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.

Springsteen’s “City of Ruin” (first in a series)

October 17, 2009

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Subtitle: Overlooking Wesley Lake Note: This series of photographs is inspired and encouraged by Billie Hara (my most excellent collaborator at Composing with Images), whose series of the same name contains photos taken when we were in Asbury Park, NJ, on September, 26, 2009. We were attending (and presenting at) the Springsteen Symposium and took the [...]

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an old poem I wrote with a springsteen reference

September 23, 2009

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Today is Bruce Springsteen’s 60th birthday and readers of the blog and my Twitter followers know that I am a huge fan and in a few days will be presenting a paper at the international Springsteen Symposium. My paper is investigating the literary tradition of supermarkets in terms of Bruce’s new song, “Queen of the [...]

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toward the creation of a web 2.0 readings packet

September 12, 2009

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This semester in Writing for Electronic Communities I’m assigning a selection of readings on Web 2.o, which I am calling The Web 2.0 Readings Packet. (Original, I know.) I thought I would share what I have included so far and also see if you have any suggestions that I might have forgotten. I suspect that [...]

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wordles of the #on911 hashtag: a brief analysis

September 11, 2009

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As readers know, I am quite interested in Wordles and how they challenge out understanding of texts. I thought it would be interesting to create a Wordle of the tweets posted with the #0n911 hashtag. To gather the tweets, I tried to use Yahoo Pipes so I could filter out common operation words that Twitter [...]

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