Bill Wolff's Composing Spaces

wordles of the #on911 hashtag: a brief analysis

In this post I briefly analyze Wordles of the first 1123 tweets posted with the #on911 hashtag. The Wordles contain 1000, 100, 10, and 1 words.

the word TV as depicted in a one-word Wordle

what the web looked like on 9/11

This post showcases screen shots of news web sites I archived throughout the day on September 11, 2001. It also discuses a project I started when a grad student, "From Shock to Spectacle: Remediating the Terrorist Attack of September 11, 2001."

Screen shot of cnn.com on september 11, 2001, taken at 2:37 pm. The site has the heading, Test Story; Don't Publish.

6 recommendations for teaching with the flip video camera

This post describes how I integrated the Flip Video camera and related software applications into an undergraduate upper level writing course in spring 2009.

Screen shot of Bill in a YouTube video holding the Flip Video camera as he explains to the viewer the purpose of the class.

using twitter in the graduate classroom

Using Twitter reinforced my belief that micro-blogging is an important communication medium for burgeoning writers to understand it both theoretically and practically. For graduate students, this involves a thorough engagement with Twitter and the Twitter community.

Screen shot of Bill's students' Twitter discussion.

concerns about newsweek’s oprah cover photo

I am concerned about the kind of editing that might have taken place on this image to darken Oprah's skin and highlight shadows, just as we saw with images of OJ on Time and Newsweek

Side-by-side photos of Oprah, one a manipulated image that appeared on the Newsweek cover, the other the original

teaching students how to create meaningful tags

I have found that engaging students in the activity of creating and interpreting a tag cloud of one of their own posts is an effective way to introduce students to the concept of tagging.

Screen shot of three tag clouds, each one from different student blogs.

mapping superbowl tweets in the nytimes

February 3, 2009

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this post has been retitled from “it’s a twitter-happy go-go springsteen nation.” Via @courtneybird who retweeted @nickbilton and an email message from my father (who refuses to Twitter but sends me all sorts of Twitter-related news articles), the New York Times has semantically and geographically represented on the continental United States an interactive tag cloud of [...]

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introductory video to writing, research, technology

January 27, 2009

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For more information, please see the course web site and its YouTube hub.

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the freedom riders: then and now

January 27, 2009

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The February 2009 issue of Smithsonian has a wonderful article, “The Freedom Writers,” which discusses a photography book created in part as a tribute the 80 heroic men and women who in 1961 boarded buses and headed south to protest illegal segregation at interstate highway facilities. The book by writer and aspiring photographer Eric Etheridge, [...]

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front page coverage of Obama inauguration

January 21, 2009

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The Guardian has 49 front pages, including many from the United States. A few favorites (note the Wordle at the bottom of DeMorgen): USA Today couldn’t move it’s logo? Terrible.

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