Privacy, Publicity,
& the Text Message

☜ Home Assignments Practica

Practica

Weekly exercises, conducted asynchronously.



Report on your results in the Slack #practica channel.



Build a working telegraph.

See how many words per minute you can key in Morse code.


Download and analyze the texts on your phone.

Use them to visualize patterns in the relationship between you and a friend.


Experiment with SMS-based apps and art.

Including the Dumbstore and other interactive text projects.


Queue up your text messages in a pen/paper notebook.

Think about the frequency of your correspondence.


Read letters from the Renaissance.

Visit Early Modern Letters Online and browse the database to get a sense of the archival sources. Find one letter of interest that you’d like to tell the group about. What can you learn about the letter’s context from its metadata, and from browsing that person’s inbox? In order to access library resources, you may have to log in to campus networks remotely via EZProxy or VPN. Also: Networking Archives is a “a three-year .


Text using a T9 keypad.

An exercise in technics of the 2000s.


What does 💬 actually mean?

An exploration of what the animated ellipsis indicates, on a number of messaging platforms.