the the article on global warming (and even in news today), there are all these statistics and studies that are being thrown around. Yet most of them are not valid, they are just logical. They share a common theme and are used with other studies that have no solid evidence to lead the audience to a certain conclusion, even if the conclusion isn't fully true. It isn't a new concept or idea, but when viewing the articles and ideas the news puts out as stases, it makes a bit more sense.

In conclusion I found that these articles interact with one another via the audience. The audience is what determines what is news or relevant, and what information is given to support the stases the news is making. I did see the line of questioning used in the rhetorical analysis of stases carry over into how information is given in the news, but it seemed to obvious to write about. Though I'm sure it will be a topic of discussion in the next class.

Tomorrow's Text, Today's Problem

In "The Future of Reading" by Jonah Lehrer, the rhetorical situation is fairly clear and apparent to the reader. According to Grant-Davie, the rhetorical situation is made up of  four constituents: exigence, rhetors, audience, and constraints. The context behind these parts are then build upon with intertextual comments to support the claim's that Lehrer is making. The main focus of these ideas would be the context these constituents are based around, and how this context shapes our (the audiences) understanding of the work.

Context seems to be a recurring theme in Grant-Davie's and Bazerman's essays. What is context though, and why is it so important? Grant-Davie states "Every situation arises within  a context-a  background of time, place, people, events, and so forth". This is important because the rhetorical situation would mean nothing without rhetorical discourse and the context in which it was created (Grant-Davie, 265). The context used by the rhetor to create the discourse is key in informing or persuading an audience because it is the discourse that the audience uses to draw meaning from a work. In regards to Lehrer's piece, the discourse (Also the exigence) of the work is how e-texts and technology will ruin reading and writing.

This was supported with scientific study at a college that measured brain function. They discovered that the error free e-texts made the brain more relaxed and functioned on a lower level of thought. The use of this intertext helps shape the work of Lehrer. However, he goes on to say more about the study and how they discovered that having a few larger words or even errors in an e-text can boost a readers thought process. He then states that if all e-texts should have blurs, marks, or errors. This recontextualizes the term "e-text" for the reader/audience and changes the rhetor's message. Rather than wanting to demolish technology, we should adapt it.

Unfortunately there isn't much use of intertext in this piece, but having a clear cut rhetorical situation does help make the piece understood. It would be nice to see more supportive information in Lehrer's work. Maybe if he had this submitted in a journal, rather than as an e-text, I would appreciate it more as well. He could have changed the font styling or maybe demonstrated some of the points he was discussing in the piece. Lehrer even openly admits to using this dreaded technology himself. Also, the fact I am reading complex e-texts right now makes me feel a little less that persuaded.

Intertextuality in Mixed Media

Intertextuality: Shaping a Text's Meaning

Of the reading assignments for today, Bazerman's essay on intertextuality peaked my interests the most. In his work he describes intertextuality as the relation a text has to each text surrounding it. Bazerman goes on to explain how learning to analyze intertextuality can help us identify ideas, research, and knowledge behind documents and anything else textual. He seems to focus heavily on how a written text evokes a certain representation of the discourse situation and how that situation draws on other textual resources. As Bazerman sees it, no text can exist outside of, or independently from, other texts.

Bazerman then tries capturing the different aspects of intertextuality breaking it down into categories; levels of intertextuality, techniques of intertextual representation, intertextual distance or reach, and translation across contexts/recontextualization. The first two sections are explicit and easily understood (i.e. direct quotes, citation, etc), so I'll skip that and will move on to 'intertextual reach' and 'recontextualization'. Both of these are more implicit and require a bit more thought. They do, however, seem to go hand in hand with one another.

Recontextualization is when a reference or word is used in a work, then brought up multiple times throughout the work. Each time the word or phase is brought up, the meaning changes, giving new context. This concept  can be used in philosophical works, having a specific term recur to further explain its meaning, or even have a metaphor recur to help explain different aspects of something. For example, explaining to someone how to properly write by making connections to baseball. If you have the same theme of viewing writing baseball reappear, then the message will change and become stronger and more clear.

Intertextual reach is how far a text travels for its intertextual relations, for instance (using a sports example again), if a newspaper stated that the president of the U.S. was "stepping up to the plate", we would know they didn't mean he was playing baseball, but rather, was dealing with something himself. The reach of the phase, "stepping up to the plate", transcends just sports casters commenting on a game. This is also an example of intermediality, or when a reference or resource moves from one media to another, i.e. talk radio, movies, or music is alluded to in written text.

When I originally saw the topic of the reading excepts, I was thrilled. However, as soon as I started reading I realized that intertextuality isn't what I had originally thought it was. I had anticipated the reading to pertain more to intermediality more so than to purely writing. The mixed media aspect came from how the word 'text' was defined in my other classes. This article was intertextual itself, in the sense that it built upon the word 'intertextuality' to change and further explain its own meaning for me.