Today, I’m stepping outside my usual zone a little bit and ruminating on television and celebrity at Anne Helen Petersen’s fantastic blog, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.
I’ve been a fan of The Hills since the beginning – though my viewing has dropped off lately – and after rewatching some early seasons, I suggest that Heidi can be read as a tragic character. With the benefit of hindsight, and the inundation of media coverage of Heidi and Spencer, her transformations over the past few years (including her recent extensive plastic surgery) take on a more sinister cast. I’m not wedded to this idea – it’s still floating around while I make sense of it, and this blog post is a start.
Just a quick post today – I’m dying to read Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s book, Staring: How We Look but couldn’t find a way to work it into the prelims reading lists that dominate my free time right now. Until I get around to reading it, though, this video is a nice introduction.* Would be great for teaching, but is also just a well-done blurb on the issue.
*Unfortunately, it is not part of YouTube’s attempted captioning program, and doesn’t have any captions of its own.
Just a quick hit to say happy birthday to Louis Braille and the written system he pioneered. There are a number of articles out there lately focused on how e-readers are supplanting Braille. E-readers, Kindles and screenreaders for the web are all exciting and useful technologies, and from a universal design standpoint, they do a lot of good crossover work as both assistive devices for people with visual impairments and as enhancing technologies for those with vision.
But, as is pointed out in FWD’s link round-up, these technologies are only useful for visually impaired people with normal hearing abilities. Even more troubling, from some research I did on screenreader technology a few years ago, these audio technologies are difficult to learn, synthesized speech is still imperfect, and the temporal element of having written material read aurally means that progress and comprehension can be very slow. Thus, a number of people still prefer screenreaders that create Braille output – it can be skimmed, revisited, and stored much more easily than audio formats.
So, hooray for Braille and ongoing advances in making the written word available to all! Blogging will continue to be light around here, as I’m travelling more in January, so here’s a thematically appropriate web comic from XKCD to wrap things up!
Today, I’m stepping outside my usual zone a little bit and ruminating on television and celebrity at Anne Helen Petersen’s fantastic blog, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.
