This website is an artifact.
Not a brochure for work happening somewhere else — the making of it is some of the work. It is what monotropic bricolage thinkers produce when they write about neurodivergence using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web, and it looks the way it does for reasons we can account for.
This page is that accounting. Why the pages are built from scavenged parts and other people’s words. Why so much of it is quotation. Why it is a garden rather than a stream, open by default, and mirrored in more than one place because data is fragile. Why we mix talk, texts, and media instead of writing essays. Why some of it is silly.
Three things this page is not.
If you want the short practical introduction to how our pages read — the layering, the pacing, the reason you can stop a third of the way down and still have got the point — that is Scrollytelling: How We Tell Our Stories.
If you want the reference manual for actually building one — gutters, accordions, takeaway boxes, alt text — that is Page Conventions.
If you want the rules for the words themselves, that is the House Style Guide.
This page is the why underneath all three.
Header image: “Wolpertinger” by Kaya Oldaker is licensed under “All Rights Reserved”. Used with permission.
Table of Contents
- 📼 Bricolage, Remixing, Constructionism, and Pastiche: Behind Our Punk Rock Research-Storytelling
- 🗣️ Talk, Texts, and Media
- 📊 Language Has Always and Ever Been a Multimodal Performance
- 🔑 The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy… According to Your Grandmothers
- 🌍 A Knowledge Commons and a Space of Openness
- 🪴 Digital Gardening
- 💨 Default to Open, Created Serendipity, and Learning Exhaust
- 🗄️ Building a Storytelling Database
- 📚🎥🎧 Story: Maintaining the Continuity of Creation
- 🖍️ Let’s Revel in Disruptive Frivolity
- 🎸 When the movement is strong, the music is strong.
📼 Bricolage, Remixing, Constructionism, and Pastiche: Behind Our Punk Rock Research-Storytelling
You don’t want to make communication an elite thing. And I think that’s really a lot of what punk was about — a hands on, do what you want, of the people type of a thing.
Anita Smith, Fifth Column, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution
bricolage = the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available.
pastiche = a work that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Pastiche celebrates the work it imitates.
constructionism = a theory that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.
monotropism = a neurodiversity affirming theory of autism.
What do you get when monotropic bricolage thinkers write about monotropism and neurodiversity using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web? This website. This website is an artifact of our iteration and constructionism.
In the tradition of punk and disabled communities, we use bricolage and pastiche to roll our own.
Constructionism
Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.
On Constructionism, Makerspaces, and Music Education
We practice constructionism and actively engage in constructing things in the world. Constructionism, collaborative niche construction, bricolage, and toolbelt theory go great together.
Young Stimpunk: I want a red lamp with 100 teeth, 7 eyes and 2 mouths.
Older Stimpunk: Let’s make it.
DIY Bricolage
Neurodivergent and disabled people have to do it ourselves, or we go without. We bricolage from “a diverse range of things that happen to be available“.
People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we don’t hack we often go without.
Liz Jackson: Designing for Inclusivity – 99U
In the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY” or “do-it-yourself projects”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.
The term bricolage has also been used in many other fields, including anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, education, computer software, and business.
Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler (“to tinker”), with the English term DIY (“Do-it-yourself”) being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French usage. In both languages, bricolage also denotes any works or products of DIY endeavors.
Bricolage – Wikipedia
The most important message I got from punk, was the DIY ethos. The DIY ethic. It’s inherently part of surviving.
Don Letts, SHOWstudio: Stussy – Talking Punk with Don Letts and John Ingham
Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s described the early Masque scene: “Everyone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, ‘cause … you couldn’t buy real punk clothes like they could in London.”
“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism
Pastiche
A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.
The word pastiche is a French cognate of the Italian noun pasticcio, which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients. Metaphorically, pastiche and pasticcio describe works that are either composed by several authors, or that incorporate stylistic elements of other artists’ work. Pastiche is an example of eclecticism in art.
Pastiche – Wikipedia
Stimpunks.org is pastiche. We celebrate the work of the many authors and artists we incorporate into our storytelling. In our learning space, we encourage our learners to build and iterate via bricolage, pastiche, and celebration of their influences.
Next in a punk sensibility was its love affair with pastiche. As the true postmoderns they were, punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology.
In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.
“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
Remix
We encourage our learners to remix.
Remixing is key to progress.
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work
Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
Everything is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD) – YouTube
Together, all of this is a living storytelling and community building process that turns our differences into strengths and our problems into assets.
Turn Problems Into Assets
Punk rock is a living thing.
It’s about turning problems into assets.
Don Letts, Rebel Dread
Take Our Differences and Make Them Strengths
Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.
Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
In other words…
One Idea Per Line
- Communication should not be exclusive or limited to a select group.
- Punk culture emphasized a hands-on, do-it-yourself approach that was accessible to everyone.
- Punk rock is about hands-on, do-it-yourself communication for everyone.
- Bricolage refers to constructing or creating something using whatever materials are available.
- Pastiche is a work that imitates the style of other artists and celebrates their work.
- Constructionism is a theory that suggests people learn best when actively engaged in constructing things in the world.
- Monotropism is a theory related to autism that embraces neurodiversity.
- Constructionism is practiced whenever people create artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.
- The punk and disabled communities embrace bricolage and pastiche to create their own unique expressions.
- Punks drew inspiration from various cultures and ideologies, freely borrowing and melding them into their own form of expression.
- Neurodivergent and disabled individuals often have to rely on bricolage to meet their needs.
- People with disabilities are skilled at finding creative solutions because they often have limited options.
- Bricolage is the process of creating something using a diverse range of available materials.
- Bricolage is a French word meaning improvisation or tinkering, similar to the concept of DIY (do-it-yourself) in English.
- This website is a result of bricolage and constructionism.
- Punk and disabled communities use bricolage and pastiche to create their own.
- Punks drew from various cultures and created something new.
- Disabled people have to be resourceful and use what’s available.
- DIY ethos is an important message from punk.
- The early punk scene embraced homemade creations.
- Stimpunks.org celebrates the work of others through pastiche.
- Pastiche imitates and celebrates the work of other artists.
- Remixing is encouraged in our learning space.
- Everything we create is influenced by existing creations and the lives of others.
One Paragraph Summary
This website, stimpunks.org, is a platform that combines different ideas and concepts to create something new. It is influenced by the punk and disabled communities, who believe in doing things themselves and using whatever resources are available. The website promotes the practice of bricolage, which is the construction of something using a diverse range of materials, and pastiche, which is imitating the style of other artists. It also embraces the concept of constructionism, which suggests that people learn best when they actively engage in creating things. The website encourages learners to remix and iterate, meaning they can take existing ideas and put their own spin on them. Overall, stimpunks.org celebrates the DIY ethos and the idea that creation requires influence from various sources.
Six Paragraph Summary
The concept of bricolage, remixing, constructionism, and pastiche are all intertwined in the context of punk rock and disability communities.
Bricolage refers to the construction or creation of a work using a diverse range of available materials or resources. In the context of punk rock and disability communities, bricolage represents the act of making do with what is available and creating something unique and meaningful out of it. It is a hands-on, do-it-yourself approach that empowers individuals to express themselves and their ideas.
Pastiche, on the other hand, is a work that imitates the style or character of the work of other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates and pays homage to the work it imitates. In the punk rock and disability communities, pastiche is used to draw inspiration from various sources and create something new and original while honoring the influences that came before.
Constructionism is a theory that suggests people learn best when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. It emphasizes the importance of hands-on learning and creating tangible artifacts to represent one’s knowledge constructions. In the context of punk rock and disability communities, constructionism is practiced when individuals create artifacts, such as music, art, or writing, to express their ideas and experiences.
The concept of monotropism, which is a neurodiversity-affirming theory of autism, is also mentioned in the context of bricolage thinking. It highlights the unique ways in which neurodivergent individuals process information and engage with the world. The punk rock and disability communities often embrace this diversity and encourage individuals to embrace their unique perspectives and approaches.
In summary, the punk rock and disability communities embrace bricolage, remixing, constructionism, and pastiche as creative and empowering approaches to self-expression and knowledge construction. These concepts allow individuals to make the most of the resources available to them, draw inspiration from various sources, and celebrate their influences while creating something new and meaningful.
AI Disclosure: The summaries above were created with the help of Elephas AI Assistant.
🗣️ Talk, Texts, and Media
We use talk, texts, and media in a highly connected way to provide vicarious learning experiences.
Stories, texts, and media (e.g., videos, films, music, and video games) can be important means for extending children’s real-world experiences. Each of these can cause a child to fill up his or her imagination with images and match them to words, just as children do in real-world experiences. Talk, texts, and media are types of virtual or vicarious experiences.
The human mind is built in such a way that people (that is, all of us) often cannot remember whether an experience of theirs was in the world, in talk (in a story for example), in a text, or in a movie (Reeves & Nass, 1999). All these can become fodder for pattern recognition, the superpower of the human mind.
Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (p. 38). Teachers College Press.
Good talk, texts, and media expose children to a wider array of experiences.
Good talk, texts, and media expose children to a wider array of experiences. In turn, children use these new, but vicarious, experiences to broaden the real-world experiences they actively seek out. As they broaden and deepen their real-world experiences, they can gain more from new and more advanced talk, texts, and media and then bring these lessons back home again to their real-world experiences. It is a virtuous cycle. But it does not happen all by itself.
When parents, mentors, and teachers create transactions and connections between real-world experiences and talk, texts, and various forms of media, they are engaged in one of the most crucial aspects of child development (Gee, 2004; New London Group, 1996; Rosenblatt, 2005). Such transactions and connections integrate children’s real-world experiences and vicarious experiences into a well-organized and highly integrated experiential resource base for thinking about the past, making sense of things, preparing for the future, and storying the self in healthy ways. In such a well-connected and well-integrated resource base, literacy, media, and the world are deeply connected and enrich one another.
Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (p. 39). Teachers College Press.
I am talking about young people standing in the world outside school being helped to relate what they are experiencing to texts they have read and vice versa. I am talking about students reading texts in school and explicating them in extended talk about themselves; experiences they have had; and what they know from talk, texts, and media of the world we all share. I am talking about adults and peers engaging in extended dialogue about how the world, experiences in life, and different people’s different lived realities relate to texts and vice versa. The earlier this starts, the better.
For some children literacy is not as affectively (emotionally) and cognitively tied to the world of experience (and vice versa) as it is for others. For these children, literacy is isolated. It is a domain with which the child does not truly affiliate and where the child’s connections to empowerment as an actor in the world are unfelt and unseen. These unfortunate results occur when transactions and connections among the world, talk, texts, and media are not made early and sustained later.
Such children often have problems with literacy at school. The remedy is the same: lots of good playful and serious +experiences; lots of good vicarious experiences via talk, texts, and media; lots of nurturing experiential talk with an adult in an emotionally positive relationship; and help in making transactions across and connections among real-world experiences, talk, texts, and media of all sorts.
Remember here, too, the importance of horizontal learning (mucking around). There is no need to stress being a “good reader” too early and too much, to the detriment of the sorts of emotional attachments, experiences, talk, and media that are the foundation of reading’s meaningfulness and significance to the child.
Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (pp. 39-40). Teachers College Press.
📊 Language Has Always and Ever Been a Multimodal Performance
Language has always and ever been a multimodal performance.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series) (p. xi). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Multimodal Literacy
This new world is a multimodal world. Language is one mode; images, actions, sounds, and physical manipulation are other modes. Today, students need to know how to make and get meaning from all these modes alone and integrated together. In the 21st century anyone who cannot handle multimodality is illiterate. They must be able to handle it critically, since without critical and analytic skills a multimodal world of games, ads, news, and other media is a world where it is easier than ever to lie, scam, dupe, and manipulate people.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Multimodal literacy isn’t about pretty pictures and popsicle sticks. It’s not about Pinterest Pedagogy. It’s about honing a sense-making skillset our students can use to navigate the complex times in which we live.
Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English
Multimodal Ensembles
Frank Serafini, author of the fantastic “Reading the Visual,” refers to these print, visual, and video combinations as “multimodal ensembles” to capture the fact we rarely encounter information in a single mode anymore.
Whether we’re viewing a snapchat or reading an online article, most of the texts we engage with convey meaning across several modes that shape the meanings within.
Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English
The world outside school today is replete with words married to images, sounds, the body, and experiences.
The world outside school today is replete with words married to images, sounds, the body, and experiences. When we play a video game we integrate words, maps, images, actions, goals, choices, and experiences. We manipulate a surrogate body, our avatar in the game. Science books and articles today are replete with graphs, images, and diagrams. As we move to digital books, books will become media full of images, videos, simulations, games, and representations readers will be able to handle and manipulate and even build.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
The complexity of multimodal ensembles expands exponentially in a digital environment.
In general, the modes used in print-based multimodal ensembles fall into three categories: (1) textual elements, which include all written language; (2) visual images like photography, painting, drawings, graphs, and charts; and (3) design elements like borders, typography, and other graphic elements. These represent the basic elements used in print-based, multimodal ensembles. As the texts we encounter shift from print-based to digital or screen-based, the range of modes used in these texts expands to include sound effects, moving images, and other digitally rendered elements. It is easy to see how the complexity of multimodal ensembles expands exponentially in a digital environment.
Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.
Crip Linguistics
Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.
Crip Linguistics Intro
Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics
🔑 The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy… According to Your Grandmothers
The Seven Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy . . . According to Your Grandmothers – Coda: Back to the Future – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
- Learn with the students!
- Embrace play and failure
- Hack the tech!
- Compose for real audiences
- Keep the focus on reflective learning
- Use new media to rethink pedagogy
- Fight for access and justice for all
Making things out of other people’s talk, texts, and media only works if the material is reachable — and if what we make stays reachable in turn. That is why the openness is not a licence choice bolted on afterwards. It is a precondition for the way we work.
🌍 A Knowledge Commons and a Space of Openness
Create open source communities instead of walled gardens of intellectual property rights – to create a global knowledge commons and to maximise collective intelligence.
Replacing Control With Ecologies of Care | Autistic Collaboration
Our Glossary, Field Guide, Library, Pillars, Gallery, and Courses steadily expand in depth and breadth. We’re building a knowledge commons and a space of openness, at the edges.
For me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.
Living as we did on the edge we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both.
Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks
The writing on Stimpunks.org that isn’t quoted from elsewhere is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Rights to the images on Stimpunks belong to the individual artists/photographers unless a license is stated in the image caption. Many, but not all, use CC BY-SA.
🪴 Digital Gardening
stimpunks.org is a digital knowledge garden that we cultivate in the open. It is a living and constantly changing thing.
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.
Another characteristic is the navigation: while a blog may usually be explored in chronological order, a digital garden uses bi-directional linking—or at least lots of internal links—to connect notes together. Such interconnection creates a trail of ideas that readers can follow.
Digital gardens are usually light-weight, with an emphasis on the text itself, but they can be designed in any way that reflects their owners’ thinking style and digital gardening preferences. They can be built with intricate systems, or simple no-code tools.
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number . It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
Digital gardening is part of the pushback against the limited range of vanilla web formats and layouts we now for granted.
💨 Default to Open, Created Serendipity, and Learning Exhaust
The quality of our code and our product depend on the amount of feedback we get and on the amount of people who use them. If we’re developing behind closed doors, we are putting artificial limits to both.
We have done our best work in the open, let’s continue working this way.
Our writing on stimpunks.org connects humane tech, tech ethics, tech regrets, indie ed-tech, open source, open web, open data, distributed work, backchannels, indieweb, neurodiversity, #ActuallyAutistic, the social model of disability, design for real life, behaviorism, structural ideology, mindset marketing, psychological safety, progressive education, and much more. That jumble of tags is full of connections and overlap. It’s full of lessons on building for humans and the commons. We try to bring these communities together with our public writing and sharing, because in connection there is created serendipity, and we urgently need a lot of that going on between tech, education, and neurodiversity and disability communities.
created serendipity: the more connected you are, the more ideas seem to find you, not the other way around.
3 Obvious Ways Twitter Promotes Literacy – The Principal of Change
We feel good and reenergized when educators, tech workers, and autistic and disabled people interact in discussions we start. These moments are necessary and make a difference. Cheers for being in the space. Cheers for helping make the commons.
Generally speaking, open by default is just the right thing to do. As the GOV.UK team mantras says, “Make things open: it makes things better.”
Openness is an ethos that organizations — public and private — adopt so they can be more adaptive and responsive to the people they serve.
Open education, open government, open data, open web, and open source. These are the foundations of the commons. They should be public, well-supported, and open by default.
Software and the internet are at their best when making human systems more inclusive, accessible, and transparent. The web and the open source stack that powers it were built so that public infrastructure, particularly education, could “default to open”.
We default to open at Stimpunks. We iterate out loud, in public. We share our “learning exhaust” on this website so we can learn from each other.
You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that’s fine, but we’re here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:
- Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets.
- Speak at meetups and conferences.
- Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they’re not public.
- Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams.
- Start a newsletter.
- Draw cartoons (people loooove cartoons!).
Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning.
🗄️ Building a Storytelling Database
Instead of seeing ourselves as gathering textual quotes to support a persuasive narrative argument, we saw ourselves first and foremost as building a database (in our case, a Google spreadsheet) that we could then query in order to explore a range of possible stories we might tell.
Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
We build storytelling databases using thin description and multiple scales of analysis across many disciplines and silos. While doing so, we recognize that “our own embodied positionalities influence our work”.
Thin Description
…we might also consider the value of forms of “thin description” (Love 2013) that focus more on observing surface features of a wide range of texts rather than on interpreting the many layers, contradictions, and hidden forces animating a single text: what we may lose in depth and nuance of interpretation with this approach, we can gain in breadth and copiousness of evidence.
Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
Two Scales of Analysis
Today’s literary-historical scholar can no longer risk being just a close reader: the sheer quantity of available data makes the traditional practice of close reading untenable as an exhaustive or definitive method of evidence gathering. The same argument, however, may be leveled against the macroscale; from thirty thousand feet, something important will inevitably be missed. The two scales of analysis, therefore, need to coexist. (Jockers 2013, 9)
Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
Deeply Embodied Lived Process
…we also seek to employ multimodal composing as a strategy to vividly demonstrate how our archival research arises from a deeply embodied, “lived process” (Kirsch and Rohan 2008). While traditional print histories often erase the embodied positionalities of their authors by telling “authoritative” narratives that speak almost entirely in the third person, feminist historians have increasingly called scholars to account more fully for how our own embodied positionalities and experiences shape the work we do in archives (Kirsch and Rohan 2008; Royster and Kirsch, 2012). As Royster and Kirsch argue, a feminist rhetorical methodology necessitates that scholars break with the third-person conventions of historical narrative structure to tell stories about how their inquiries have been influenced by their own “lived, embodied experience(s)” (22) both within the archives and beyond them.
Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
We find that Love’s feminist articulation of “thin description” as a human observational practice is more in line with our commitment to embodied knowledge making practices that highlight how technologies and research methods reflect the social positionalities of the humans who employ them.
Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
Our Own Embodied Positionalities Influence Our Work
As you watch and listen to us discuss the archive in our audio and video pieces, you can be reminded that our own selection and representation of this archive is necessarily influenced by how our own embodied positionalities influence our work as historians. We are both white, tenured English professors who live and work in Ohio, but grew up in the southern United States. We both share a love of silly humor, obscure old technologies, all things rhetoric, and classic cocktails. Jason is a queer, genderfluid person from a middle class background, who lives with an adorable cat named The General; Jason also lives with the unpredictability of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Ben identifies as a cishet man, as well as a first-generation academic from a rural, working-class background. While we have worked hard to re-see our archives through many different methodological lenses, we recognize well that the story we tell here is very much shaped by our own lived experiences. It’s likely that other scholars would have arrived at very different narratives about the history of new media pedagogy, and we hope this book inspires them to tell those stories.
Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
Ultimately, we take as axiomatic that all methodologies of textual analysis involve ideologically loaded processes of selection and reduction.
Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
📚🎥🎧 Story: Maintaining the Continuity of Creation
You wrote that “the key to keeping track of stable innovation processes across multiple generations is story.” You said—I love this quote—“that it can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion. Story that maintains the continuity of creation requires a lot more work, however, and it develops over time from thousands of data sets held in relationships.”
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
Stimpunks.org attempts to be “story that maintains the continuity of creation” with our research-storytelling and digital composition. We curate the treasures of neurodivergent and disabled cultures and weave together a community of voices and experiences.
We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do.
@ira.socol • We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do. I love what you’re building. I… • Threads
Stimpunks.org is a celebration of bricolage and pastiche assembled into story, building on other’s work and preserving it as story that maintains the continuity of creation.
Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. It keeps us from building upon prior strategies led by our ancestors and elders. White supremacy also teaches us that we must be the first—the first to confront a particular issue or problem and therefore need to create something new instead of drawing from our rich history of revolutionary work available to us.
Memory.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 32). North Atlantic Books.
We use bricolage and pastiche to tell our stories and preserve our histories.
In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.
“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
⏳ Deep Time Diligence
Tyson Yunkaporta’s conception of “Deep Time Diligence” resonates with our efforts to serve the edges and connect the rhizome.
Deep time diligence is sort of looking at all the systems and the trajectories of these things and doing catastrophic risk analysis, doing all these kinds of things, doing these things collectively. So as a group, everybody’s out there observing what’s happening in nature and what’s happening in your economic systems and communities, and we keep coming together and everybody’s bringing a different data set, and some of these overlap, some of them are contradictory. But in the aggregate, we get a sense, together, with that one big brain—the computational power of a group of people together, you know, big community together doing all this work—that, that works. That’s deep time diligence, because you start building the stories that you need and the Lore that you need and the knowledge that you need for the system as it’s shifting.
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those different data sets. Because the ignorance is just that: you’ve only analyzed it from one point of view. But collectively, collective analysis—ah, that’s amazing. That’s the only way it can be done.
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
☁️ Data is Vulnerable
Data is vulnerable. Data just disappears. All your photos in Photobucket—how long are they gonna be there for? Is someone just gonna maintain that server forever, and maintain the costs for that, and keep losing money? Nah. So the only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued—that data will last
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
Doing curation work on Stimpunks emphasizes how real this trend of information loss is. We’re continuously updating broken links, hoping they were captured in the Internet Archive so we can link to a public copy. We use the Internet Archive browser extension to tell it to save copies of pages critical to our storytelling. The amount of link rot created by the collapse of Twitter as people locked and closed their accounts was great.
The trend is accelerating with companies taking decades of archives offline.
- MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline
- Comedy Central Website Removes Archive of Video Clips, Content
🗄️ Become a Citizen Archivist
We need to maintain the continuity of creation through story. We attempt that on stimpunks.org for the neurodiversity and disability communities.
Join us. Become a citizen archivist and help tell our stories across generations.
I’ve loved so much of the art, culture, criticism and reporting that I’ve seen from marginalized people in the past several years, and I’m terrified that a lot of it could be buried in this tidal wave of hate. We’re really going to need all of those stories and creations to hold onto, during the dark times to come. We’ll keep producing great art and culture no matter what, but we’ll still want to hold on to the proof of what we can accomplish when the “mainstream” culture industry gives us access to resources. And there are so many obscure, little-noticed, indie projects from the past several years that we’re going to want to revisit. This has been a fertile time, and we need to save as much of these riches as we can.
The good news? There’s something you can do to help. You can become a citizen archivist.
We Should All Be Archivists • Buttondown
As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen.
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
🖍️ Let’s Revel in Disruptive Frivolity
The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production. [. . .] Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous [. . .] signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.
(Jack Halberstam 2011, 6)
But Halberstam’s queer rejection of seriousness emboldens us to revel in the disruptive frivolity of multimodal play—to recognize that our conscious refusal of a serious tone in digital multimodal scholarship can potentially open new ways of knowing and being in the field.
Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
Silly Archives & Wondrous Anarchy
This project is also informed by Halberstam’s elucidation of the value of engaging “silly archives” (Halberstam 2011, 2) that resist traditional academic hierarchies of knowledge. For example, Halberstam chose to turn a queer eye towards an archive of animated children’s films that “preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children” (3). We similarly seek to reclaim the “wondrous anarchy” of youth media production in English classrooms as a way to resist the norms of disciplinary seriousness that limit the kinds of multimodal texts that we and our students compose. In our experience, multimodal writing pedagogies have too often been dismissed by colleagues in the university as “childish,” and we advocates of multimodal pedagogy too often respond to these critiques by demonstrating the very serious reflective learning that takes place in our classrooms. But consider if we took a step back from defending the adult seriousness of multimodal composition and instead embraced a childish approach to multimodal production. How might embracing our inner twelve-year-old help us think beyond the academic professional norms that limit the transformative potential of multimodal scholarship? By consciously embracing a childish approach to media production, we ultimately seek to resist the institutional hierarchies that too often prevent university faculty from learning from and valuing the innovative, playful media pedagogies that can be found in K–12 contexts, both historic and contemporary.
Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy
🎸 When the movement is strong, the music is strong.
We use music to tell our stories. We embed music and lyrics all over our website.
When the movement is strong, the music is strong.
Harry Belafonte
Joy is an act of resistance.
Toi Derricotte
🌿 Biophilic Design
We attempt biophilic design with our colour choices and art selection — calm, natural tones over saturated ones, warm surfaces over pure white. The reasoning and the sources are in Color & Palette.
🧠 Designing for Memory
We treat memory as something you design for, not something a reader performs on demand — externalizing memory across pages, using place and pattern so sections work like rooms you can recognise, building in orientation cues, and designing for graceful re-entry rather than perfect recall.
The full argument, drawn from Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft: Designing for Memory in the Design Field Guide.