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What Can We Do With Digital?

Texts to have read:

Writing to turn in:

  • A post to the main course issue queue, introducing yourself to your classmates (and anyone else who stumbles upon it)

Plan for the Day

  1. The Newness of New Media: Five Principles, in Brief (~15 min)
  2. GitHub and Git (~15 min)
  3. Five Principles as Lenses (~15 min)
  4. Shareback (~15 min)
  5. HW Preview

Welcome back!

1. Five Principles, in Brief

Can I get five people to fill us in on the five “principles of new media” from the webtext I asked you to read? i.e. One person, one term.

Let’s take notes here: http://bit.ly/cdm2020fall-notes

2. GitHub, part 2

Last time, we saw that GitHub can host a discussion forum, so in that sense it’s a community website: it makes media social.

But its core functionality is meant to solve a different media problem:

webcomic shows a series of panels renaming final.doc to final_rev2, final_rev_6.comments, and so on to absurdity
from PhD Comics by Jorge Cham (2012).
Let's quickly walk through what it looks like via the Web Interface: https://github.com/benmiller314/text-demo

3. Five Principles as Lenses

Time to take these abstractions and put them into practice, in two ways:

  • practice using GitHub
  • practice using our key terms to help us see differently

We’ll be working in groups. I’ve used your Tech Comfort Survey responses to build breakout rooms where at least one person has prior GitHub experience, so I hope you’ll be able to help each other where needed!

Head to https://github.com/benmiller314/cdm-digital-affordances, where you'll find more instructions for what to do next – starting with forking the repo. (Thanks, anchors!) Then follow the instructions in the README file.

We’ll work in Breakout Rooms for 10-15 minutes, then report back. Don’t forget that you can use Zoom chat and screenshare to your advantage.

Call me if you need me! Otherwise, I’ll be floating from group to group.

HW for next time:

  • Watch Git and GitHub for Poets, starting at least with the Introduction and going as far as your interest and time allow.
  • Practice following the steps in the video, using either a .txt file or a .md file: create a repository on GitHub, add some content to a file, commit, edit it, commit again, and view the history. Next class we can start with any questions that came up for you in the process.
    • If you’ve used GitHub a lot, you may want to play around with Markdown formatting. Do you know what happens if you embed html inside a Markdown file? Or Markdown inside an html block?
  • I highly recommend you download the GitHub Desktop application, available for MacOS or Windows, which (like the command line interface) has some essential features that are unavailable on the GitHub website.
  • Definitely be sure to download a plain text editor: I recommend Atom, but if you already use Notepad++ or SublimeText or something like that, you’re fine.
  • Optional, but encouraged: install command-line git, probably using either GitBash (for Windows) or Homebrew (for Mac) – or see this [walkthrough of how to install git using GitHub Desktop](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-github-desktop/#:~:text=That’s%20right%2C%20even%20though%20GitHub,install%20Git%20(Figure%20B). (Linux users, I assume you don’t need further instructions.)
  • Optional: Want a more hands-on guide through the full GitHub functionality? See the GitHub Learning Lab entry on our Resources page.