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SPIF-y Analyses

Short critical writing

Assignment Overview

  • Students work individually
  • ~1500 words
  • Submitted via email
  • Submitted by October 30

Assignment Details

In our first class, we will discuss Whitney Trettien’s “Substrate, Platform, Interface, Format” (2023), which aims ambitiously to “develop a shared, formalist framework for describing the material structure of all technologies that mediate human culture.” We will work together to define the key terms in Trettien’s framework—“substrate, platform, interface, format” (S-P-I-F)-and experiment with applying them as we study media technologies together in class.

This assignment asks you to put Trettien’s framework into practice in a short analytical paper. You should choose two related media-technological artifacts to compare and contrast using the SPIF-y model, with a particular focus on material structure and its relationship to cultural reception and understanding. As you chose what to analyze, consider these suggestions:

  • You can choose materials related to your own research, objects of personal or pedagogical interest, or materials we discussed but did not deeply analyze in class. Across your two short papers you will look at four distinct artifacts, and I encourage you to choose at least 2 outside your typical comfort zone. For instance, if you are expert in contemporary web comics, perhaps choose a comparison from print culture to stretch your thinking.
  • Your chosen artifact pairs should facilitate both comparison and contrast, and thus should not identical across all four SPIF-y axes. A physical and digital edition of “the same” book could be meaningfully contrasted, for example, but two books published by the same printer in the same format might be harder to meaningfully contrast from this material-cultural perspective.

Your short paper should succinctly:

  1. Compare and contrast your chosen artifacts across all four axes of the SPIF-y framework;
  2. Develop hypotheses about the significance of these media qualities. How do the material elements of your artifacts help us reflect on broader literary, historical, or socio-technical questions? Since these are short papers, you needn’t have a fully developed argument, but you should use these analyses to begin critically reflecting on the relationships between media, materiality, and culture.
  3. Incorporate at least two critical sources into your analysis. One can be chosen from our course readings (core or penumbral), but one should come from independent research.