Composing Spaces

Back in January I posted a video created by Richard Miller and colleagues at Rutgers that described what they are calling the new humanities. Part of that future is in the form of video compositions. This morning Richard posted a new video called WOW (as in, OMG! No Way! not World of Warcraft) in which he details the distributed effect of the distribution of the New Humanities video. It takes its model from Michael Wesch’s ground-breaking "The Machine is Us/Using Us" and builds on his work by incorporating invented writing spaces, Google Earth mashups, and images of the video on multiple blogs (disclaimer: including this one). Take a look.

He announced his video to the WPA List, a post that was forwarded to the techrhet list—(virtual) reality imitating (virtual) art imitating (virtual) reality, in a way. The list has, as lists tends to do, immediately taken a negative view, labeling it self-aggrandizing and self-promoting. Perhaps because I have known Richard for over a decade I cannot help but think that something else is going on. That the WOW is just as much about the fact that Richard is doing this kind of work as it is with the impact that his New Humanities video had on his career, travels and Rutgers English’s evolving reputation.

The WOW is also to show other not-as-tech-savvy faculty the impact that new media technologies can have on the distribution of information in so short a time period (and, hence, on their own careers). I also think it is about play—playing with new ideas, new technologies, new techniques. A kind of play that was just beginning at Rutgers in the days when as their first director of Instructional Technology in the Writing Program I, for example, began playing with web design and created their first web site—a web site that was woefully inadequate, but it was the first time we had attempted such a thing, just as these videos are his (their) first foray into video compositions. Our reaction to the web site: WOW. My reaction to the fact that I built it: WOW.

The imitation is homage here and is used just as we would use in writing and new media classes. We ask students to take a look at what other, more experienced folks have done and as a way of getting to know the technologies, imitate their methods, modes, and processes, and then see what you come up with. Often a student’s reaction is just that, WOW.

My initial reaction to this video (sent to me by a colleague at Rowan) was a loud, sharp, guffaw. After recovering from seeing Obama as Rocky doing one handed pushups, I began to realize that there is quite a bit of masterful visual rhetoric going on in here taking off from the boxing conceit afforded by the movie. A semiotic reading of the video would, I suspect, reveal a host of modes, discourses, and meanings.

Via Ewan McIntosh, introducing Animoto, an application that mashes together the images you upload with music you select to create a unique video production. The folks at Animoto—"a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out"—have developed "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film." Way cool, I think. The below video contains their 60 info bit as well as an extended introduction to the application and its features.

Due to popularity in education, Animoto (like Voicethread) has created an Educators site. The possibilities for video compositions are growing rapidly. I can’t wait to take advantage of this in the near future.

I recently put together a grant proposal called, "Mapping Relationships among Web 2.0 Applications: A Preliminary Investigation into a New Information Literacy," to be consider for a Non-salary Faculty Grant. These grants are given annually at Rowan and provide up to $5000.00 to support the initial stages of faculty research. I have also recently submitted two conference proposals that consider similar issues and themes. The project summary:

As literate readers of web pages we understand that the hyperlink is used to connect together different web sites and that the web is a system of interconnected hypertext documents. When we hyperlink from one web site to the next we read these sites as discrete entities, each with unique texts, symbols, navigations, and artifacts that define it apart from others. CNN.com, for example, has a different look, feel, and usability compared to Yahoo! Other than the content of some reports we generally do not expect their features to overlap in any meaningful way.

Web 2.0 applications complicate our understanding of how to read web sites by requiring a sophisticated kind of reflective, elastic, semiotic eco-spatial information literacy that evolves with the web. This new (as yet unnamed) literacy involves, for example, becoming a critical reader of the similarities among Web 2.0 vocabularies (“widget,” “feed,” “reader”) from which new modes of composition are emerging. Literate users will be able to recognize Web 2.0 applications as writing spaces that contain multiple symbiotic genres, and will have an ability to transfer knowledge of application functionality from one site to the next. They will understand both the meaning-making and compositional possibilities of working with and among, for example, static pages, blogs, RSS readers, and social bookmarking sites.

Little, however, is known about the literacy of Web 2.0 applications. This project begins that process of understanding. The project requests $xxxx.xx. A portion of this money is to support two undergraduate student co-researchers. The remaining money is for computer hardware and software, which will facilitate our work. The end result will provide the seeds for a larger study that will investigate the processes of how web users (students, faculty, the general public, and so forth) become literate readers and users of Web 2.0 applications. The ultimate goal is to identify the characteristics of and name this new literacy. Doing so will have broad implications for the fields of composition, internet studies, rhetoric, ontological studies, and any discipline concerned with Web 2.0 applications.

The complete grant application will be available shortly on the Research page of this web site.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged regularly, partly because I have been traveling. I also got a new toy: a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 digital camera, which I am becoming more fond of every day. Here is a small selection, though representative, of what I have been seeing lately through its (wonderful, 12x digital zoom) lens, shown in roughly the order they were taken.

Readers of this blog will recall posts from several months ago that touched upon Martin Kevorkian’s fascinating book, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. Jim Brown pointed me to it and I decided to add it to the syllabus of my graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities. We are reading it this week. The book is based on Kevorkian’s astute observation that black males have, since the mid-1980s, been cast in the role of the technician or computer systems analyst. Think Miles Theo in Die Hard (the guy who has to break into the vault) and Ving Rhames in the Mission Impossible series (and, though not mentioned, the same kind of role in Entrapment). One might also think of the entire Orc population of Lord of the Rings as fitting within this representation.

In chapter 2, "Lost Worlds" Kevorkian begins looking at the representations of black children in corporate and philanthropic advertisements and annual reports. He locates their images within the narrative of the digital divide which he see as "the desire for [the fusion of the young black body with new computer technology]" (p. 39). He observes that in

popular usage, the phrase "digital divide" tends to serve as a polite shorthand from which explicit reference to race has been omitted in describing the gap between technological have and have-nots. Of course, the degree of technological access does correlate to a range of categories, including geography, income, and ethnicity. But attempts to depict the access situation in its true complexity run up against the strength of established perception: when people hear "digital divide," they tend to think in terms of black and white.
    People think that way about the gap because that is, quite literally, how they see it. In image after published image, the face of that gap is black. (p. 39)

Kevorkian continues for several pages referencing advertisements and annual reports that showcase the black child with a computer. His examples include The Computers for Learning Project, IBM, EDS, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. He argues that the "digital gap media campaigns suggest that the computer has been deployed in this fashion in part so as to cast the computer in a positive role. In these instances of tech-sector public relations, the affirmative action is technological: the placement of small colored people next to the machines forms as association for the advancement of computers" (p. 43). Reading that last phrase—"for the advancement of computers—I could not help but think of the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One campaign and this image:

This image of a black child balancing a computer on her head is a recasting of the image of the black person balancing on her head a basket of food or crops or other essential item.  In it we see Kevorkian’s observations affirmed in a new setting. As well, the computer is now savior, providor of the new form of sustenance (propagated by all media in this country): information, knowledge, access. Information has become more necessary for survival than food.

Now, I must say that I am a tempered supporter of this program. I jumped at the opportunity to participate in the By One Give One campaign and am happy that a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda now has access to computing technologies. I am excited with how the program has progressed in certain countries, and I hope all nations embrace the open computing ideas upon which OLPC is founded. However, ever since reading Lila Abu-Lughod I am wary of asserting technologies on others.

Kevorkian’s text raises significant concerns about how the program is showcasing the computers in local environments on its web sites. The participation page of the OLPC Foundation illustrates the white-black rich-poor dyad of which Kevorkian suggests by having a photograph of Negroponte and another white male signing something and the three following images being of happy, dancing, healthy black children. The implication is, of course, cause and effect: the men signed the paper and the children became happy.

Other similar images abound. In all of them dark-skinned children are happily sitting at the computer, smiling the computer, staring intently at the computer. This is not just for geographic reasons. According to the web site, trial locations include non-African, Asian, and South American countries. Indeed, the United States is included as a trial country.

The OLPC program raises heated emotions on both sides of the issue: those that see it as the west thrusting its values on other cultures and those who is it as a benevolent attempt to bring technologies to children in countries that otherwise could never afford it. Indeed, a hotly contested and sometimes nasty discussion recently threaded on the techrhet list over this very issue. And though I support Negroponte’s goals, I have to wonder about the program overall when the web site is representing success in this way.

ReadWriteWeb recently had two posts on information visualization. Marshall Kirkpatrick addresses the question of information overload by looking at how new visualization media are adapting from gaming interfaces. Sarah Perez lists The Best Tools for for Visualization by breaking the tools into several categories: Visualize Social Networks, Visualize Music, Visualize the Internet, among others. The number of tools, applications, and plugins that are now available, combined with the increasing importance of being able to become critical readers and composers of visual information, suggests that we are going to start to seriously rethink (more than we have already) the place of information visualization in our curricula and its placement in composition as a whole.

(I will soon be making an argument to my department that the course that I (and a few others) teach, Writing, Research, and Technology, needs to be transformed from one in which students consider visual rhetoric and compose multimodal essays (at least in my sections, I’m not sure what happens in others—another issue to be addressed), into one dedicated to a critical understanding of information visualization. I’m still not sure the kinds of assignments that I would like to see or the applications considered, but I would like students to compose Adobe Flex applications that interact with XML data and/or engage with mapping in Google Earth, and/or one of the many useful APIs, and so forth. One question, among many, is how to ensure that such a course coevolves with current visualization technologies. Perhaps what we really need is an information visualization certificate where students take classes ranging from visual rhetoric to mapping and cartography to composing their own apps. Lots to think about.)

In a comment to Sarah Perez’ post, a reader pointed to Twingly’s screensaver: “Our screensaver is a visualization of the real time web… more precise a visualization over the blogosphere, real time, as a world globe.” The creators see this application as an evolution of the RSS Reader: “Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.” The installation is quite simple and can be run as a stand-along application as well as a screen saver. They include this video (there is no sound):

The Twingly screensaver compliments Jonathan Harris’ work (which I posted about below) but unlike Harris, whose applications segment out information based on preset conditions that often give an artificial sense of wholeness (for example, “We Feel Fine” only includes passages from blogs posted in English and therefore, despite his earnest ideals, only maps the “human emotion” of the English-speaking world), Twingly presents all posts in multiple languages from across the planet. As a result, we get a more authentic (re)presentation of the dissemination of the ideas of those on the planet who have a blog and care to share them.

Very quickly, from The Chronicle of Higher Education (some comments later in the week when I have a chance to relax a bit):

I strongly recommend the Chronicle Review’s Architecture Issue (March 9, 2008), with which I am just getting started.

I have been helping a colleague design her first Voicethread, and while I was on the site I came across a series of book reports by children that seem to be in the fourth grade. I have embedded one below and I don’t think I need to write why, though I will. Many of my students have been posting on their blogs about reading, my undergrads (who are primarily elementary education majors) most likely because March 2 was Read Across American Day and Dr. Suess’ birthday. Two posts were on the subject of reading difficulties. One student points to a very cool program called Reading Assistance Education Dogs, or R.E.A.D., in which dogs are trained to sit and listen to children with reading difficulties read aloud. Another describes, with great hilarity, what she calls "blue addiction"—the uncontrollable urge to click on blue links in hypertext fiction without care for the text in which a link appears.

The beauty of the below Voicethread is how wonderful it is to see an elementary school teacher use a multimodal social technology to provide a space for her students to articulate what they have read, what they think about it, and how it impacted their learning. They even composed their own avatars. Spectacular, really.

From the great folks at CommonCraft, Twitter in Plain English:

An excellent explanation of Twitter—better than I ever could do when talking with students about it—but I must say that I do miss the “Hmm Hmm Hmm” that began and ended their prior videos.