Composing Spaces

Pangea Day is this Saturday, May 10th. I’ve been working with two students to plan the only public screening event in Southern Jersey. The planning is getting intense and exciting. We’ve posted signs everywhere, invited local schools and community members. One of the student co-coordinators has been on the radio (.mp3). We’ve got a Facebook page, and we’re hoping for a respectable turnout. And for the weather to be nice, as expected.

The Pangea Day folks have released a new trailer which seems to include portions of the 24 films that will be shown:

In 2006 Jehane Noujaim won the TED prize for her wish “to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film.” Pangea Day is the realization of that wish—a global event with thousands of screenings in homes, fields, stadiums, and, like at Rowan, auditoriums. In these public and private spaces people will come together to get to know each other, to learn about each other, to celebrate each other in ways that only film can provide. Photographs and video that we take at the event will join those from around the world, adding Rowan, its students, and the South Jersey community to a world-wide text that encourages openness, curiosity, friendship, and hope.

Here is here 2006 TED talk:

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.

I was reading the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine this morning and found an article called "Aerosol Art" which details a fascinating new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture (runs through October 26, 2008). The exhibit includes portraits and paintings of Hip Hop artists, film, poetry, and the one medium that really caught my attention: the graffiti art of taggers Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Jobyl Boone, the exhibit’s guest curator, argues that

graffiti tags function as self-portraits. "We want to present the notion that individuality and portraiture might not be someone’s face or body," she says. Conlon agrees: "Graffiti is based on choosing a name and making it as prolific as possible."

Two of Conlon and Hupp’s tags:

Read the rest of this entry »

Its the first day of classes here at Rowan and Blackboard is giving me issues posting Web links, so here are the videos we are going to show in Introduction to Writing Arts:

The first snowfall came to southern Jersey on Thursday, starting around 9:30am and ending around 11:00pm. About 3 inches in total. I, like many others I imagine, enjoy seeing how snow transforms the spaces we take for granted everyday. While walking around campus I snapped a few photos of Rowan Hall with my cell phone.

Jim Brown over at Blogging Pedagogy (by way of Earth Wide Moth) points to Voicethread, an application which allows users to annotate images documents, and videos with sound and text from multiple users. I have been searching for something like this for quite some time. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of assignments Jim comes up with (his assignments are always quite cool).

Right now I’m thinking of asking my grad course next semester, Writing for Electronic Communities, to use it in their presentations of their usability test results (as an alternative to the horror of PowerPoint, for example). Or, perhaps, to compose a Voicethread compendium to the written report which provides oral and written comments to screen shots and data. My engineering students this semester could orally describe their parametric design process as they optimized their bottle rocket and truss designs.

I’m having trouble with the embed—sorry!