Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

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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I just came across the companion site for the book Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. This book looks fascinating, and I’m going to be ordering it from the University of Minnesota Press. The book “charts the ascendancy of mapping as a powerful interdisciplinary strategy that links people and places, data and organizations, and physical and virtual environments.”

The web site has the most incredible map: “W.Bradford Paley’s TextArc version of the book [which] shows each page as thumbnail and highlights the most-used terms”:

TextArc “is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by everaging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as Statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an verview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text” (from their pdf overview). It the pet project of one person, W. Bradford Paley, a self-described “interaction designer,” and many others who have provided support. Here is a TextArc of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (click on the image to go to the interactive version; go here first to verify that your browser is supported):

I am blown away by this. It’s too late to write anything about it now, but I will when I have a few minutes to really figure out what I am seeing, what I think about it, and how it could be used in the classroom.

I recently came across several interactive maps on the interactive graphics section of the Philadelphia Inquirer website while looking up some information on the number of Philly homicides in 2007 (as of October 10, 318). Three that caught my attention are: “Philadelphia Shootings in 2007,” “Philadelphia Homicides in 2007,” and “Philadelphia Median Home Prices.” The maps, designed by Alan Baseden, John Duchneskie, and Robert West, are wonderful examples of what Edward Tufte calls beautiful evidence (click image to see full-size)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpq1yZOrtYA

Update 10/24: An uncut, extended version has been leaked:

Last weekend, after reflecting on the fact that I talk about it all the time with students regardless of what class I am teaching, I decided to take the plunge and get a Facebook account. According to the fascinating Wired article, “How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform,” I was 1 of 1 million new users in the last week, and among the fastest growing user population:

As for those concerns that Facebook’s membership had peaked? Well, now
it’s signing up nearly 1 million new users a week. By the end of August
there were 36 million of them. And these aren’t just the tweens or
college kids you might suspect; the fastest-growing segment of Facebook
users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users.
Total registrations have more than quadrupled over the previous year.
The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. And venture
capitalists say that if Facebook were to go public today, investors
would value it at more than $5 billion — five times what Yahoo had been
prepared to pay.

To say that I have found Facebook intoxicating would be an understatement. I am addicted.

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Michael Wesch, creator of The Machine is Us/ing Us, has collaborated with 200 students in his Cultural Anthropology class to create a new video, A Vision of Students Today:

The video, set in a 60s- or 70s-era stadium-seating lecture hall, presents the technological and educational habits of the 200 or so students in his class. It highlights the fact that contemporary students are multitaskers, that they have disparate interests, that there is not enough time in the day, and that they learn by active engagement. They use Facebook, read barely 50% of the assigned readings, and some never crack a book. The vast majority don’t believe their teachers know their names. There is an interesting (though I’m not sure successful) causality argument taking place about the spaces of education, the amount of time students spend with their education, and the amount of time students spend using technology.

Also significant is the media used to present the message. Several writing spaces are employed: walls, chairs, notebook paper, Google Docs word processor, and a chalkboard (the latter of which is overlaid by a quotation heralding its invention, though the remaining footage seems to mock the space itself).

As an exercise for students, I can see the value of such an assignment: use multiple media to create a message about your experiences a student and individual in contemporary society. And I support the overarching theme: that the spaces in which learning occur in most university classrooms inhibit the kind of pedagogy that is effective with Student 2.0. It is an argument I make often. Yet, for some reason the video leaves me unsettled. Perhaps it is the passivity of the students’ messages. Perhaps it is the retread of some of the material from The Machine is Us/ing Us. Or, perhaps it is because there are no solutions offered. We know the complaints. What, students, are some of the solutions? Hopefully, we’ll see such a video from these talented students in the future.

Blogged with Flock

When it is a writing space:

Office door of Columbia University professor, Madonna G. Constantine:

A hangman’s noose was found pinned to the door of an African-American professor’s door at Teacher’s College, administrators wrote in an e-mail today.

The noose was discovered this morning and was reported to the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, members of which are currently investigating the incident. Police and University officials declined to name the professor, who the police described as a 44 year-old black woman, but students identified the victim as Professor Madonna Constantine, who is in the Psychological Counseling department and is known for her work on racism.

The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in doing so have continued to refine the characteristics of peace. By locating efforts to fight global warming and climate change within the peace category (instead of, say, chemistry or economics), the Foundation is supporting Gore’s (and others) argument that fighting global warming is a moral issue, as well as a rhetorical issue and, I would argue, a spatial issue. The geographical spaces that are going to be most affected (or have been most affected) by climate change are going to become war zones, where people fight for scarce resources:

“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

Yesterday, in another act of classifying, the House Foreign Relations Committee, in a non-binding resolution, voted to label the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as “genocide.” The Bush administration countered by calling the atrocities “historic mass killings.” (Update: Ira Schorr noted possible political reasons for the creation of the resolution.) As usual, The Daily Show offered the most meaningful assessment of the ironical and political ramifications of such a vote: