VirtualLit looks like a set of excellent tutorials in close reading poems and fiction. I came across it searching for definitions of connotation – I’m grading papers, you see, and grading papers you always see what you didn’t teach well enough. VirtualLit not only has a decent explanation of connotation and denotation, it has simple but effective exercises you could do yourself online, but that would be easily transported to the classroom (write sentences on blackboard with alternate words, have the students discuss the different connotations and senses either all together or in pairs). I could find, perhaps, some images or even mockup a website or two that similarly let students see how small differences change meaning. I didn’t use any verbal examples to explain connotation this year. Just images. Perhaps words would be better.

The students have done great work, though, honestly, and most of them do use words like connotation correctly. They’ve dug up some fascinating websites. Look at Playmusicmagazine, for instance, discussed by Tom Henrik, who was a a well-established blogger long before signing up for my class. Isn’t that an astonishingly retro, remediated look for a website? The students had to come up with a question about the website which their analysis was supposed to answer, and my favourite question so far was about a brewery’s website. Beamish is a brand of Irish stout that ran a campaign in Ireland last year proclaiming “Beamish Consistency” – you can always rely on Beamish, was the idea. So Daniel’s question was whether the Beamish website could be said to have a “Beamish Consistency”.

His conclusion is no. Unfortunately not. But I love that creativity. I love it when people mix knowledge gleaned from several spheres of life.

1 Comment

  1. VirtualLit
    Jill Walker writes: “VirtualLit looks like a set of excellent tutorials in close reading poems and fiction.” [You can read more of what Jill has to say on her site.] The site is maintained by the publisher Bedford/St. Martin’s: These…

Leave a Reply to palimpsest: open-source teaching resources. good stuff, free. Cancel reply

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. ā€œImagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]