The new issue of the journal FlowTV is online. FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.
Highlights from this issue include:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Wikipedia and social change.
Here is an interesting event on whether Wikipedia is helping or hindering social change.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Mapping and tracking web 2.0 tool usage
I heard of WikipediaVision (beta) from a snippet in the Feb 2008 edition of College & Research Libraries News, and while that tool has potential, it led me to even more 2.0 tool/Google maps mashup applications that I found to be more impressive (mainly just because they're further into their development).
Check them out to see in (almost) real-time the usage and content people are contributing:
Check them out to see in (almost) real-time the usage and content people are contributing:
- FlickrVision 3D
- TwitterVision - also in 3D version and can be set up to pull from Facebook "twitter" messages.
- SpinVisionTV - pulls from YouTube postings
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Websites as graph/art
This tool is pretty neat. Enter the url of the website of your choice, and it will graph it and display the site in a visual manner. It's really quite beautiful as the graph is generated, too, as it's an animated process.This image is the graph for this blog, and it's still growing and taking form as I write this entry!
What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Signs: Studies in Graphic Narrative - new scholarly journal
SIGNs – Studies in Graphic Narratives – is a new, international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Comics (or, in contemporary jargon, Graphic Novels), from modern times up to the early decades of the 20th century. Read more here.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Wikipedia's Top 50 - Visualized
For those of you fascinated by the visual display of info as I am, this graphic nicely visualizes the top 50 wikipedia searches from 8/06-5/07. Edward Tufte would be proud of the creator.
It's interesting to see what topics were popular in concordance w/ what was going on in the news of politics and entertainment at the time. It's also kinda funny how one of the top things searched on were 'wiki' and/or 'wikipedia.'
Scholarly communication: Harvard opens up
In an exciting development in the push for open access scholarly communication, Tuesday's Chronicle of Higher Education news blog posted: Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement. The policy requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online through Harvard's institutional repository. There appears to be some confusion regarding when the articles can be posted (after peer review? after the article is published?). This is another facet of what MIT's open courseware project has done to make course materials available free online.
Related links:
SPARC
MIT Open CourseWare
Related links:
SPARC
MIT Open CourseWare
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
One million monkeys.
I have always been struck by how the logic of Wikipedia has not really affected the production of content- except for the use of blogs by major media outlets. I can easily see Wikilogic being applied in the creation of literature, advertising and even textbooks. (I am aware of Wikibooks- but it is not the force it needs to be, IMHO.)
Now, we have an interesting example of collaborative story telling- one million monkeys. They seem to have very interesting ideas on how stories can be generated using a collaborative approach. Members upload snippets and readers can take stories off in interesting directions based on their preferences. At the end, the book is not a linear progression. Rather, it is a hypertext tree! Check it out and post your thoughts here.
Now, we have an interesting example of collaborative story telling- one million monkeys. They seem to have very interesting ideas on how stories can be generated using a collaborative approach. Members upload snippets and readers can take stories off in interesting directions based on their preferences. At the end, the book is not a linear progression. Rather, it is a hypertext tree! Check it out and post your thoughts here.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Open-Access Student Video Contest
via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/22/08
A library group that promotes open access to scholarly data today announced the winners of a contest that had students producing short videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video called “Share.”
The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, of Carleton College, titled “Pri Vetai: Private Eye.” And the second runner-up was “An Open Access Manifesto,” by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of the Pratt Institute. —Andrea L. Foster
A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom
Here is an interesting way one professor used Twitter in class and for assignments:
via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/28/08
Twitter at first seemed like a bad idea to David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog your life by dashing out very short notes (140 characters max) to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Mr. Parry’s first instinct was that Twittering would just encourage students to speak in sound bites and self-obsess.
But then he gave it a try, and he now sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool.
How is that? He outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” on a post on the blog AcademHack.
Last semester he required the 20 students in his “Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication” course to sign up for Twitter and to send a few messages with the service each week as part of a writing assignment. He also invited his students to follow his own Twitter feed, in which he sometimes writes several short thoughts each day. Yesterday morning, for instance, he sent out a message that read: “Reading, prepping for grad class, putting off running until it warms up a bit.” Last week, one of his messages included a link to a Web site he wanted his students to check out.
The posts from students also mixed the mundane with the useful. One student twittered that she just bought a pet rabbit. Another noted that a topic from the class was being discussed on a TV-news report.
The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel like more of a community, Mr. Parry said in an interview Monday. “It was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching,” he said.
One downside: Some students have to pay a small fee for each text message they receive, and that means all this Twittering can add up to real money. Students can avoid such charges by setting their Twitter account so that they receive e-mail messages instead of text messages, but that eliminates much of the point of the service.
Should more professors use Twitter? Have you tried it in your classroom? —Jeffrey R. Young
Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review
Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!
Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.
He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.
Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.
He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.
Digital Toy Chest
via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/15/08
From Alan Liu, via Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 465:
“Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used productively on a free trial basis). Also on this page are “paradigms”–books, essays, digital projects, etc.–that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create.” Each entry includes a descriptive annotation, screenshot, and link. Included at present are tools for diagramming, game creation, mapping, mashup creation, simulation & modeling, text analysis, visualization/pattern-discovery, and machinima.
New Journal: Memory Studies
via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/23/08
Via the H-Net’s H-Memory:
SAGE Publications has released the first issue of Memory Studies. They describe the journal thusly
Memory Studies responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era, and examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. [Read more.]
They’re allowing free access to the first issue (with registration), and it is most definitely worth checking out.
Friday, February 08, 2008
frustration aesthetics
I’m intrigued by the term, as Douglas uses it in his analysis of Interactive Fiction (which looks quite good as a whole, btw)….I wonder if, in part, that “frustration” is part and parcel of the expeience of art since at least its modernist fragmenations, growing autonomy? Art is the genre that knows how and works to frustrate its own tradition, expectations? Thereby opening up something different, giving chance a chance….
Thursday, February 07, 2008
YouTube Ethnography Project
This YouTube video introduces the YouTube Ethnography Project, lead by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State. Read more about the ongoing digital ethnography project.