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.

communication technologies and the revealing of history

January 20, 2009

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The Readings section of the February 2009 Harper’s (subscription required) has an excerpt from Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome,” that struck me as appropriate reading for today, a day when the nation is celebrating the inauguration of the first African-American president and the school semester started with discussions about the future of communication technologies [...]

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obama address wordle: a new nation

January 20, 2009

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During Obama’s address I remarked that in just a few minutes he had subtlely but substantially rewritten, recomposed what America was for the citizens of America and the world. The Wordle of his address bears that out:

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Apple Introduces New Laptop Wheel

January 6, 2009

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via briancroxall Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

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three of my photos appear in gallery show in salt lake city

November 26, 2008

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I am excited to announce that three of my photos were selected to appear at Saans Downtown’s annual Holga show—”the premier international showcase for photographs that are Holga-made.” One even made the exhibit postcard. The announcement on the Saans web site provides some background to the Holga camera: Born in 1982 in Hong Kong as a decidedly [...]

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