RIDE Blog Carnival #3—Open Event CFE

As promised yon, RIDE Blog Carnival #3 is an open event. Here is what we agreed to some months ago:

Carnival #3 will work a bit differently in that it will invite a wider set of possibilities. Whereas Carnival #1 and Carnival #2 will be guided by a set of questions, or a theme, Carnival #3 will truly be an open event, which will invite you to index (as experimentally or conventionally, as you wish) a subset of 90s from the blog, to respond to a blog entry or two from other carnivals, to extend or remediate your carnival entry from #1 or #2, or to develop another entry in light of some key question, curiosity, or connection you want to puzzle through nearer to the semester’s end.

Accordingly, you are invited to index one subset of entries from the blog. Those subsets correspond neatly with our six lode stars: hypertext & hodology, database & narrative, avatar & identity, attention, artificiality, and dataism. For the indexing option, select one lode star, and compose an entry that indexes the set of entries collected under the corresponding tag/label for that lode star. An indexical entry on attention, for example, would take into consideration all of the entries posted at the RIDE Blog under that category (i.e., label/tag). What, then, does an indexing entry do? It locates patterns, amplifies phrases or themes, and elucidates patterns, becoming, in effect, a map for refreshed wayfinding. You might style the index like one you would find near the end of a book. You might include hyperlinks. You might experiment with multimodal elements (maximally or minimally; it is up to you). You also might consult the Indexes section of The Hundreds (PDFed in Canvas). The Hundreds, after all, inspired our work with incremental short-form writing (known as “nineties”). At the end of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, there are four experimental indexes: “Index,” a poem by Fred Moten; “Not-Index,” an imagetext combining a phrasal list with with illustrations; “The Index,” a stylized essay by Susan Lepselter, and “Untitled,” a prose poem by Stephen Muecke. The Duke UP website characterizes the invited indexes as “responses] with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.” The Indexes section ends with yet another possibility, “Some Things We Thought With,” an inventory of references and enduring lines assembled, presumably, by Berlant and Stewart. Take a look. Consider the world(s) we’ve staged. Mull over some things we thought with. And let this send you in a direction of your choosing.

Beyond this indexing option, RIDE Blog Carnival #3 is open in the most genuine sense, in that you might also do something else instead. The something else is up to you. Length is unprescribed due to the multimodal extensibility of the call. All RIDE Blog Carnival #3 entries are due to be posted no later than 4 p.m. ET on Monday, December 4, under the category you selected (e.g., “Attention”) and “Blog Carnival #3.”