Toward an Algorithmic Rhetoric

Author(s):  
Chris Ingraham

Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or processes to arrive at a result, they are constrained by the rules that determine their parameters for operating. While an algorithm can only operate according to its instructions, however, the potential rules that might govern an algorithm are inexhaustible. An algorithm's design thus makes rhetorical choices that privilege the importance of some information or desired outcomes over others. This chapter argues for a way of thinking about algorithmic rhetoric as macro-, meso-, and micro-rhetorical. Along these lines, it would be beneficial to think more about algorithms as digital rhetorics with terrific power to sway what counts as knowledge, truth, and material reality in the everyday lives of people across an astonishing range of global communities in the twenty-first century.

Author(s):  
Felicia Chan

It is now widely acknowledged that the postracial fantasies ushered in by Barack Obama’s two-term election success are now in tatters. Yet debates on yellowface casting practices in contemporary Hollywood (also said to have evolved into “whitewashing” practices), in such films as The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), have resurfaced in recent times. These press controversies seem almost anachronistic after a generation of “intercultural” artistic theory and practice, “diversity” management training, and numerous academic discourses on otherness and difference, including those on cosmopolitan theory and practice. This article reviews yellowface practices and debates in contemporary times and puts them in dialogue with cosmopolitan aspirations of being “open to difference”, and argues that the latter cannot be taken as self-evident. It offers a way of thinking about yellowface practice via cosmopolitan pleasures evoked largely through modes of consumption, which “hollow out” the subjectivity of the character being depicted. On the site of the intersection between representation and subjectivity is where the identity politics occurs, yet, rather than universalising the issue, the article argues that a cosmopolitan approach should take on board localised conditions and contexts of production and reception in ways that acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the issues at hand.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Zamorano Llena

The theme of displacement and a view of exile that differs from traditional definitions of the concept and its associations with feelings of loss and nostalgia are a constant in Colum McCann's oeuvre. Images of flight and fleeing are recurrent in his work and underscore the centrality that mobility occupies in his fictional world, in which these flights are, not infrequently, a metaphorical act of escapism from material reality and physical conditioning. However, mobility in Let the Great World Spin is articulated as a characteristically twenty-first century phenomenon in its emphasis on how interconnectivity beyond differences, especially in the form of transnational exchanges, characterizes contemporary societies and shapes individual realities and identities. This essay contends that this transnational interconnectivity is not only foregrounded at the narrative level, thematically and in terms of narrative structure; McCann's tangentially framing of this novel within American post-9/11 fiction, while formally echoing an Irish literature of exile and thematically relating to an Irish literature of migration and fictions of the global, suggests the process in which new imaginative realities and identities are shaped from a cosmopolitan outlook that promotes the synergetic dialogue between national and transnational differences in the creation of a cosmopolitanized reality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 351-367
Author(s):  
Petra Dolata

Canada and/in the World is a broad topic that has produced a wide range of diverse publications in the twenty-first century, not only in political science but also in history and other neighbouring disciplines. What they all share is an interest in investigating how Canada, either as a state, a polity, a society, a culture or an idea, intersects with and is part of the international. Yet, along this spectrum we find literature spanning from problem-solving to critical—to use Robert Cox's distinction (1986)—as well as from heavily empirical and policy relevant to theoretically informed. Some works aim to explain, some to facilitate understanding and others to challenge and deconstruct. Thus, while there might be a traditional core of positivist writing centring on liberal internationalism and to a lesser extent (neo)realism, which some claim can be condensed into a list of “the ten most important books on Canadian foreign policy” (Kirton, 2009), there are also strong critical voices that challenge core assumptions about how we conceptualize and examine Canada and/in the world.


1992 ◽  
Vol 39 (9) ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Charles P. Geer

As teachers use NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989) to develop programs that will prepare students for the twenty-first century, some are discovering that mathematics instruction is going to be very different in the 1990s. Many previous programs placed a heavy emphasis on paper-and-pencil proficiency with computational skills and learning mathematics by memorizing rules. Because of advances in technology, new knowledge about how learning occurs, and the changing needs of business and industry, future programs will focus on mathematics with meaning, problem solving, and higher-level cognitive skills.


Author(s):  
Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga

Lexical borrowings can be regarded as one of the clearest and most direct consequences of any language contact situation. However, not all the borrowings that enter a language are alike. Since their entrance in a given language is motivated by different reasons, two general kinds of borrowings must be distinguished: necessary borrowings which name ideas and concepts for which the recipient language does not have any equivalent term; and superfluous borrowings which, on the contrary, refer to realities for which the recipient language already has equivalent terms. This paper focuses on the latter type. Specifically, it presents a diachronic corpus-based analysis of 14 English fashion terms with a clear Spanish lexical counterpart —blazer/‘chaqueta’, celebrity/‘famoso’, clutch/‘bolso de mano’, cool/‘de moda’, fashion/‘moda’, fashionable/‘de moda’, fashionista/ ‘adicto a la moda’, jeans/‘vaqueros’, nude/‘color carne’, photocall/‘sesión de fotos’, shorts/‘pantalones cortos’, sporty/‘deportivo’, trench/‘trinchera, gabardina’, and trendy/‘moderno’— in four Spanish corpora: the Corpus del Español, and the CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI corpora. My objectives are twofold: firstly, to demonstrate to what extent these unnecessary Anglicisms are increasingly becoming part of the everyday contemporary Peninsular Spanish fashion lexicon; and secondly, to account for the three reasons that underlie their alleged constant entrance in twenty-first century Peninsular Spanish: (i) globalization and the impact of English on Spanish; (ii) the highly visible presence of English in the field of advertising; (iii) and the selling power of English.


Author(s):  
Isabel M.ª Andrés Cuevas

Chris Stewart’s account of his experiences after purchasing a farm in Andalusia, in an isolated farmhouse in the mountains adjacent to Granada, are far from the traditionally bucolic depictions of a pastoral landscape, in which the drawbacks of agricultural life become unquestionably compensated by the bliss of life in nature. Even though, as the title indicates, he seems to be a born romantic and optimist, undefeated by the inconveniences of a life without the everyday commodities of a First-World country in the twenty-first century, his memoir narrative is soon balanced by his own testimony, which provides a realistic counterbalance to Stewart’s initial idealistic portrayal of life in rustic Alpujarras. Nonetheless, as this article intends to demonstrate, it is precisely this necessary demystification of the rural setting prevailing in certain areas in Andalusia that becomes crucial for the establishment of an essential complicity with the audience, thereby trained to appreciate—and even become enthralled by—the reality of the rural surroundings which the contemporary reader can no longer envision as merely a place of “vales and hills” softly covered by “a host of golden daffodils”.


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