Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Embodiment and Digital Literacy
Submitted by crashingintowalls on 5 November 2006 - 8:14pm.
So, as many of you know, I have a pet interest in embodied cognition and I try to apply this to every class that I am in. Thus far, I have been rather quiet because I have had trouble deciding how to make it work with a media that seem disembodied by their very nature. Now that we're getting down to the wire, I found myself looking again for inroads into the topic. I'm not satisfied with what I found and I'll be looking for more, but the most promising one thus far is a masters thesis called A New Alphabet [note: this views a little better in IE and I'd recommend reading the "about" page first]. The project seeks to discuss issues of embodied language in a digital medium. The format and finish isn't great, and some of the heady content gets wrapped up in itself. Still, it feeds my habit. Any feedback on this?
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visual poetry, alphabet
Great link. How would you define "embodied cognition" or its study as opposed to cognitive psychology in general?
the politics of cognitive science
Well, it's not so much an opposition cognitive psychology as a theorhetical debate within the field itself. Much of the work done in linguistics and cognitive science following Chomsky has focused on quantifiable models that propose to completely describe what is going on in the human mind. At the end of the day, there has been a belief that once we know enough we can program a computer to function like a human being.
Embodied cognition throws many assumptions of cognitive science (and thus the findings arrived at under them) for a loop. If human intelligence is seated in the body and not the so-called "rational mind," we cannot depend on this intlelligence to be reducable to an intellectual form that we can theorize or model completely. Thus, those in this camp are rather unpopular right now because we would like to question many of the "facts" that linguistics and cognitive science have arrived at. The benefit, in my mind, is a notion of human intelligence that his more truly human in its quality, being irrational, irreduceable and tied to the particularlities of our physical existence.