Information, Usability, and Interface Design (Digital Archiving)

Courses taught

Example scholarship and creative endeavors
Brautigan Bibliography and Archive
An actively curated digital archive generally acknowledged as the premier information resource for American author Richard Brautigan (1935-1984).

"Brautigan Bibliography and Archive: A Case Study for Archiving Electronic Literature." Hyperrhiz: New Media New Cultures 6 Summer 2009.
Given agreement over the importance of archiving works of electronic literature, this essay asks how to proceed with such a venture. One example is provided by the presenter's efforts to create and maintain a digital archive of information focusing on the life and works of American author Richard Brautigan. The web-based portal, Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, provides heretofore unachievable associations and interconnections between multiple information kinds and sources (biographical, bibliographical, historical, ethnographical, as well as literary). The result is a unique and individual digital literary presence which may provide insight for others wishing to archive and curate works of electronic literature.

Post-Doctoral Mentor/Research Supervisor for Fulbright Visiting Scholar Dr. Nataliya Shyplova, August 2008-July 2009
Dr. Barber, because of his research focus on American author Richard Brautigan, was selected by The Institute of International Education and the Fulbright Scholars Program to mentor Dr. Nataliya Shyplova, faculty member of the Center of American Literary Studies at Bohdan Khmelnytsky State University, Cherkaksy, Ukraine. Dr. Shyplova was granted a one-year Visiting Researcher Fulbright scholarship to study Richard Brautigan and his place within the literary and artistic continuum of the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Barber worked with Dr. Shyplova from August 2008-July 2009 to prepare and present the following research:
  • "Richard Brautigan: The Magic of the Fragmented Word." 19th Annual Mardi Gras Conference. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, February 2009.
    "Addresses Brautigan's literary uniqueness rooted in a fantastic variety of different cultural and literary traditions that creates a vital artistic continuum marked by energy and ceaseless movement. Brautigan's fragmented artistic world is analyzed from the perspective of the dialogue between the Beats and postmodernism.
  • "Performance Potential in Richard Brautigan's Works." 17th Annual Acacia Conference. California State University, Fullerton, CA. March 2009.
    "Addresses the strategies Richard Brautigan used in his works to create an inspiring artistic 'chaosmos' that incorporates the principle of all-inclusiveness masking the search for the illusory harmony and balance. The focus is on Brautigan's characteristic presentation of a plural vision stirring up the artistic exchange and communication."
  • "Richard Brautigan: Inspiration for Literary Diversity." Clark County Historical Museum, Vancouver, WA, October 2008.
    "Highlights Brautigan’s search for his unique writing style within the inspiring and diverse Bohemian San Francisco of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Brautigan is presented as a literary persona that, being sensitive and responsive to the paradigmatic and epistemological changes articulated via a great variety of overlapping and intermingling artistic presentations, including the Beats, Diggers, hippies, and jazz musicians, creates his individual artistic 'chaosmos'."
  • "Richard Brautigan: Inspiration for Literary Diversity." 2008 Digital Technology & Culture Artists and Scholars Talks. Clark County Historical Museum, Vancouver, WA, 1 October 2008.
    "Discusses the sources Richard Brautigan may have tapped as inspiration for his signature writing style."
  • Contemporary American Literature: From the Beats to Postmodernism
    A manuscript in progress for a book focusing on the transformation from the Beat literary paradigm to postmodernism, suggesting the diverse American literary continuum as the basis for the further cultural and literary vitality and development. Richard Brautigan's works are used to illustrate this evolvement via the postmodern literary polyphony, implying the interactive "chaosmos" of the diverse elements finding their way into the heterogeneous artistic universe from which such writing evolved.
"Digital Archiving and The New Screen." Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen. Eds. Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, Stefan Muller Arisona. Springer, 2008. 110-119.
Failure to preserve, migrate, and archive digital performances, artworks, literary expressions, hyperlinked resources, and interactive experiences created for the new screen—as well as connections between their multimedia components, the texts, the images, the coded mechanisms that drive their interactivity—threatens their survival as markers in our collective artistic, literary, and cultural heritage. . . . Digital archiving focuses on the preservation, presentation, and addition of value to such digital works.

Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writings and Life. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2007.
These essays—many new, others previously published in obscure journals—combine personal remembrance of [Brautigan] and the critical appraisal of his still-controversial works. Previously unpublished photographs and artworks are included.

"Richard Gary Brautigan." Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, Ed. Kurt Hemmer. Facts on File, 2007. 27-28.

"Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan." Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, Ed. Kurt Hemmer. Facts on File, 2007. 320-321.

Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 1990.

Yellow Cat Gallery and Media Lounge logo Yellow Cat Gallery & Media Lounge
An online gallery for digital media art by the students in the Digital Technology and Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. Each show generally features the works of four students co-curated by myself, and/or Dr. Dene Grigar, DTC Program Director.

Media Focus on Research and Teaching
Please see this section of my Curriculum Vita

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Technology Studies

Courses taught

Example scholarship and creative endeavors
"Winged Words: On the Theory and Use of Internet Radio." (with Dene Grigar). Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers. Ed. Amy C. Kimmehea. Hampton Press, 2009. 275-288.
Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus' "winged words," called in ancient Greek epea pteroenta, sustain him in his journey, and gain him great gifts from gods and men alike. While this epic has come to represent what is left of an ancient, lost culture, the notion of well-crafted or passionate words, spoken aloud and intended to be heard by a listening audience, still remains. One iteration of winged words made possible by broadband networks is internet radio. . . . With this idea in mind, our essay describes a project, called the Nouspace Internet Radio project, that entails using of internet radio for undergraduate and graduate level rhetoric.

"A New Web for the New Millennium." Technical Communication and the World Wide Web. Eds. Michael Day and Carol Lipson. Lawrence Erlbaum. 2005. 113-131.
"Barber speculates about the future directions of the Web—specifically the wireless Web—and the skills that technical communicators will need to develop content for such communication modes. . . . According to Barber, our curricula will need to help technical communicators learn to adapt information for delivery to a variety of wireless devices, with different interfaces and constraints. . . . Technical communicators will need to learn to adapt and repurpose content across platforms for a multiplicity of targeted audiences and users. . . . Barber suggests that technical communicators may need to learn computer and scripting languages as well as a variety of wireless scripting languages. His analysis suggests that technical communicators should also be given backgrounds in visual design and art history, video and audio production, as well as technologies that enable their incorporation with text."

"Parallel Worlds in Science Fiction Literature." Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Eds. Nisar Keshvani and Michael Punt. The MIT Press and the International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology, November 2004.

"Hackers, Cyberpunks, and Cyberians: Texts Detailing Human Intertwining with Technology." TnT: Texts and Technology. Eds. Ollie Oviedo and Janice Walker. Hampton Press, 2003. 57-88.
"Barber delves into the topic of why and how hackers, cyberpunks, and cyberians—the people who frequent cyberspace, a notional place created through the use of computer technology—in their exploratory and evolutionary efforts (while often seen as countercultural, radical, or antisocial) may in fact produce a wide variety of cultural and social forms and phenomena that can help shape new expressions of self, community, culture, and reality that both preserve old values and embrace new opportunities. Barber maintains that living amphibiously—one foot in the physical world, the other in the electronic sphere—these hackers, cyberpunks, and cyberians are 'texts' detailing the implications the rest of us might face as our lives become increasingly intertwined with technology."

New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments. Hampton Press, 2001.
"Effective Teaching in the Online Classroom: Thoughts and Ideas." The Online Writing Classroom. Eds. Michael Day, Becky Rickly, and Susanmarie Harrington. New York: Hampton Press, 2000. 243-264.
"Synthesizes ongoing participant-observer ethnographic studies of university-level writing teachers making the transition from the traditional to the online classroom to address questions of how they can effectively and productively utilize the online classroom for teaching and support for their pedagogies and curricula."

"Defending Your Life in MOOspace, and Other Stories of Academia on the Electronic Edge." High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 192-231.
(with Dene Grigar).
"Based on Grigar's history-making online dissertation defense, held at LinguaMOO in 1995, the essay analyzes the event and its implications for future scholarship, in an innovative format, a collage of MOO dialogue, MOO slides, ASCII maps of the MOOspace, emails, and multivocal sections. As Grigar and Barber conclude, there can be problems with the use of this medium at the highest levels of academic work, which have to date resisted the integration of technology. They invite members of the academy to step out onto an 'electronic edge' where technology and the university offer unlimited resources for making and marking new technologies."

"Composition Teachers and Computer Conferences: Finding a Productive Fit." Studies in Technical Communication: Selected Papers of the 1994 1995 CCCC and NCTE Meetings. Ed. Brenda Sims. Denton: University of North Texas, 1997. 77-92.
"Insights gained from ongoing ethnographical studies of writing teachers using computer conferences for teaching and learning composition. Discusses theoretical relevance, methodology, and context of studies. Elaborates on insights from these studies. Provides recommendations for teachers considering utilizing computer conferences as sites for teaching and learning."

Town Hall Meeting 1999 art Dr. John's Eazy-Peazy Guides
Web-based, award-winning tutorials for improving skills in writing, research, HTML, public speaking, and creative thinking.

Dr. John's Eazy-Peazy Guide to Creative Ideas was included in 101 Best Websites for Secondary Teachers (James Lerman. New York: International Society for Technology in Education, 2005), was featured in The Help Desk (1(6) June 21, 2002), an online newsletter supporting Kentucky education, and was selected by Encyclopedia Britannica as one of its "100 Best Websites for Teachers." Good Web Guide called Dr. John "perhaps the internet's most helpful lecturer."

The gears of cybernetic ecology "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Promoting Cybernetic Ecology in Writing Classrooms"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay examining preliminary theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological implications of cybernetic ecology, interpreted here as a productive interaction between people and computers.

"How in the World Can "Where in the World . . .?" Promote Second-Language Writing Skills?"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay exploring using problem solving computer games like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? to involve intermediate and advanced second language learners in reading, listening, researching, and decision making exercises – all of which can provide challenging, interesting, and meaningful contexts for improving second-language writing skills.

Town Hall Meeting 1999 art "Idealism, Pragmatism, Skepticism in 'Computers and Writing' at the Fin de Siècle"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay with Dene Grigar critiquing and analyzing the Town Hall Meetings at the Computers and Writing 1999 Conference. Builds on complex and disparate attitudes from multiple conference participants to build a multilayered, multivocal work consisting of three embedded webtexts: "Sequential Writing with Hyperlinks," "Interactive Webtext," and "Randomly Generated Text." Each offers a unique lens through which to view the Town Hall Meetings, while at the same time presenting the same information in different ways.

Town Hall Meeting 1998 art "The Way We Will Have Become: The Future (Histories) of Computers and Writing"
Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 3(2) Fall 1998.
A hypertext essay with Dene Grigar and Becky Rickley reporting on the first ever Town Hall Meetings at the Computers and Writing 1998 Conference. The purpose of this meeting was to explore the future of the computers and writing community, a pioneering group of academics who experimented with computers for research and teaching.

Media Focus on Research and Teaching
Please see this section of my Curriculum Vita