not disappeared, just swamped from last week's traveling and a whole mess of masters defenses and the end of the semester... but this weekend I'll be here, thinking, imagining, liking even more the ideas that are here.

Jody, I love your idea of tying our presentation to the conference's 60th anniversary and thinking in terms of 6 ways of looking at the 4Cs (ok, that's too much math). One idea that struck me was to create a timeline/map of all the places that the conference has been held over the past 60 years, zigzagging across the U.S., and perhaps with some interactive elements to explore for each year (like numbers of speakers, keynote title, cost of a hotel room, etc.). It would be a way of contextualizing the conference, visually and interactively. But in addition to taking an historical approach, I'd also like to focus on the current conference--doing the kind of text analysis thing I mentioned earlier with the 2009 program. And the beauty of your 6 ways idea is that it gives us a chance to take different approaches. Including a song and a 3D display would be awesome.

from Jody: six decades, six ways

Again, I love the idea of providing people with opportunities to see, hear, touch, engage with, respond to, etc. the experience of the conference in a variety of ways.

As far as the blog goes, I was going to offer to set something up on Blogger (since I know how to do that) but if there are better options out there, I'm game for those.

As we get closer to crafting a proposal, one idea I had was offering something in keeping with the anniversary theme and along the lines of "Six decades, six ways," (I'd been thinking a bit of Lars von Trier's film The Five Obstructions--) and to propose a session that features six different ways of remediating or re-presenting conference themes or particular sessions over time, whether within or across decades. [I know someone, for instance, who might be willing to write and record a song
based on her interpretations of some of the conference offerings and I'd love to explore the potentials of another 3-D display or maybe a film.]

In this way, I was thinking of connections we might make with the first and (maybe)seventh questions from the proposal: "What have we learned from major waves made by rhetoricians and compositionists in the past 60 years?" "How will we and our students effectively use the airwaves [we could expand things here in keeping with what the various technologies featured in the installation] to create meaning?"

I'd love to get my hands on some old conference programs (ideally, at least one from each decade if that were even possible), so I wrote to Eileen Maley last week to see if NCTE has an archive of CCCC programs. I also contacted Teresa at U of I to see how many old programs are held in the Center for Writing Studies library--she said their collection starts with 1983. They don't have every year since then but they hold a fair number of old programs and she said she'd be willing to send me some of them.

from Madeleine: visualizing the program

I really like the idea of setting up a blog/wiki for sharing our thoughts, resources, drafts, etc. Who knows what role it might eventually play in our project, but I think it would facilitate our communication at this point a lot more smoothly than doing all our sharing via email (much as I love email and check it 73 times a day).

I'm glad that you're interested in the idea of using the conference as our theme/topic/material, at least to some extent. What I was thinking of doing with the conference program is some kind of visualization that helps people see the conference itself differently. If I could get access to the database that has all of the titles and presentation descriptions (do you know if this is possible, Anne?), then I could set up one or several tools that people could use to explore and engage with the program
in different ways. I'm thinking of text clouds, TAPor tools, treemap or other sorts of visualization methods (there's some cool stuff at neoformix.com)--maybe even something I could create myself if I have time to learn some Processing this summer (lots of wishful thinking here). I think this could all be scaled back for a more standard sort of presentation, or made more interactive and collaborative for an installation.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking of. I realize, though, that it's kind of narrow, and I'm certainly open to other possibilities involving processes and materialities and all that good stuff.

from Jody: the sky

I love the idea of making our focus alternative ways of viewing (doing, having, experiencing) the conference (or conference session) itself. I’m curious though to think and hear more about the idea of using the program as a/the text, theme, or material—I think I really, really love this idea, think it would provide us with a focus and want to hear and think more
about this potential. I’m not sure how far back they go and/or if we could get our hands on old programs [I think when I left University of Illinois we had a pretty good number of them] but we could certainly offer views through time.

In thinking about skies being the limit, I’d love to find a way to have the installation up and running for a couple of days—not sure if we could swing this though. At first I was thinking of a scoring a space in the area where people check in and the book publishers meet. I do like the idea of focusing on the participatory and collaborative aspects of the presentation—having people make or do something (too little of this is happening now). Again, if anything were possible, I’d love to offer people the option of moving things around, adding to the display, over- or re-writing it using many different kinds of materials. In terms of what people would have to interact and/or make things with, we might offer a graffiti/response space (wall), computers, moveable text and images (magnet and/or felt-backed) maybe a Polaroid camera, materials for scrap-booking. (I’m trying to think of technologies that are inexpensive and easily transportable.) Another option would be to provide
participants the option of audio- or videotaping their responses to the questions we pose, folding this into the presentation. Having the display up for more than 75 minutes would allow people to encounter it, and perhaps revisit after having had time to think about how/if they’d like to respond. In short, I like the idea of creating something dynamic, something people would want to revisit to see if/how it has been changed by other participants, to make still other changes. My concern, however,
is that people (having been conditioned to do otherwise at conferences?) might not be inclined to add, respond, alter experience, etc.

Another sky-is-the-limit idea would be to hold the installation/performance/presentation someplace other than in a hotel
conference room—someplace near the hotel but not in the hotel. [I’ll likely be attending MLA too, Anne, so we can scout places together.]

I like the idea of documenting our process for this and was wondering about the idea of setting up a blog or website where the three of us could post ideas, upload photos, sketches, audio or video. . . That site could be featured as part of the installation or we might select, recombine and feature aspects of the process in other ways—a video or scrapbook that focuses on outtakes—detours, ideas proposed, risks imagined but not taken, etc.

from Madeleine: exploring and making

I really like the idea of doing a presentation/installation/project that engages people in a process of exploring and making something. I think it would be neat to have people print something out so as to take something tangible away for individual consumption, so to speak--but ideally the process itself would be collaborative. Our task would be to provide the initial materials and tools, as well as to give some structure to the process. Just at a basic level, we could do something collage-like, maybe with networked computers so that people are interacting with others in the same room, selecting text and image and maybe sound and video. We could project various stages of the project on various walls so that its evolution could be experienced by other people in the room. (It might be kind of fun to try to replicate materials and tools and processes in a
non-computer-based way, too.) So the presentation becomes a process of making. I don't know if this gets at Jody's interest in what's left out of the process, although there may be some way of working rejected alternatives back into the mix or working in some randomizing element that distorts what people think they've chosen (which would reflect back to them an alternative path).

This is all a bit abstract, I know. But I guess basically I want to convey that I'm thinking along the same lines as you are--or at least along what I think are some of the same lines. I love Anne's idea of projecting things on walls in such a way that people have to position themselves differently in order to read/see. And I have to say that I'm still drawn to the idea of taking the conference program as our theme/text/material-- does this interest you? It just strikes me that the conference program is
so overwhelming and there's so much text and so many ideas and so much difficulty making sense of it. An alternative presentation might usefully present alternative ways to view the conference itself.

from Anne: Jody asked "If the sky were the limit...?"

If the sky were the limit.... it'd be a full vr/cave environment in which people could experiment with moving words around by hand, words that responded in different ways when touched, "printed" argumentative texts that twitched when touched, that flowed into movies suggesting other connotations or showed specific histories behind the arguments, arguments whose logical structures glowed behind the words, words that morphed into other sorts of visualizations and v/v. Arguments you could climb up like mountains or slide down like Alice, textured arguments. I'd like for words to be touchable/physical at the same time that their histories were attached to them.

Perhaps I'll steal a whole lot of felt letters from a Montessori school and attach photographs of their etymologies and particular historical uses to them.

:-)

But your questions, Jody, make me think that our still semi-concrete, preliminary ideas play off each other, in ways we can kick off from, perhaps: I am interested in visualizing the materiality of words; Madeleine in visualizations in a more general way (I hope this is a fair representation, Madeleine); and you in what we aren't showing by the particular choices we would make as we move toward the more concrete.

I am hoping for some sort of installation where all those questions/tensions play off each other at once. Perhaps there are printed banners of our questions on the walls -- big -- with room for people to write responses to the questions as they are contextualized by whatever we install.

Our roles -- as people in the space responsible for the setup -- seem to me up for grabs. We could set up an installation that "ran itself," so that we were each there just to answer questions. Or we could give short presentations to contextualize our work. Or we could be performing continually. Or...

But I guess I am hoping that we come up with something integrated, where our concerns/questions fold into each other, make some integral experience within the room, an experience that raises the questions we hope but that also gets people thinking more concretely about the issues we've each raised. (So the Montessori reference above might be more appropriate than I thought...) (And there is nothing to preclude us documenting the whole thing in multiple ways, and producing something to go on the NCTE website, which they would love, or into Kairos, something in which we deconstructed our documentation process, to encourage viewers/readers to ask the questions you posed, Jody.)

I'll end this too-late after-too-many-papers-responded-to-today message with the comment that the only truly concrete picture in my head of what I want to do is of some writing projected really small up against a wall so that people have to get up close and bend down or sit on the floor to read it.

PS -- I'll be at MLA in SF at Christmas, so I can scope out the particulars of the Hilton, and so can ask if we could be put into a particular room or space that would be most conducive to our desires.