Course Description
This course explores the development of technologies of representation and asks what we can learn either from the way they were used and experienced in earlier periods as well as how we experience and articulate our own experience of evolving media. While the course gives attention to the history of a range of media including electronic sound recording and film, it will focus attention on the development of technologies that that allow us to explore emerging ideas of cognition and cognitive science. Course reading and research will examine ideas surrounding the origin of writing and geometry and the development of practices associated with scroll, codex, and book. Work on the evolution of printing technologies will include study of related graphic technologies such as woodcuts, engraving, and etching. The final portion of the course will deal the emergence of photography and digital technologies.
Course Requirements
Grades for the course will be determined by four short papers (60%), a final take-home examination (25%), and class-participation (15%). Students will be expected to have a series of meetings with the instructor in the course of the semester. Where appropriate, students will be encouraged to undertake projects that may be presented electronically. As the course proceeds, a gallery of ongoing-projects will be included in the web pages associated with the course.
Required Texts
- Augustine, Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1968)
- Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999)
- Timothy Lenoir, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999)
- George Myerson, Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001)
- Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002 [1982]
Texts Available on Course Website
- Kenneth Knoespel,"Models and Diagrams within the Cognitive Field," Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery, ed. Lorenzo Magnani, Nancy J. Nersessian, and Paul Thagard (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 59-73;
- Kenneth Knoespel,"The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order" in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 100-122.
- Barbara Stafford, Barbara Maria Stafford, "Presuming images and consuming words: the visualization of knowledge from the Enlightenment to post-modernism," Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993) 462-477.
Recommended Texts
- Algirdas Julien Greimas. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1987)
- Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995)
- Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell eds. Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (London: Routledge, 1999)
- Larry A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990).
- Larry A. Hickman, Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001)
- Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000)
- Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996)
Downloaded articles are in PDF format, a free plugin & stand alone reader are at Adobe Acrobat Download Page.
Due to document length and the need for printability PDF files may exceed 9 megabytes
Texts are available at the Georgia Tech Book Store and the Engineer's Bookstore.
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