Skip to main content

What Can We Do With Digital?

Texts to have read:

Writing to turn in:

  • An open-book “quiz” on the grading contract
  • 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! I really enjoyed reading all the introductory posts and letters; if you haven’t had a chance to get to know your classmates’ opening posts, I encourage you to check them out!

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: bit.ly/cdm2021spring-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: tracking changes to files over time.

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).

Renaming ever more files isn’t only messy to keep track of: it also eats up your storage space, especially if you’re working with multimedia. But digital media is all numeric, at heart, so we can instead just keep track of the differences.

Let's quickly walk through what it looks like to track changes via the GitHub.com 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 from Lesson 1 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, group GitHub anchors!) Start by skimming through the instructions in the README file, so you know where this is headed. (It'll save you headaches later.) Then follow the steps.

We’ll work in Breakout Rooms for about 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?
  • Download what you’ll need to get git functioning on your own computer (i.e. not through the github.com website):
    • 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.
    • Alternatively: you could install command-line git, probably using either GitBash (for Windows) or Homebrew (for Mac) – or see this [walkthrough of how to install git using, ironically enough, 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 kind of assume you don’t need further instructions, but hit me up if I’m wrong.)
    • Extra optional: Do you already know git basics, and want a more hands-on guide through the full GitHub functionality? See the GitHub Learning Lab entry on our Resources page.