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39
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Introduction
Interests include Arts Based Research involving digitally enhanced data analysis, visualization, sonification and performance; Automation of language and literacy; Poetry and poetics as artful inquiry; Cultural studies in education; Teacher education; English Language Arts; Digital literature, Information systems from a new materialist and post humanist lens.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (39)
We write about the poetics of kinship with birds, trees, stones, and places as an act of resistance to neo-literal, neo-liberal destruction of refuge for non-human beings. Through research in which we situate ourselves in relation to the more-than-human, we take up kin as a verb. We offer experiences of kinning—that is, being present with that whic...
The pandemic is not one coherent narrative but an unbounded multiplicity of narrative ravellings. One theme that can be traced through the course of the past two years is the undoings and redoings of normalcy, including normalcy in qualitative research. Our digital literacy research group took up the pandemic as a canvas upon which to story new fut...
The concept of transmediation might be one of the most influential intellectual tools for studying, discussing and fostering innovative phenomena across fields of study. One could argue that the term itself is self-explanatory. Etymologically, it suggests a transition (to go across) between different media but the concept of transmediation has been...
This article explores the role of literary user preference and experience of contextualizing information in the interpretive responses to poems on PhoneMe, a social media web-platform and mobile app for place-based spoken word poetry. 137 education students in three Canadian universities participated by completing a survey that asked them to choose...
The Journal of Marketing Management recently published an article titled "Towards Glitch Pedagogy". As part of their discussion, Preece & Whittaker (2023), misrepresent an earlier work titled "A Glitch Pedagogy…" (Peña & James, 2016) in an effort to minimize the potential influence and effect that our work would have on the general concept of glitc...
This paper is born out of conceptual work stimulated in the construction of a literary search engine for the PhoneMe project (www.phonemeproject.com), social media for spoken-word poetry. Drawing on Hiroki Azuma, we explore the ways in which desires are located and consummated through acts of searching and propose a pedagogy of search literacy whic...
This book review explores the publication of an email correspondence between Carl Leggo and Kimberley Holmes which occurred over the period of time that Leggo was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment for a brain tumour that eventually ended his life. It observes his role as a super-mentor of graduate students undertaking works in poetic...
This research paper explores how preservice teachers engaged with the transmodal place‐based poetry on PhoneMe, an educational social media platform for sharing poetry and vocal performances about place. This work is situated in literature on digital place‐based education and theoretical scholarship exploring transmodality and the shifting entangle...
Futures literacy is a concept that has gained increased currency over the last decade and has been taken up by, for example, organizations like UNESCO in global initiatives to improve our capacity to performatively imagine the future and alter the course of dominant narratives. Rather than thinking singularly about what may constitute futures liter...
The Patch workshop explores creative / critical analyses that can map the collectively relevant topoi of semiosis in linguistic texts according to the three ecologies as articulated by Félix Guattari. As creative pedagogues both in service and critical of creative economics, we valourize a generative practice, one that results in successive creativ...
As visualization struggles to grasp the intricate and temporal networks of meaning found in textual data, sonification emerges as a creative and effective way of representing language. Accordingly, this paper seeks to introduce Singling, a textual sonification software that allows users to create and manipulate auditory representations of a text's...
In this paper we explore how place-based poetry mediated online enabled community self-representation. Located in the urban core of a large cosmopolitan Canadian city, the PhoneMe project brought together academic researchers and community members into a collaborative educational creative space. Community members created poems about specific places...
The Patch workshop explores creative / critical analyses which can map the collectively relevant topoi of semiosis in linguistic texts according to the three ecologies as articulated by Felix Guattari. As creative pedagogues both in service of and critical of creative economics, we use this workshop as a generative practice, one which results in su...
This paper describes a live transmediatic impro-visualization that started with the production of a digital photograph. The artifact-as-raw-data was translated into sound and played through a transducer (vibrating speaker), thus filtering the digital file as an analogue signal through different physical materials before its re-digitization, re-reco...
This will be a live quintet performance of a collaborative future narrative using the instrument/platform of Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musial Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software developed by the Digital Literacy Centre at the University of British Columbia. Capable of sounding characters, symbols and punctuation, or...
This is the debut show of Singling, a new text sonification software we have developed to analyze and otherwise perform string data, choosing from a wide variety of linguistic and musical parameters and multilevel parsing of text. Virtual attendees of the performance will be invited to share their thoughts, reactions, poems, and codework with us th...
Working paper for use in data sonification and visualization. Based on a study of one ESL student's use of 3-D visuals to explore complex meanings in fiction. Close analysis of aspects of language using Systemic Functional Linguistics, the Knowledge Framework, and looking specifically at function words such as modals and prepositions assigning moti...
Computational thinking has been promoted as a cross-curricular mode of thinking necessary for meaningful engagement in 21stcentury literacy practices; however, CT is generally restricted to computer science where it finds an obvious though constricted context. The tendency to think of CT in terms of computer science perpetuates what Papert (1980) d...
Through a faculty-wide program enhancement campaign implemented in a British Col-umbia university, we investigated sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) awareness and inclusion in a Canadian teacher education program. Comparing data from curriculum mapping of course outlines, close analysis of a departmental cross-section of 49 undergraduat...
Computational thinking (CT) has been hailed as a necessary competency that should be incorporated across the curriculum; however, research shows that CT is generally corifined within programming curriculums. If we are to foster CT in areas like the humanities, we must extend our understanding of CT to include emergent and creative expressions of co...
The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across...
In this paper, the authors present the initial findings from explorations on transformation patterns of data in raw format when crossing or transmediating directly (i.e., unaffected by any other form of codification) between audio and visual media. These patterns have allowed the authors to engage in the production of transmediatic artifacts with s...
In this paper, we present documental evidence of the influence that Kodak Eastman had since the late 60's in the advancement of the term "visual literacy". Here, we argue that the involvement that this company had with the framing of a particular type of literacy might have set a precedent for a still current trend: the use of concepts particularly...
For more than 50 years computers have been programmed to engage in creative discourse. For the past 20 years, artificial or machine intelligence has been able to augment, collaborate and at times invent human forms of creative expression. The increasingly globalized presence of mobile technology greatly influences our communicative behaviors and pr...
As two scholars committed to Poetic Inquiry, we find ourselves positioned between diametrical impulses guiding our creative practices: between an organic poetics of speaking truthfully from the heart and living poetically on the one hand, and a digital poetics of crafting utterance from logical constraints and living probabilistically on the other....
Peer Reviewed
Computational thinking & pedagogical playing
Ernesto Peña, Kedrick James & The Digital Literacy Centre
Department of Language and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
Over the last few years, the need to integrate computer coding to formal education has been both entertained and contested within and outside academic circles (Bierend,...
In the tradition of a decade of bi-annual gatherings of the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, this volume serves as the fifth refereed symposium anthology. Enchantments of Place celebrates poetry and poetic voices—theorizing and exploring poetic inquiry as an approach, methodology, and/or method for use in contemporary research practices....
By experimenting with computer glitches as provocation of accepted norms of user interactions with digital technologies, this paper extends and radicalizes Dewey’s (1934) pedagogical principle of “consummatory experience,” observing computational error, logical accidents, and procedural glitches as creative and productive forces in the lived curric...
It could be argued that one of the most remarkable affordances of digital technology is the possibility to translate information across different kinds of media, a practice that has traditionally been known as transmediation. Although the concept of transmediation predates digital technology, contemporary practices translate between various electro...
Purpose
In this presentation we explore the pedagogical potential of disrupting automated processes of digital media production across modalities to produce unpredictable and educational results. In doing so, the learner/artist/researcher is provided with evidence of hitherto invisible, automated means of digital production. In particular we are in...
This paper briefly historicizes English language mail services, postal reform, and the inauguration of global delivery systems for material mails in order to outline the origins of junk mail and discursive excess in network concepts and systems. These historical developments not only made mail services affordable to common people, but also created...
Late teen, early 1980s, and first gorging on poetry because it was the only thing that made sense, I became deeply enthused by hearing poems, as much as by reading them: to experience poetry as immanent, in synaesthetic plenty, all writing, reading, listening, speaking, watching, touching, tasting and smelling of poetry was involved. Poets whose wo...
