Archive for October, 2007

ambiguous sexism

4 years ago

by dawn in cultural & textual studies, rhetoric

I love typography. There is something about the ways that letters and words fit together to make a beautiful design within themselves. Leading, kerning, serif or sans-serif — they are all elements that I love to play with and to use to make something original and appealing.

I was quite excited to find an introductory video via viz. that explains typography in an easy and straightforward way. Except…

Well, you watch it and see if you catch it before reading any further.

Did you see it? When the video defines who uses typography, it showed only men’s images when saying typographers, graphic artists, and art directors.

It’s a little thing, right? But it isn’t. It’s this type of inconspicuous sexism that can be the most damaging. When we see those images, we think, subconsciously, that only men will be in those positions. That’s simply not true. In my department, our lead graphic designer is a woman. A woman who oversees a staff of nearly a dozen people. Within her staff, many of the student workers who are majoring in graphic design are women. The student graphic designer who did the graphics for the class I’m teaching is a woman.

I’m not going out of my way to find sexism in the things I research. When it is there, though, I’m going to point it out.

Subtle things like these types of images are the things that I look at when I’m researching rhetorical placement of images. What kinds of messages are they giving out? What colors, fonts, images, and sounds (if any) are being used? How do these affect an audience and, what kind of an audience are they trying to reach?

It may seem innocuous. It can be just the opposite, though.

money for nothing and books for free

4 years ago

by dawn in books, technology

Most of my readers are bibliophiles in the most delightful sense of the word. I know that most of you absolutely adore your books and many of you do poetry, book, or article reviews and/or references on your sites. That being said, I wanted to share some sites with you.

My gift to you is places where you can either read or listen to books for free. As someone who listens to books on my iPod daily and who reads articles/websites/journals more often than I care to admit, finding these free treasures is a joy.

Many of you may have already discovered the Google Books site. I talked about it in a presentation I gave in May and quite a few people in that presentation already knew about it. I have used this site to find scholarly books on the issues I’ve been researching — anything from feminist studies to identity to rhetoric — and found plenty to keep me reading for years. In addition, you can find segments or whole books on a wide range of topics. Google Books opens a book up in a reader and you can read the book right on your desktop. You can even save the book to your library to return to later (I have done that for research).

One thing that I did find unfortunate is that when I put in key terms to search for in the books, they are all highlighted in the same color, unlike Google searches where each term has its own color. This is only a problem when you are searching for multiple terms, however.

DailyLit lists books that are more literature based. For instance, when I did a search for “rhetoric and identity,” I didn’t get any scholarly papers. Instead, I got books by D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and Virginia Woolf (although I have to admit that the Descartes book did pique my interest).

DailyLit works by sending you pieces of the book on a daily basis either in email or through an RSS feed. It’s not meant for a “sit down and read this book all at once” type of setting (and I can’t imagine reading Descartes that way anyway).

Book Glutton is a new service that is still in beta. However you can sign up to take part in their beta testing. Or, alternatively, you can watch the video below and see if it’s something you’re interested in.

Say you don’t want to sit and read, though. You’re busy and on the go. How do you get your reading done (and be cultural) and still keep going? Audiobooks are great for that. There are pay services (just like there are for buying books) but there are also some great free sites, too many to list here. If you do a Google search, you can and will find thousands of sites (that link will take you to a search).

Out of the many audio book sites out there, my favorite is the Gutenberg Project. You can choose from human-read or computer-read books (and it does make a difference).

I have also listened to a few at Oculture.

Do you have any favorites you’d like to share? I’d love to hear about them.

constructing identity

4 years ago

by dawn in cultural & textual studies, rhetoric, women

My world these days is full of thinking about how we create identity in online communities (specifically women). We create multiple identities (as we do in our offline lives — mother, student, employee, etc) and sometimes those identities are fractured or are portraying us in ways that are not as flattering as we would like.

This video shows some of the issues I’ve been thinking about. How far do we go to project ourselves in certain ways or how much attention are we paying to how we do project ourselves?

I’ve been wondering what kinds of responsibilities we have to ourselves, to other women, and to the girls coming behind us to create identities that avoid sexist stereotypes, contribute to stronger female images, and that build up women instead of tearing them down.

There is so much out there already tearing us down. Why do we persist in doing it to ourselves as well?

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