About the Author: Abby Larson is an aspiring graphic designer studying Digital Technology and Culture at Washington State University. Digital Technology and Culture, or DTC, is a program that allows students to concentrate on one of two areas: media production, or Culture and Technology. Abby has chosen to focus on Media Authoring and has found that WSU’s DTC program is very suited to what she is looking for in terms of education. Abby finds the juxtaposition of creative expressiveness and critical analysis to be a perfect arrangement of creativity and analytical exploration of media. In addition to DTC, Abby is minoring in Fine Arts and plans to use these courses to expand her understanding of the creative aspects in media authoring.
During the spring semester of 2018, she took four DTC courses, including DTC 375: Language Texts and Technology, which took an in-depth look at the historical technologies that brought us to where we are today in terms of technology. Through this class, Abby has taken a special interest in long-distance interactions and how messages travel and translate through different modes of communication.
Currently, Abby has found that technologies like the Adobe creative suite, media sharing platforms like Behance, Pinterest, or even Blackboard, and her laptop in general to be the most instrumental to her education in media authoring, and the most consistently used technologies throughout her coursework. These technologies are consistent in her focus on long-distance communication and her daily use of these technologies certainly plays a role in her expanding interest in how people share ideas across great distances.
A Look into the Earliest Computing Systems: This piece looks into the various forms of computation that lead to the modern calculator used each and every day by students and professionals alike. This writing goes into how widespread these devices have become, and their very humble beginnings. While the early forms of this computation device were very modest, they were also extremely massive and of substantial size. Throughout the analysis, the author refers to outside sources, and provides images as reference to the devices she comments on.
Keywords: calculator, device, computation, pascal, leibniz,
Sharing Ideas and Conversing with Code: How Samuel Morse Changed the World: This multimodal analysis of Morse code and its effect on the world first looks at the author’s personal experiences with long distance communication. It then goes on to look at the what is known as the earliest form of long distance communication: Sub-saharan Africa’s Talking Drums. These drums were less of a code and more of language. The writing the focuses on how the telegraph came to be, and the various inventors that almost got to Morse’s discovery first. After the groundwork is laid for Morse’s invention, the piece details the various ways in which the telegraph, in conjunction with Morse code, changed the western world.
Keywords: morse code, early communication, telegraph, efficiency, information structures,