To slough and to slither

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Robert Basil

The xkcd webcomic is very entertaining. (h/t language log)

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Business Communications course ‘in a box’ – terrific resource

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Robert Basil

My colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University have been really rising to the occasion during the pandemic, in all ways. I’m especially impressed, as an editor, by how prolific and intelligent their publishing ventures have been. Here’s another super-helpful one.

My Kwantlen colleague Arley Cruthers writes:

For those of you who teach business communications, my colleagues Melissa Ashman, John Grant, Petti Fong, Dr. Seanna Takacs and I collaborated to make an OOC (Open Online Course). Basically, it’s a ‘course in a box’ built using OER [Open Educational Resources] resources with a CC-BY license, so anyone can either use the whole thing (assignments, activities, mini-lectures, readings etc) or use/adapt/remix bits and pieces. We got a grant from BCCampus to do it, so we were able to do things like have a focus group with students and compensate them for their feedback.

From the book’s intro:

This course is designed for instructors who have the option of delivering the content either synchronously or asynchronously. … Students will explore and practice concepts such as their own writing beliefs, genres, audience analysis, storytelling, forming arguments, evaluating sources, persuasion, and verbal and written presentation skills. Learning and applying those skills are needed … in a world where new forms of engagement, relationship-building, critical thinking, internationalization, decolonization, anti-racism, and Indigenization form the foundation of today’s workplace.

I used Arley’s recently published Business Writing for Everyone in two first-year classes this summer. I hadn’t taught these classes in a few years. Her book made life a lot easier for me, and my students enjoyed reading it.

Here’s more on my university’s Open Learning initiatives.

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Posted on August 18, 2020 by Robert Basil
Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo NY; art by Robert Therrian

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Flagging the #tags

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Robert Basil

It’s not just the photos available for viewing and sale by the Magnum Agency but how they are tagged:

Magnum Photos, one of the world’s most celebrated photographic agencies, is to re-examine the content of its archive of more than 1 million images after accusations it made available photographs that critics said may show the sexual exploitation of minors. …

“Recently, we have been alerted to historical material in our archive that is problematic in terms of imagery, captioning or keywording and we are taking this extremely seriously,” she said.

As of Friday the Magnum archive was offline. …

While photo essays documenting sex workers and sexual exploitation have a long history in journalistic reportage photography, Magnum admitted it had been caught out, both by the presence of some images in its archive, and by the way they had been labelled in search terms accessible to the wider public. …

Several of the photographs, which were sexually explicit, were tagged in the archive with the search term “teenage girl – 13 to 18 years”.

“Some of the search terms are problematic like referring to a 13 to 18-year-old girl,” the spokesman said, adding that it was not clear who had supplied the tags for the pictures or whether the photographs in question depicted what was described in the tags. He said some “tags and images were not appropriate” for the agency’s publicly searchable archive. …

“I think the whole photographic industry, across the board, are questioning their assumptions, not least the power structures and inherent way that photography has predominantly reflected male gaze, which leaves it very open to very strong arguments of exploitation.”

Librarians and curators – really anyone involved in the licensing of archive photography – have to revisit and reassess their archives continually. I’m confident Magnum will meet this requirement in an enlightened fashion; perhaps I am swayed by the agency’s great history. Some photographers are not sanguine, though.

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RIP Geoff Nunberg

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Robert Basil

I aspired to rise to the level of acumen, clarity, and courtesy of this marvelous linguist, knowing of course that I could never get close. Listen to some of Nunberg’s commentaries for NPR’s “Fresh Air” program.

—

22 August: The New York Times published an excellent obituary of Nunberg today:

In a “Fresh Air” commentary last year on the gender-neutral pronouns used by nonbinary people, [Nunberg] urged speakers to “tweak your internal grammar” to refer to an individual as “they.”

“It takes some practice to get the hang of it,” he said, “but the human language processing capacity is more adaptable than people realize, even for geezers like me. As I read through an article about a nonbinary person who uses ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘their,’ the pronouns ultimately sort themselves out.”

In another NPR essay, he observed that the word “socialism” has survived as a term of abuse used against Democrats by Republicans, but has lately lost some of its political zip because “the connections to Marxism are hard to discern” and its power to slander has diminished.

“Conservatives often seem to assign magical powers to that word — call yourself a socialist and you summon the specter of Stalin whether you meant to our not,” he said. “You think you’re calling for guaranteed health care, but you’re really calling for gulags and collectivization.”

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Editing for a civil society

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Robert Basil

Friend of No Contest Communications Chet Wisniewsiki, a principal research scientist at Sophos, woke me up with this short thread earlier this week:

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On collaboration

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Robert Basil

Richard Rogers upon meeting Lorenz Hart for the first time:  “I left Hart’s house having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a source of permanent irritation.” Their song “My Funny Valentine” is something of a mutual self-portrait.

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The root of beauty …

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Robert Basil

… is boldness, wrote Pasternak. “That is what’s brought us to one another.”

Apropos: After Wolfgang Pauli had given a colloquium on some ideas related to particle physics, Pauli said to Neils Bohr: “You will probably think that what I said is crazy.” Bohr to Pauli: “Yes, but unfortunately it is not crazy enough.” – from Abraham Pais (in Neils Bohr: A Centenary Volume, p. 182)

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“Business Writing for Everyone”

Posted on May 9, 2020 by Robert Basil

My summer 2020 first-year students will be getting their textbook for free – Business Writing for Everyone, put together by my colleague Arley Cruther’s. It’s a wonderful resource that will make my teaching better without a doubt.

Arley’s “Adaptation Statement” is worth reading:

Several chapters were written from scratch, while others were adapted and remixed from other open textbooks, as indicated at the end of each chapter. Unless stated otherwise, Business Communication For Everyone (c) 2019 by Arley Cruthers and is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

In Business Communication For Everyone, examples have been changed to Canadian references, and information throughout the book, as applicable, has been revised to reflect Canadian content and language. The author has also changed names to reflect her classroom composition and has added examples that reflect her students’ diverse experiences. Gender neutral language (they/their) has been used intentionally. In addition, while general ideas and content may remain unchanged from the sources from which this adapted version is based, word choice, phrasing, and organization of content within each chapter may have changed to reflect this author’s stylistic preferences.

The author also collaborated with Brenda Fernie, who is the president of Seyem, the economic development branch of the Kwantlen Nation, to produce a series of narratives that connect to the topic explored in the book.

This book was composed on unceded Coast Salish territory.

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Journalism needs a better metaphor

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Robert Basil

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen writes that “exposure” is a “metaphor that increasingly misleads. I refer to the image of ‘exposure’ as a description of what the press does, should do, or isn’t doing well enough. To expose wrongdoing, incompetence, or hypocrisy is to do good in journalism, right? Well, yes, but…”

What follows is a remarkable twitter thread that “get(s) closer to the key problems in covering disinformation than anything else I have read,” writes author Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute. “It is also an exceptionally effective use of Twitter as a format. I think of it as a short essay in serial form.”

Two of Jay’s key points:

Many of the biggest and hardest problems before the American press involve matters that have already been “brought to light,” meaning they cannot be resolved by further exposure. …

For the press, then, the problem is not how to bring to light the truth that the President is a wholly unreliable source of information, but how to operate around him in light of the fact that we know he is likely to pollute the stream further when asked legitimate questions.

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