Wikipedia and social change.

Here is an interesting event on whether Wikipedia is helping or hindering social change.

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:

• FlickrVision 3D
  
• TwitterVision - also in 3D version and can be set up to pull from Facebook "twitter" messages.
  
• SpinVisionTV - pulls from YouTube postings

Caveats: Only certain user's activities will be reflected in these tools, depending on user information made public and other functions of the selected tools.

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.

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.'

Wikipedia’s Top 50 Visualizations Link

via English Education Professor by Todd Finley on 1/27/08

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

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.

Open-Access Student Video Contest

North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access 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:

A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

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.

Digital Toy Chest

Digital Toy Chest for Online or Downloadable Tools

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

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.

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….

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.

Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

A newly completed Ph.D. dissertation by Jeremy Douglass:

Abstract:

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended “close interactions” include Plotkin’s Shade (1999), Barlow’s Aisle (2000), Pontious’s Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Currently seeking proposals, but also held next spring in our own backyard of Vancouver, WA.

MediaCommons: a digital scholarly network

"MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network."

FlowTV

"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. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves."

Their site also offers their journal articles, reader polls, columns, and more.

museums and the web

This is a fascinating topic, as the links between the two become thicker and the question of the archive, with its desire for the transmissible memorial, becomes more complex.

 

gray kochhar-lindgren, ph.d.

director: center for university studies and programs

professor: interdisciplinary arts and sciences

university of washington  bothell

425-352-3670

 

 

Museums and the Web

Museums and the Web

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 9/27/07

Museums and the Web

April 9-12,2008
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Join hundreds of your colleagues at the only annual conference exploring the on-line presentation of cultural, scientific and heritage content across institutions and around the world: Museums and the Web.

Call for Participation Closes September 30, 2007.

Demonstration Proposals will be accepted through December 31, 2007.

For more information go to: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/

Museums and the Web addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Together, we are transforming communities and organizations.

The MW Program
MW features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional forums, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. The primary language of the conference has always been English, but in 2008, the sessions will be simultaneously translated English/French and /French/English to encourage a wide francophone participation.

Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours, including one to the museums of Ottawa, Canada's national capital.
Social events include receptions each evening, a Birds-of-a-Feather Breakfast, and plenty of refreshment breaks to provide hours of discovery and debate among hundreds of colleagues from around the world.

The MW2008 Program will be selected through peer-review by an International Program Committee based on proposals due September 30, 2007.

Who Attends MW?
Webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centers, and archives join the professionals, companies, foundations and governments that support them and attend Museums and the Web every year.

Scholarships and Volunteers
Archives & Museum Informatics awards MW Scholarships to museum professionals from small institutions and developing countries. For MW2008, The Department of Canadian Heritage has sponsored Scholarships for Canadian Professionals. Scholarship applications are due December 31, 2007.

Students are invited to volunteer at MW; they may attend the conference in exchange for helping out. Preference in 2008 will be given to fully bilingual volunteers. Volunteer applications are accepted until all spaces are filled.

Can't Make It? Get the Book.
MW2008 Presenters will be required to submit written papers; the best will appear in print in Museums and the Web 2008: Selected papers from an international conference. All papers are also published on-line and on CD-ROM. Discounted advance orders of the Selected Papers and CD-ROM Proceedings are now being taken.

Past papers from all Museums and the Web conferences – since 1997 – are on-line. Printed volumes of Selected Papers from MW97 – MW2007 are also available to order.

Conference Co-Chairs
Jennifer Trant and David Bearman
Archives & Museum Informatics
158 Lee Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M4E 2P3 Canada