Composing Spaces

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.

The March 2008 edition of Harper’s arrived today, and in it is a wonderful example of how internet technologies are not value neutral. Ginger Strand’s annotation "Keyword: Evil" (which Harper’s has made available for free online) spans two pages as she uses call-outs connected to an architectural schematic to dissect the energy-use implications of Google’s planned server farm site, The Dallas, which rests on the Columbia River in Oregon. Two screenshots of the article:

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The goal of Pangea Day is to unite the world through the visual power of short films. Submit your own by 15 Feb 2008 at http://www.pangeaday.org/.

This is a test  to see if images appear:

Updated 12/8/07, 9:48am. The New York Times continues its tradition of mapping traumatic spaces in its remediation of the shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people with an assault rifle.

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One of my students, lee, posted a link that his girlfriend found (can I just say how much I love having blogs in this class) to a video for Jeff Han’ s Perceptive Pixel’s interactive touch media wall (this is the link to the video, which I could not get it to embed) which is being sold by Neiman Marcus for the price of $100,000.00.

Here is a video from Perceptive Pixel’s web site:

Jeff Han is a human-computer interactive designer who is revolutionizing interactive touch displays. He launched his company, Perceptive Pixel, after this TED talk he gave in February 2006:

There are multiple YouTube videos showcasing this technology, as well, including this one where Han walks through its use:

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!

Via Geoff Carter on the techrhet list, Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose talking about the Kindle:

The device is getting the full media blitz, most notably the cover story in Newsweek, claiming that it is The Future of Reading and that the Book Isn’t Dead. I wasn’t aware that the book was in critical care.I haven’t used the Kindle yet, though I would obviously like to get my hands on one and see what its all about. I had the same initial reaction as Clay—that the lack of unlimited internet access is a serious drawback. Clay likes to check blogs in his phone; I like to do the same through my RSS reader.At Thanksgiving the family got into a discussion about the Kindle and I opined that I thought it would be another neat toy that some readers buy, just as some people bought the Sony Reader—the technology from which the Kindle heavily borrows (especially the liquid text screen). The only reason the Kindle is getting such buzz, I suspect, is because it is Bezos. But, we shall see.

Update 11/24, 9:27pm: Wired has a table that compares 8 categories among 9 ebook readers.

Update 12/2/07, 11:13am: I can’t resist pointing to Chip Kidd’s response to the Kindle at A Brief Message:

On Monday November 19th, Amazon released something called Kindle, the latest “e-book” reading device. I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think this will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.

Sincerely,
Chip Kidd

My brother-in-law, who is a Marine, and his wife are stationed at Camp Pendleton which is 38 miles north of San Diego. It also, according to the official website for the base, “covers over 125,000 acres and approximately 200 square miles of terrain. The stretch of shoreline along the base — 17½ miles — is the largest undeveloped portion of coastal area left in Southern California.”

Felipe just sent me some pictures of what it looked like this afternoon (note the sun in the second image):

Update, 11:18pm: CNN.com is now reporting that 3500 Marines have been evacuated from Camp Pendleton, as two fires were burning on the property. Here is a San Diego County-wide fire map (.pdf, 1.76 MB) updated as of 6:00pm local time. Camp Pendleton is in the upper left of the map and is still white as evacuations had yet to be ordered. You can see that Estimated Manditory Evacuation Areas surrounded it.

I am loving TextArc, though I am somewhat amazed that I have never heard of or seen it, especially since it has been around since the mid-late 1990s. The creator, Paley, tapped into Project Gutenberg to be able to TextArc thousands of works. The TextArc of The Waste Land brings a whole new dimension to the spatiality of the poem:

In the few (wonderful) chances I have had to discuss The Waste Land with students, I have brought them into it by conceiving of the poem as a series of spaces–lands that the protagonist was traversing in search of multiple meanings. The TextArc shows that landscape in a new way–as Paley puts it (.pdf; this link describes the process of designing a TextArc): they can “serve as a visual seed, evoking new insights into a text’s meaning.”

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