Dr. Laura Otis presenting in GT Library’s Ferst Room.
Today, Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication invited Emory University’s Dr. Laura Otis to give a presentation in the Library’s Ferst Room. Dr. Otis’ presentation was titled, “The Surprising Antics of Other People’s Minds” [read the abstract here].
In Dr. Otis’ work, she aims to show with data that she has collected from interviews with an admittedly small number of English-speaking people from the United States that:
1) visual thinking and verbal thinking are not opposites and they cannot be separated,” 2) there is no such thing as a visual thinking type or a verbal thinking type–every mind is unique, and 3) visual and verbal inclinations are not destinies. Anyone can develop visual or verbal skills with practice.
She also offered two suggestions for literary studies:
1) refer to visual imagery in readings, because this might help include more students who may feel excluded by verbal readings, and 2) take reader’s visual imagery seriously, because this might help reconnect the reader to creative writing as co-creator of its imagery.
You can download my handwritten notes on Dr. Otis’ talk and the Q&A session from the event as a PDF from here.
I enjoyed Dr. Otis’ presentation, and it provided me with a new insight into something that I had already read and thought about but in a more biological sense: we each think differently, because our brains are wired differently. Our experience of the world and life, which includes our biology, environment, and culture, leaves its indelible trace on our brain’s physical wiring. As we live, our brains wire themselves to accommodate new memories, abilities, and ways of thinking. It makes sense that all of these experiences would shape our thinking, but more importantly, we can exert our own conscious control over our thinking by adopting reflective practices and training/practice to improve abilities that we already have to greater or lesser degrees.
This morning, Georgia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning (CETL) hosted the annual Celebrating Teaching Day.
We began with a poster session that showcased pedagogies and assignments from across campus.
A number of Brittain Fellows had their posters on display and we were there in force to talk about our teaching of communication as rhetorical and multimodal (WOVEN = written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal). I presented my poster on, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience” [you may view it here–with thanks to my student Jinming Hu for giving me permission to share his work from class].
Fellow Britts: Olga Menagarishvili, Mollie Barnes, Emily Kane, and Iuliu Ratiu
We were able to share teaching ideas and techniques with others from the Georgia Tech community.
Emily Kane explaining her assignments.
The poster session was very well attended by people from across campus. The posters demonstrated the innovative teaching taking place at Georgia Tech.
Lots of visitors and lots of posters at Celebrating Teaching Day, 2013.
After the poster session, we were treated to lunch, an awards ceremony, remarks by President Bud Petersen, and finally, a presentation by Dr. Derek Bruff of Vanderbilt University on “Social Pedagogies.”
Audience and panelists at the State of Black SF Film Festival.
Tonight, it was standing room only in Georgia Tech’s Hall Building Room 102 for the 2013 State of Black Science Fiction Film Festival. Co-presented by the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the State of Black Science Fiction Collective, it presented a number of cutting edge and independent films and opened conversation between filmmakers, writers, and critics. Professor Lisa Yaszek introduced the festival and Georgia Tech’s long history with science fiction via her predecessor Bud Foote, and Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade organized the festival, introduced the films, and lead the post-screening panel discussion.
All of the films were exceptionally great! I have listed the films shown below with links to the video or more information where available.
Clayton Ziga’s “I am Designer” imagines a world where adoptive children can be surgically and technologically redesigned to meet the wants of their adoptive parents.
Matthew Savage’s dieselpunk, noirish short film “Reign of Death,” pits a gumshoe against an allegedly murderous robot. I really liked the integration of the CGI robot with the Sin City-esque visual feel of the moving picture.
Tommy Bottoms showed off his webseries, “Eternal.” It was billed as “True Blood meets The Wire,” and it combines the gritty reality of life with action and humor. In the episodes that we saw, I have to say that my favorite line of the whole night came when the main character Josh Davis, not understanding how the vampires around him seemingly vanish in thin air, exclaims, “Fucking magic tricks!”
We caught a glimpse of Teresa Dowell-Vest’s “Genesis: New American Superheroes,” which is about a couple who survived the Tuskeegee Experiment, went on to become scientists, and bestow science-derived gifts to their their five children: Tage/Power of Earth, Xavier/Power of Water, Xander/Power of Fire, Jordan/Power of Wind, and Quincey/Power of Technology and Knowledge.
Bree Newsome treated the audience to her Southern tale of horror titled, “Wake.” A woman gets more than she bargains for when she conjures a man to marry after ridding herself of her controlling father. Besides being creepy, disturbing, and occasionally funny, I enjoyed its playful use of language.
Balogun Ojetade showed the audience an excerpt from the larger steamfunk project titled, “Rite of Passage: Initiation.” In the scene, Harriet Tubman challenges her student Dorthy to a martial arts contest.
Finally, Donnie Leapheart presented two episodes of his action-packed webseries Osiris. This SF thriller is about a seemingly immortal man fighting back against corporate interests who want to commoditize and sell his ability to live forever. The two episodes that we saw were slick and clever. I was also impressed by the high production value of this series made for the web.
After the screening, Davis and Ojetade lead a panel discussion with Teresa Dowell-Vest, Donnie Leapheart, Tommy Bottoms, Bree Newsome, and Steve Barnes (writer, critic, and martial artist). What follows are my notes and paraphrasing from the conversation.
Question: What makes something black SF?
Bottoms: It can be the production side, actors, or story. However, anyone should be able to enjoy these films, not necessarily an exclusive black audience.
Dowell-Vest: She aims to create a body of work that transcends race and is enjoyable to a broad audience.
Leapheart: He embraces the idea of black SF, because he knows that there are black nerds, but they don’t get represented. Since SF is the biggest grossing genre for a broad audience, why are not more black filmmakers putting their voice out there in SF to reach that audience?
Barnes: He breaks down the definitions of SF, fantasy, and horror to help develop the terminology of the discussion. Broadly speaking, all fiction is fantasy, because fiction is not real. However, what we think of as fantasy involves a world that is unlike our own and operates by a set of rules significantly different than our own. SF is a subset of fantasy that must follow the rules of science, but it can be allowed to break one rule–such as time travel–to produce stories around: what if, if only, and if this goes on. Horror is another subset of fantasy in which the dominant mode is fear and it generates dread in the audience. There are many different kinds of horror: SF horror, fantasy horror, psychological horror, etc.
Question: How and why are black people portrayed negatively in the media?
Newsome: Where do we start!?
Bottoms: Right now, our culture embraces this as entertainment. At least in the past with Blaxploitation, social consciousness and positive endings were an integral part of the early wave of these films.
Newsome: We are fighting and combating stereotypes. Media is not separate from the social world.
Barnes: Negative portrayals are likely not something done with conscious intent, but are the way people actually thought. Put another way, they are not trying to make a group look negative. Instead, they are simply presenting their internalized beliefs. Furthermore, it has a lot to do with one group in a superior position defining itself against others.
Leapheart: We can blame the media, whites, etc., but if you look online there are many negative videos produced by blacks with loads of views and other positive videos with very few views. Is art imitating life or life imitating art? Should we give people what they want (or think that they want), or do we keep doing our own thing?
Dowell-Vest: She is concerned about the declining representation on television. At one point, we had a menu of options (e.g., Cosby, A Different World, In Living Color, etc.), but now it seems to be all on the shoulders of the character Olivia Pope in the show Scandal. If she were played by a white woman, would we be having this conversation? She sees a cycle of fight-struggle-complacency, and she worries that we are now in a period of complacency. True art and storytelling come from bucking the status quo.
Barnes: In the history of network television, there have only been four successful black-starring hour-long dramas. This is why so much rides on Olivia Pope and Scandal. He also mentioned the TV series Deception.
Newsome: Waits for a time when we don’t have to rely on only one show to represent all black people.
Question: What is the future of black film (while considering Quintin Tarantino’s Django Unchained)?
Bottoms: Don’t tell someone that they can’t make a film. If you think that you can do it better, then you go out and make it. He enjoyed Django Unchained despite the problems that some people had with its language–how else could you do it, he asked?
Barnes: Loved Django Unchained. He went to see it with one of Louis Farrakhan’s body guards, who laughed his ass off. Only five directors could have pulled off this film, and four didn’t want to do it. Taratino grew up around black people, and he represented what he knew from his perspective. Anyone can write about others’ experiences, and we have a right to disagree with their perspective. A good thing about Django Unchained is that it proved that a movie with central black characters can sell to an international audience. He asked the audience a pointed question: When was the last time that you saw a film with slaves? Amistad? No, it debated their freedom. Beloved? They were ex-slaves. This is the third rail of cinema, and Taratino is crazy enough to go there and he made people laugh doing it. The film is not a perfect thing, but it is a good thing.
Dowell-Vest: She is from Virginia, and for her, Nat Turner is very real history. There is something significant about that moment when the oppressed have their time or their revenge. It can be soul serving or spiritually serving. She felt that Taratino had given her what she needed.
Newsome: You can’t say he can’t make something because of his race, because then, you say that I can’t make a kind of film due to my race.
Leapheart: Concerned that despite the high a film like this might give us now, it is likely not the beginning of a new wave. Instead, its momentum will dissipate.
Barnes: Yet, a film like this sets the ground for the future: experience, learning, jobs. It is up to you guys (the filmmakers on the panel) to make the future.
Bottoms: There is this thing that I’ve heard about called the Internet, and it gives us new options, choices, and a chance for change. However, change takes time.
Unfortunately, at that point, we had to close it down for the evening. This was an exciting event that reminded me it was very good to be back in Atlanta at Georgia Tech.
The conversation continues at the State of Black Science Fiction group on Facebook here. See you there!
I am currently teaching three sections of ENGL1101 at Georgia Tech. The class’ theme, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience,” remains the same as my earlier syllabus that I taught in Fall 2012 [available here]. However, I have made some fundamental changes to the reading list (two books instead of only one: John Medina’s Brain Rules and Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal), reading schedule (began with WOVENtext, then three fundamental essays/excerpts from O’Shea’s The Brain, Gary Marcus’ Kludge, and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind), and major projects (still three major projects, but now the first project incorporates Storify and ComicLife and the third project is an individual Pecha Kucha presentation instead of a group presentation–students will continue group work on the second project’s video). In the readings, I am encouraging more discussion about WOVEN and rhetoric in addition to discussion about the content and its application to composition. I have also integrated Twitter into the class’ daily rhythm and added daily reading presentations as a core component of the class. I have given the new syllabus a version 1.1 designation. Find out more by reading the new syllabus here.
I should also note that I had planned on teaching ENGL1102 in Spring 2013, but the school asked for a volunteer to teaching ENGL1101 again. This seemed like a terrific opportunity to put some of my ideas from reflection into practice right away. I do plan to teach ENGL1102 in the future, and I will be ready with this syllabus (unless, of course, I find the time to develop another syllabus, which is something that I would like to do by continuing the “Writing the Brain” theme into the second tier class with neuronovels and neuronarratives).
2012 was a big year for me. I earned my PhD and I obtained my first job with that degree. I traveled for my research–first to California, then to Detroit, and later to Germany. And, my wife, our cat, and I relocated from Ohio to Atlanta for my new job at Georgia Tech and we moved into my old house in Norcross, which had not sold during the past six years of graduate school.
Unlike years past, I thought that it might be appropriate to jot down some of the milestones of 2012. Here are a few of those big things:
January 5-8: Y and I attended the MLA Convention for the first time and met up with a number of our friends and colleagues.
February: I spent two weeks in Riverside, California to read and research in the University of California, Riverside’s Eaton Collection in the Library’s Special Collections and Archives. This was an incredibly useful research trip that gave me the original research materials to complete my dissertation. Prior to leaving for my research trip–funded by the prestigious R. D. Mullen Fellowship–I had completed my dissertation’s theory chapter and compiled outlines for the other chapters.
April 2: I interviewed for the Marion L. Brittain Fellowship at my alma mater, Georgia Tech.
April 9: I delivered printed copies of my dissertation to my committee members. Since my trip to Riverside, I wrote approximately 68,000 words for a final word count of 81,948. Needless to say, I channeled the spirit of Philip K. Dick during this feverish time of hypergraphia. I could not have written this amount in such a short time had I not already created an efficient organization system for my research and deployed a number of digital humanities tools in my workflow. It was a terribly stressful time, because I drove myself relentlessly to complete it as quickly as possible. However, I would not have had it any other way.
April 19: I accepted an offer from Georgia Tech to join the rechristened School of Literature, Media, and Communication as a Brittain Fellow! My term of appointment is for three years.
May 15: I successfully defended my dissertation titled, “Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives.” I came prepared with a suitcase of gear and donned with my only suit. During my opening statement, I showed off the ebook version of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy on a Powerbook 145.
June 4-15: I met my parents in Norcross to work on my house. We replaced the main water line, repaired the plumbing, installed a new dishwasher, worked on the house, and cleaned the yard. Prior to this trip, I had maintained a vegetarian lifestyle. During my second day of using a grubbing hoe, I decided that I needed to eat meat again.
June 28-July 1: I attended the SFRA Conference in Detroit. This was my second and final meeting as the organization’s vice president. I presented my paper, “Philip K. Dick as Pioneer of the Brain Revolution.”
July 10: Y and I said goodbye to our friends in Kent and drove straight through to our new home in Norcross.
August 11: While I was unable to attend the ceremony, I officially graduated from Kent State University with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
August 13-17: I attended new hire orientation at Georgia Tech, or as my cohort and I came to know it: Brittain Fellow Boot Camp.
August 21: I began teaching at Georgia Tech. I had three sections of ENGL1101. I designed my classes around the theme of becoming better communicators and professionals through neuroscience.
September 1: I began building the Lego Death Star set.
September 10: My Dad called me early in the morning to tell me that my Granny Ellis had passed away during the night. I wrote about it here.
November 15-18: I attended the first international Philip K. Dick conference at UT-Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany. I delivered a heavily revised version of my SFRA 2012 paper, “Philip K. Dick as Pioneer of the Brain Revolution.” The conference was a fantastic experience. I promise to write more about this in a separate post. In the meantime, you can see my pictures from Germany here.
November 22: My parents spent the Thanksgiving holiday with us in Norcross.
December 16: I filed my students’ grades and completed my first semester teaching at my alma mater. Looking backward, it was a tough semester, but it was extremely rewarding. I will reflect and write about this more soon.
December 17: I completed building the Lego Death Star set.
December 25: My parents spent Christmas with Y and me. They arrived bearing many gifts, and they took us out for more surprises. I believe that we all had a really wonderful time!
December 26+: I am preparing my teaching and publication materials. I also have a few job applications to complete. I have been using my chain saw and weed eater with saw blade a lot. When the weather and wind permit, I get to burn a small bit of excessive yard waste that I have to do something with.
December 29: Y and I met our friend (and fellow Georgia Tech alumna) Smitha for pastries and tea at Sweet Hut. We had a great time catching up.
I am currently teaching three sections of ENGL1101 at Georgia Tech. The class’ theme, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience,” remains the same as my earlier syllabus that I taught in Fall 2012 [available 