“Soundwriting in the FYW classroom” (Podcast s01e10)

Ames and Trauman are BACK! After a hiatus caused by the perfect storm of health issues, an unsustainable production schedule, and amazing professional opportunities, Ames and Trauman return to end Season 1 with the first of three episodes. Episode 10 brings the long-ago promised discussion of our collaboratively created and co-taught soundwriting classes.  After a pretty quick explanation of what we did, we focus our conversation on what we got out of the experience, and what we believe the students got out of the experience.
In the second part of the episode, Ames and Trauman each choose and offer for your listening pleasure one of our favorite student-created podcast segments. We had a devil of a time choosing, and could have filled hours of MoT with student work—much of which is AMAZING. But we’ve gone with these examples because they illustrate well some of the affordances of sound, and each makes clear the ways that soundwriting expands our understanding of how and when storytelling can inform and be, in and of itself, scholarly work.

This episode is available for direct download here.

Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here.

“DIY Audio Cables, Scholars as Makers, Penultimate S. Discussion” (Podcast s01e09)

Like most episodes, this one consists of two segments. In the initial segment, Ames and Trauman talk about their adventures into the world of DIY audio cables. Though not without challenges, their efforts were ultimately successful. They reflect on the practical rewards and emotional satisfaction of measuring, stripping, soldering, and testing. And of course the conversation moves beyond the specifics of cable-making in general to larger questions about the value of DIY approaches to scholarship and creative work. And Ames makes Trauman blush. Like three times.

In the Creative-Critical-Scholarly-Spotlight (CCSS) section, Ames points to a few different texts. They include:

This episode’s second segment brings to your the penultimate discussion of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s experimental storytelling project S. Even thought we LOVE this book, it’s certainly not without its flaws. This is easily our most detailed discussion, and we take the authors to task in a couple of ways they didn’t really deliver on the enormous early promise of this project.

And stay tuned for an additional blog post where Trauman offers more detailed information about the cable making materials and techniques he and Ames discuss in this episode.

This episode is available for direct download here.

Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here.

“Storytelling through Marginalia, a Radical Dance Workshop, and Creative Processes as Research Methodologies.” (Podcast s01e08)


In this episode, we offer two segments and spotlight three excellent texts.

In our first segment, we continue our discussion of S., the experimental novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. As we reflect on reading chapters 7,8,9, and an “interlude,” we return to some of the main themes of the book: scholarship, love, identity, documentation, and collaboration. It’s such an amazing book. You should really get yourself a copy, start reading it, and keep listening to us talk about it.

In the second half of the episode, Ames and her frequent collaborator, Phil Bratta have a conversation about participating in a radical dance workshop with Guillermo Gomez Pena and Sara Shelton Mann this past summer.

And between these two segments, we want to point your attention to three excellent texts we’ve been reading and thinking about lately:

This episode is available for direct download here.

Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here.

More Links:

Do have other relevant links or resources to contribute? Please tweet them at us: @trauman or @amesthehawk or with the hashtag #MastersOfText.

“Vox Fabri, Vox Dea, and Adventures in Microcasting” (Podcast s01e07)

In our first segment, “Vox Fabri, Vox Dea,” Ames remixes the responses of 45 participants of the Tenth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. Organized around patterns of answers to two questions–“What’s your favorite FemRhet moment?” and “What’s you’re way of making? This vox populi piece makes clear the magic and magnificence of this conference, one celebrating twenty years.

Our second segment recounts a local “microcasting” experiment produced at Columbia College Chicago’s Parents Weekend. Ames and Trauman organized a participatory “making” session in which students and parents recorded different portions of a common audio text, which were then immediately combined into a short podcast for the participants to listen to and to take with them. Although the session didn’t run perfectly, it was a fascinating (and largely successful) experiment engaging an audience as co-producers of a real-time microcasting.

This episode is available for direct download here.

Check out the podcast on iTunes and subscribe here.

“The New Work of Reading; More S. Project Chatter” (Podcast s01e06)

In episode 6 of Masters of Text, Ames presents the first part of a three-section piece called “The New Work of Reading,” an experimental audio-autoethnographic piece in which she examines her own process of learning to read multimodal scholarship. This episode also features the third segment of our S. Project, a dialogue that focuses on what we thought about Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of S.. by J.J. Abrahams and Doug Dorst. As an interlude, Trauman offers a spotlight on a couple of texts he recommends our listeners check out.