I’ve noticed that sometimes games may not come with rhetorical baggage, but they tend to attract certain audience.

My experiences here concern mostly RPG’s, but I will lead with one computer game example.

Well, I’m not sure it was an example THEN: Castle Wolfenstein is an early 80’s shoot ’em up where you’re infiltrating a castle filled with Nazis. Your job is to kill all of them.

I remember my gun crazy friends* going crazy for this game because, again, circa 1983, the big games were things like Pac-Man. So this game was fun because it was very different and you could play it at home,

A lot of this audience is conservative. I’m not sure the creators of the game planned on attracting a politically conservative audience, but it did.

Personally, I only got into the fame when someone hacked it and turned it into Castle Smurfenstein because, by that point, the nephew I was helping to raise was a toddler, and he LOVED the Smurfs, so we watched them all the time. Killing Smurfs was cathartic.

Still, though, most of my experience here comes from RPG’s.

Take an RPG from the 80’s called Twilight 2000. The premise here is that you and the people on your crew are stranded in Europe after a limited nuclear exchange.

No, seriously.

This attracted a VERY conservative audience.

I played because the people who set up the game would frequently buy pizza. I was nineteen, and free food was a powerful motivator.

In the 90’s. RPG’s had a different issue. They would set up a universe that the players wouldn’t buy into.

Take Vampire the Masquerade. In this game, you role-played vampire trying to stay alive (unalive?) in the modern world.

This game was supposed to an angst and horror filled game where, your character tried desperately to hold onto your humanity while your surrounded by those who would destroy you.

Interestingly, many of my conservative friends, who had no issue with Twilight 2000 refused to play Vampire because pretending to be a vampire was immoral somehow.
(This is so very 1990’s)
Having said that, no one in my friend group played the game the way the authors intended. I knew someone who wrote scenarios for the game, and he told me that he thought we were playing the game wrong, that we were missing the deep, personal horror of it all.

I said, “I play these games to escape. Why would I play a fame where I’m more miserable thanI am in real life.”

He never understood that.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how these things interact, and I never thought about it in this way before.

__________
*I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. I knew (and know) lots of gun owners. Heck, deer season is such an important thing where I’m from that the first day of deer season is a say off from school. I mean, gun culture is a thing. For example, I learned how to shoot guns at summer camp whenI was ten. Right after the archery lesson.

I would like to explore producing audio books in a classroom setting.

In an ideal world, I would set it up so that each student would get ta separate chapter that they would have to record.

I do an assignment similar to this in Voice and Diction, but I use long poems, that I divide into sections and assign. Then, each student has to find photos that match what’s going on in the poem, record their part of the poem and turn it into a short video.

Then, I take the individual videos and edit them together and we watch the video in class.

I’d like to do something like that, though not for Voice and Diction… in my mind, this project would be the big end of term project for, like, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts. I’d like yo present the idea and the research to the people at my college who teach that class, but, honestly, when I’ve brought up projects like this before, they haven’t been interested.

This is partially because they fall into the “I’ve been teaching this way since the Pleistocene, I don’t need to anything different” camp of Academics (everyone who works in the Academy knows people like this) and partially because they have all the creativity of a turnip.

I could maybe pitch it to the person who teaches Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers.

Anyway, before I do this with anyone, I’d need to have my ducks in a row, in terms of theory and examples. For an example, I was thinking of using the Manifold project I did for In Our Time and move on from there.

Obviously, I’m still refining this idea, so comments and critiques are welcome.
_

Majel set up the Miro site. I wasn’t thrilled at this at first… we didn’t have a great deal of time, and I didn’t want to learn a new application in that time frame.

Credit where it’s due, Majel was right. Miro worked for Mrs. Dalloway, especially the way Majel set it up. I think that Majel is a more visual person than I am, and the way she set everything up made the chapters we did flow.

The learning curve for Miro was not that steep, frankly. Looking back at it, I’m not sure why I Was resistant, other than my “sheer cussed stubbornness”. (To borrow a phrase my grandmother used)

Even though I normally teach things like Voice and Diction or Public Speaking, I have had to teach texts to students, so I think in terms of context, historical background, and vocabulary. So, those are the things I focused on. In this regard, the work was not difficult, just a little time consuming. I felt that this historical context was important, because this novel takes place after WWI, but a novel set in the early 1920’s is going to have a very different feel from one set in the the 1930’s, or even one set in 1919.

I sometimes felt like I over-annotated in places, but anytime I looked at a word or phrase and thought to myself, “I’m not sure what this means”, I felt I had to include some kind of note. I mean, if I didn’t understand it, odds are students wouldn’t.

I admit, I thought about this as a way to annotate the work for a class. Because of the classes I Teach, I considered including performance tips. Let me explain. As a student, I have had assignments when I was given a long text — a short story or chapter of a novel– and told to edit the text down and recite what I Edited.

The two times I did this, I was given time limits, like your recitation could only last 5-7 minutes. You’ll see this kind of assignment in some advanced foreign language classes (I did it in French and Spanish) and in courses like Voice and Diction, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts, and maybe some acting courses.

Som at first, I considered adding performance notes keeping assignments like this in mind. I decided against it because I thought notes like that would be going a little too far for what we’re doing here.

As we continued, I was going to be our spokesperson when we presented, but then I got sick and ended up in the hospital, so the team had to deal with that, which I apologize for.

I felt an affinity for the Graham piece “Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires”, because back in a dark era called the 90’s when I was in grad school in Illinois, one of my first jobs was working at The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research.

This project is still up, and I think it’s still being worked on.

So, here is my experience with this project.

Marcel Proust wrote several letters per day. He was a member of the upper class of Paris, so his letters give an excellent view of life in that society.

The downside to this is that Proust didn’t date his letters. Enter Prof. Philip Kolb. He was a Proust scholar who collected and annotated Proust’s letters, eventually publishing over 20 volumes of his work.

To do this, Kolb would look through newspapers and magazines at the time, to figure out when the letters were written. Many of the people Proust wrote to were celebrities in their day, so their lives are fairly well-documented. Because Proust would mention the weather in his letters, the chronology files contain lots of weather reports.

Kolb then took this information and put it on index cards. These cards make up the chronology files. Kolb had other files, another set is the biography files. This set was about the people Proust knew and their families.

After Kolb’s death. the library and the French department decided to put Kolb’s research online.

The work was slow for the first year or two because the project had limited institutional support, and the folks running the project had to set it up, including things like the html templates, language, and design concerns.

Then, the project was awarded a grant. The grant allowed them to hire research assistant, which is where I come in. I worked mostly on the chronology files and some on the biographical files.

My job was to enter the information into the templates, alter the template if I needed to (add or delete sections or another category, etc) and look things up if the writing wasn’t clear, or the citation wasn’t complete.

It was a fascinating project to be involved with. I’ve always been a history buff, so the close-up view of upper class Parisian society in the late 19th to early 20th century fascinated me. I learned quite a lot.

It also affected me in odd ways. Reading all these letters, or excerpts of letters from these people gave me a kind of emotional connection to them. This came into focus when I started encoding the files around the start of World War I in 1914 and several people who has been regular correspondents of Proust’s died. Even though I never met these people, I felt this odd feeling of loss.

And I know history well enough to know that this was coming.

Another highlight for me was the correspondence between Proust and his ex, Comte Robert de Montesquieu. One letter, written by Proust while they were fighting, was absolutely scathing. Montesquieu sent the letter back, having corrected all the grammar and spelling errors with the signature “from your professor”.

After two years, the funding for the project ran out and they couldn’t find alternate funding, so while work on the project continued, it was scaled back, and I ended up getting a new RA position, in the Language Learning Lab.

(with apologies to the Supremes)

Hemingway notes

Process:

I pulled a copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. I read the first few chapters, and realized that they were at best, loosely connected vignettes, so I decided to treat each chapter as its own story.

Then, we discovered we were working from the wrong edition, so I’m adding some stories from the 1925 edition.

For the recordings, I would read the chapter out loud to myself, and then record it. If it went well, I’d listen to the recording when it was finished. Then, I decided whether to keep the recording or to delete it and try again.

I didn’t use the first recording of any of the chapters. I’ve been doing recordings like this and teaching students to do them, that I went in knowing that the first recording usually isn’t very good. Most of these took between three and five takes.

I didn’t do a lot of editing, but I did some. For instance, I would get stuck on a certain phrase, repeat it or launch into swear words. Those got deleted. I also sometimes take a very audible deep breath before starting, and I tried to edit all those out, though I’m sure I missed a few.

Chapter one: at the start I tried to highlight how drunk everyone (especially the lieutenant) was. In the encounter with the adjutant, I tried to make him sound anxious and a little scared, and after that, I wanted the narrator to sound annoyed since the narrator clearly thought the adjutant was being overly cautious or maybe even downright stupid.

Chapter two: For the first matador, I was very matter of fact because there’s not a lot of story to tell there. The second one had a longer story, so I Tried to add some excitement to it, especially with him getting up and staggering around. The third matador, I tried to show his exhaustion by the end of the whole thing.

Chapter three: I spoke slowly with lots of pauses to represent how slowly everything was going, to give the impression that we’re stuck in the mud with them.

Chapter four: I read it like the narrator was telling this story to friends at a bar or a party.

Chapter five: I felt like the narrator was proud of his work on this barricade, so I tried to do that, and the excitement that went with it.

Chapter six: I treated this like the narrator was a reporter on the scene. I didn’t see the narrator as particularly emotional about any of this. I didn’t even see the narrator have any sense of pity for the sick minister. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just I kind of expected a “wow, look at that wretch” reaction or something. But there wasn’t. No pity. No disgust either.

Chapter seven: I started off speaking fast and maybe a little staccato because there was still a battle, but I slowed down as the description continued and the focus more shifted to the perspective of the wounded. They’re not in the battle (which was dying down anyway) anymore, so I felt I could go a little slower.

Chapter eight: I wanted to highlight the fear in the man trapped in the trench, so I spoke really fast, then I went for an ironic tone at the end.

Chapter nine: At first I focused on the voices of the cops. I tried to use a hybrid midwestern/Pittsburgh accent for them. And, man, it did not work. They both just sounded… off, and in a way where I felt like I could come as judgmental or condescending towards them. I redid. I tried doing this one with different accents (the version with southern accents was, to borrow from Law and Order: SVU, especially heinous), and it just didn’t work for me, so I redid it about six times.

Chapter ten: I broke this up into smaller chunks to work on it. Honestly, the last two paragraphs were extremely rough for some reason. I had to redo them several times. Finally, on the last take, when I stumbled over something, I just repeated it and edited out the not so good version.

Chapter eleven: It’s good that I know a lot about WWI and its immediate aftermath, because I would have been LOST here without knowing what was going on. That also helped in chapter three.

Chapter twelve: I emphasized the word “whack, ” trying to make the onomatopoeia more evident. Then I switched to a voice that was about struggling to get onto and control this badly injured horse. Finally, I ended with hesitation, because of the bull

Chapter thirteen: This was a surprisingly difficult chapter. I tried to capture the noise and chaos of the crowd at the beginning, then the exhaustion of the bull, then the speed of the assault. And finally, I slowed down for the encounter at the cafe. There is a lot going on in not very many words here.

Chapter fourteen: I tried to convey action, but tinged with anger and hate because that’s what I got out of the reading.

Chapter fifteen: Again, I tried doing different voices here, just like in chapter nine. It didn’t really work here either, so I aimed for different tones of voice, which I think worked okay. A really small thing tripped me up on this chapter. In the phrase “he hunched down in the street with them all”, I stopped at “them” at least four times. But you shouldn’t put a pause between “them” and “all” because “them all” is acting like a single word here.

Chapter sixteen: I started off a little slowly here, because I wanted to give the idea that Maera was dazed. Then when they carried him out of the ring. I went faster to highlight the speed they were going. I made “larger” louder, and “smaller” quieter to try to give the impression of the change in perception. Finally, the word “cinematograph” was rough. I kept adding a “-y” on the end of it. Then I had to look up how it was pronounced, because I wasn’t sure. I turned out to be close. It’s strange because it’s not a word we use much.

Chapter seventeen: By and large, I read this like a reporter at the scene. The only time I changed that was the dialogue, especially the line the guard said after Cardinella lost control of his bowels.

Chapter eighteen: Again, knowledge of European history comes in handy. The king of Greece, Constantine was overthrown in 1917, but returned to the throne in 1920, and was toppled again in 1922. This story takes place after the second time he was overthrown in the aftermath of the execution of the ministers in chapter six, I think.

The Indian Village was a challenge because of the length. When I first saw how long it was, I read through it, looking for places to cut it into smaller files, but I didn’t see how I could do that and keep the flow of the story going, so I did as one long take. Also, as with the chapter with the Hungarians being shot, there is a slur in this chapter. I am not comfortable with using those words, but they were certainly in much more widespread usage when these books were written, so I did it.

Weirdly, it reminds of the Wild Cards book series from the 80’s and 90’s. They were an anthology series, several of the books were set in what was then contemporary times. I loved those books, so a few years back, I picked one up to reread it. The story still held up, but the dialogue – which hadn’t really bothered me when I read it 30+ years ago – disturbed me. I admit the slurs that were thrown around were used like that back then but it’s not a pleasant memory.

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife. I probably should have tried to differentiate between the voices in the dialogue more, especially the doctor’s wife. Why was she in the darkened room? A migraine? Was she drunk or hungover? Those would affect her lines in this, but I really didn’t think about it until just now,

The Cat in the Rain. I read this as kind of a “day in the life” story. The wife is … if not completely unhappy, certainly disaffected here, and the husband is oblivious. The hotel manager is more responsive to the wife than the husband.

I actually sent the recordings to a friend for feedback before I sent them on to my teammates. This particular friend is a former student and now colleague, so he understands what I do.

Once I went over his notes – he suggested that I rerecord chapter nine, for example, I sent the files to my teammates who did the editing. At that point, I mostly checked out. I mean, I checked out things when the folks editing the piece put something up.

At one point, I decided to take the 1924 edition and put it on Manifold as a Do-It-Yourself sort of thing. I put the chapters up, added recordings, and annotated them, so the person reading it can try to make an audiobook themselves.

Before I get into my analysis, I want to discuss my own experience recording texts. At LaGuardia, when I teach Voice and Diction, I have my students do short weekly recordings. I would theme them, so one week would be, say, Robert Frost week. I’d put several of his poems up on blackboard, along with my sample recordings. 

About a year and half ago, I moved most of the sample recordings to Manifold. I also marked up the poems or speeches, with pronunciation hints, definitions, and context.

One of the speeches I always teach is Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In Voice and Diction, the students have to recite it. One of my colleagues was teaching communication for the non-native speaker, and asked if I could find a few other short Lincoln speeches, so students could have a selection. 

I found quite a few of them, and then decided to put together a Lincoln speech database. 

Heck, I’ve even done a recording of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. The past few years, rather than give my students a midterm, they would recite part of this. I think it works.

So, while I’ve never actually recorded an audiobook, I’ve been on the periphery.

For my book, I chose Katherine Kurtz’s King Kelson’s Bride, a book in the Fantasy genre. It’s a book I’ve read a few times, so I know it well. I downloaded the audible version, since I could sync up the recording with my Kindle. As the narration went on, the text of the recording would be highlighted, so following along was easy. 

Also, if you highlighted a word or phrase, the narration paused while I either looked up the word or phrase. This was a nice function. 

The narrator’s enunciation was clear, precise and easy to follow. The narrator did different voices for the dialog, so conversations between characters, even conversations with four or five different characters, were easy to follow. There was a wedding scene in Latin, which the narrator did in chant, an unexpected but nice touch. The narration is extremely faithful to the book: if there are any differences between the narration and the text, I have not noticed it. 

The narration included no audio effects. For instance, several scenes have music, but no music was played. There were no other sound effects either. For instance, when the characters were on board a ship, the narration did include any sounds like the wind in the sails, or the clanging of chains when the boat came into court. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing. The sound effects could very easily become a distraction, and I know from personal experience that adding a layer of music onto a recording can be difficult. You need to get the volume right: too loud is obviously going to be a distraction, but too soft is as well, because the music is in the background but the person hearing it can’t really identify it.  

My biggest issues:

1. I can read the text faster than the narration. I don’t know if this is because I am a fast reader or because I know the book. It’s likely a combination. It wasn’t a huge difference, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it so much if I didn’t have the text in front of me. 
2. In my head, I pronounce many of the character names differently, partially because I’ve studied Irish and Welsh, and the names that look like they are derived from those languages aren’t pronounced as I would expect.  
3. Also, the voices in the dialog didn’t always march up with how I imagined them. This isn’t a bad thing though. The dialect work was consistent. The different character voices stayed the same, and if characters were from the same country or region, their accents were similar. In this regard, the audiobook added a depth to the novel for me, 
4. While not doing dialog, the narrator sometimes was a little robotic, especially when describing places. Normally, the narration is good: it’s almost like the narration for a documentary, but sometimes, it’s a little uneven for me. 
5. One of the chapters has a scene where there is an attempted assassination. I would have liked to hear the narrator describe the scene with excitement or anger or surprise in his voice, but he didn’t. It was the same voice he used in the rest of the narration. I mean, it wasn’t as robotic as when the narration described a dinner scene, but I expected more vocal variety. 

Overall, I enjoyed the experience. I felt that the narration usually worked, and even when it was less than optimal, it was never awful. I should do this with a book I’ve never read, and with one that I don’t have sitting in front of me, to see if it would work under those circumstances. 

Many react badly to change, even when the change isn’t significant. For instance, I work in a tutoring center and computer lab which has audio recording software. Many of my colleagues resist doing recordings in their Communication Studies classes. Never mind that I did recordings for all the languages I took as an undergrad. Granted, I did most of it using tape recorders, and now, we software on computers, regardless, recording students is nothing new, even though how we do it has changed. 

Pressman touches on this on p. 254:

The novel genre no longer needs to be defined by its length or focus on human characters or even such standards expectations as an Aristotelian plot or the coming-of-age Bildungsroman Narrative.

This is not new. The addition of the digital is new, but authors have been experimenting with the narrative, etc since at least the Surrealist Movement in the early 20th century. However, the type of change can be interesting. 

The most interesting example of this in Pressman is the novella Pry (2015) by the collective Tender Claws. This work is an app, and is not structured like the traditional novel. For instance, Pry can’t be printed out and the reader doesn’t turn the page to continue reading. Further, it includes multimedia elements. (Pressman, p. 262) 

While this is innovative and I’m tempted to read ir, to me, it feels like the next generation of the Choose Your Adventure novels. Choose Your Adventure novels are quasi-interactive, in that the reader doesn’t just read the book, rather, they interact with the story by deciding which action to take. 

Pry has increased the interactivity, certainly, involving technology in ways the Choose Your Adventures simply couldn’t. Further, Pry forces the reader to engage with the work differently. For all that the Choose Your Adventure novels did give the readers some choices, but the reader still has to turn the page. The reader has no multimedia parts (well, the ones I read when I was a child didn’t. This may have changed.) to explore. 

Still, Pry feels like the spiritual child of the Choose Your Adventure books, which is interesting because no one would look at the Choose Your Adventure books and say, “Those are great literature.” 

This brings me to the “some reading is better than other” discussion. I have encountered this often in my personal life. For example, I read mostly science fiction, history, and biographies. Many people I know have criticized me for not reading the “great books” (a loaded term in its own right). 

Academics have done studies about the alleged quality of reading material and how it reflects on the readers, such as:

A study in Science in 2013 suggests a link between being able to recognize others’ emotional states and false beliefs after reading prize-winning short stories when this isn’t the case when someone reads “popular” fiction. (Price, pp. 5-6)

I wonder about the validity of these studies. I’ve read many linguistics and education studies which draw conclusions based on spurious evidence. What are the sample sizes? Are various demographics taken into account, such as income and education level? Also, what prizes did these short stories win? What genre of fiction are they? 

Further, what is the point of studies like this? Is it necessary to say some kinds of reading are better than others? On some level, it feels like snobbery. “These are the things I read, and, see, I now have proof that reading those works makes me a better person!” 

I mean, I had teachers who forbade students from reading comic books in class, but many of the comic book reading students didn’t pick up Charles Dickens instead. They just stopped reading. This can’t be the goal. 

In the end, reading has evolved as technology has, while judgment about reading really hasn’t changed.