Week 5

Tuesday, February 5

• Introduce Mapping Project
• "Mapping: A Metaphor for Professional Writing" (ppt)
• Introduce The Ghost Map
  
  • Reading Guide (pdf)
  • Official Book Site
  • Brief description from author
  • New York Times book review
  • Video of Steven Johnson discussing the book:
    
  • Video of Steven Johnson discussing the rhetoric of the map (note how he addresses the map as argument and the map as a community-produced representation - recall our discussion of "risk management"):
    
    
    “The Map Itself: A Work of Persuasion, A Neighborhood Representing Itself" | Steven Johnson Discusses THE GHOST MAP (#5) from Book Videos on Vimeo

For Next Time

• Brainstorm Mapping Projects

Thursday, February 7

• Mapping Exercise: Representing Humans to Aliens
  • Voyager Golden Map (Interactive Page)
  • Voyager Golden Record (Wikipedia Page)
  • "Billion Year Portfolio"
• The limitations of "accuracy" as an assessment: photographs
  • This story discusses a famous, Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a member of the Viet Kong
  • Importantly, it includes the thoughts of the photographer (now deceased) about the photograph
  • Note both the original photographer's (Eddie Adams) comments, the comments of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, as well as some of the comments to the story (and how they seem to "miss" the full implications of Adams's views about the photograph)

For Next Time

• Post: Mapping Project Proposal, 2/10 (by midnight, categorize appropriately)
• Read: The Ghost Map, 1 – 109
• Post: Launch Posts (Team Protagoras) by 2/11; Query Posts (Team Corax) by 2/12; Extension Posts (Team Gorgias) by 2/13; Meta-Comments (Team Isocrates) by 2/15. All posts due by midnight of the day due