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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. Contract questions?
  2. Five Principles, in Brief (15 min)
  3. GitHub, part 2 (15 min)
  4. Five Principles as Lenses (15 min)

1. Contract questions?

Anyone have any questions about the grading contract, or changes to propose?

2. Five Principles, in Brief

We have a couple of new students, and also Margaret, our TA. Welcome!

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

3. 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: https://github.com/benmiller314/text-demo

4. 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. Can I get about five volunteers who are feeling good about GitHub to anchor those teams for today?

Head to https://github.com/benmiller314/digital-affordances-2020spring, 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 for 10-15 minutes, then report back.

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?
    • Download any software you’ll need to use Git at the command line, possibly including Homebrew (on Mac) and GitBash (on Windows)
    • Optional but highly recommended: Also download the GitHub Desktop application, available for MacOS or Windows.
  • Optional: Want a more hands-on guide through the full GitHub functionality? See the GitHub Learning Lab entry on our Resources page.