Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Bookmarks for October 27th from 08:04 to 21:30

Published on October 27, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. Closed

These are my links for October 27th from 08:04 to 21:30:

  • Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute – Scottish mob that always provide a ton of stuff at the British Digital Resources in the Humanities conferences. Lots of projects, lots of cultural heritage stuff.
  • Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities – Research centre come group at Uni of Virginia that is one of the benchmark institutions for the field.
  • ADHO WebHome – Alliance of Digital Humanities. This is an umbrella organisation formed from the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers in the Humanities. Been doing work in digital humanities for a very long time.
  • NINCH: The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage – Major project come site about cultural heritage. Authored the key report on best practice in the field.
  • Design Theory and Digital Humanities – As I get older there are less conferences that I particularly want to go to. But this is one I would have loved to have gotten to (and if I'd known about it sooner would have spent my ALTC winnings on getting to). This is one of the few events I have seen that actually looks to bring digital humanities out of the archive and into dealing with 21st C media, with a really good line up of presenters.
  • Arts Digital Era | artsdigitalera – Sort of the Australia Council effort to finally catch up to this century, you know they are still struggling when they are funding a 'geek in residence' program which is sorta nice but also reeks of not quite getting it still. But at last there might be movement.
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Bookmarks for October 15th through October 21st

Published on October 21, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. Closed

These are my links for October 15th through October 21st:

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Bookmarks for October 7th through October 14th

Published on October 14, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. Closed

These are my links for October 7th through October 14th:

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Not Nigeria but Near Enough

Published on October 7, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. 0 Comments Tags: .

No idea where I visited today to get this viral spammy popup wannbe blog crud. But just a note to these people. If you want to pretend that you’re writing from Sydney note that we spell cheque with a ‘que’ and not with that word that means either ticking on box on a bit of paper or confirming the status of something. We also generally don’t say for our child’s college tuition fund, and we have mum’s, not mom’s. Oh, and then you take me to a US site telling me the US government will give me a grant. Life is like a box of chocolates sometimes.

Tags: Lifes Little Pieces

Bookmarks for September 18th through October 7th

Published on October 7, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. Closed

These are my links for September 18th through October 7th:

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Archive and Innovate

Published on October 6, 2009 in practice. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by Writing Digital Media in the Literary Arts Program

CONTENT
>> Two overarching themes:
> Archive
We are concerned with archive – although not primarily, in the context of this particular gathering, with preservation. (Preservation has been the focus of ELO attention in other contexts and fora.) Here and now we ask: what are the electronic literary, digital poetic works that are worth putting into any institutional archive, and why? What archives exist and how do we use them? What has been done to build the new archive and where is it?
We will also be asking our host institution to address these questions. Brown University’s Literary Arts Program offers the only ‘terminal’ – teaching-qualified – degree in Electronic Literature, a creative writing MFA. Where is its current archive and where will it be in five or ten years time? Thanks to Robert Coover, Andries van Dam, George Landow, momentarily Ted Nelson, and others, Brown was the pioneering institution at the center of a hypertextual, metafictional perfect storm. Where is the archive? Brown’s Library is now building an innovative, flexible Digital Repository at the university level. We will be asking the institution to rediscover our archive in this repository and aim to provide – by the time of our gathering – accessible openings into what will be a rich resource for both scholarship and poesis: for writing and its futures.

> Innovate
We have not renounced the obligation to produce literary innovation that is specific to our media. Why do we innovate? Why must we innovate? Do we, indeed, innovate? What has happened to those forms in our media that were, once – and not long ago – new? Was it the requirement to innovate that caused us to disregard these forms and stifle their brief lives? Are we right to disregard them thus? If so, what will be the ultimate effect of innovation? Other than to ensure: the ever-swifter onslaught of breaking media, reducing today’s novelties to this evening’s broken media? The mutually assured – by readers and writers – obsolescence of digital literary practices?
It seems clear, in today’s media culture, that we must be, we are, driven to innovate. How can we inflect this drive and make it critically, aesthetically productive? Make it generative of significant culture practice – of writing – that will, even if paradoxically, persist and continue to demand our attention and affection.

>> One celebration:
> Festschrift Coover
Robert Coover has been a major champion of literature in new media since the typewriter began to pass. He has done more than any other significant literary figure to promote the field, all but single-handedly adding a ‘genre’ to ‘creative writing’ in the world of institutionally-recognized and professed literary arts. It’s time to address, honor, and celebrate Coover’s contribution and its potential and potentially problematic legacy.

Tags: hypertext, practice, teaching

Forrest

Published on October 5, 2009 in Lifes Little Pieces. 0 Comments Tags: .

Funny name for a town really, isn’t it? Particularly since it was a logging town in, well, a Forrest. Perhaps that’s why they added that extra ‘r’? So, the prom last week and for most of this week I’m being a monk in a small cottage in Forrest. The rationale was laudable – remove myself from the people, distractions, home and so on for a week of intense writing, reading and thinking. Why Forrest? Well those who have heard of Forrest will already know the answer to that, it has a lot of very good mountain biking all within a short ride of town and so while I read, write, and wrack my brain in the morning I can spend a couple of hours wrestling the nearby single track, before returning for another decent evening stint of intellectual endeavour. It is sort of working. I don’t seem to be getting as much done as I had thought, but I am making very good progress. The luxury I think is not that I’m spending ridiculous hours working, but that that is pretty much all that I’m doing. I might listen to the radio a bit, go for a walk to lessen the cabin fever but there are no external demands or distractions so I can just return to the task at any time. On the other hand not only is there no internet, but no mobile coverage at all which makes things feel, dislocated. I can’t remember the last time I was just so out of reach and out of touch from my family. It’s one thing to keep work away, but I’m not enjoying not being able to ring home.

Tags: Lifes Little Pieces

Redesign Update

Published on October 4, 2009 in My Vogs. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Well, should have realised what would happen. First of all I started the redesign in Tinderbox, partly because while in Forrest I have no internet (and I didn’t install MAMP before I left) and so Tinderbox is an environment I can work in. This turned into nearly 2 days of work as I’ve built the first version of the new site for the videos, though yet have started the very long and slow process of moving the video as well as making various new poster movies and what not. I’m still a bit torn as to whether I should have persevered in Tinderbox, but this is my current thinking.

First off, with Tinderbox I can have a complete copy of all the material on my laptop so have a back up (since it will be online, on the laptop and then also on the various backups that my laptop has). This also means I can write or make new content off line, have it all prepped and ready to be published when next I have a connection. With Tinderbox you write material and then use agents in combination with external HTML templates to export to HTML. This means I can do a lot of things, such as having a screen that is only video, build archives, and if I want (for example) to have a sidebar that shows random clips, or things from a year ago, or things that are related to a current video. I haven’t implemented any of these yet, right now it is bog standard, but what is nice with Tinderbox is that I can experiment and implement any of these things very easily. I don’t need plugins, I don’t need to worry about things breaking if a plugin is not updated, and instead of treating the site as a static place I can start using it as a place to prototype not only interactive online videos but also design implementations around publishing this sort of work.

Another advantage, though I’ll have to wait and see if the proof is in the pudding, is that when I use something like WordPress I usually have to make the interactive QuickTime, upload it and any associated files, then make the post and embed the video. I do know in advance what the URL of the video will be, but if, for example, I use the style that I’ve been playing with it wants a thumbnail and that thumbnail is going who knows where. With Tinderbox I can have a simple location for the video and then I can use relative URLs for nearly everything, which should, in theory, make it very simple to relocate the entire site if I want to. Now of course, these days, this is not hard to do in something like WordPress but what I’m also talking about are the internal links to the embedded media. Also, since I’ll have the material sitting as a TinderBox document (which is XML), static HTML and the media assets all to hand it means I can move it to another CMS. Perhaps.

One issue that will turn up, and I don’t yet know of a solution, is that my videos vary in size and shape enormously. The very first video post I made, in November 2000, is only 194 x 144 pixels in size, yet what I want to be able to do is show clips in each of the archive/category views and I’ve defined that as a size of 320 x 180 pixels. So what to do with the earlier works? Actually, a work round would be to do a screen capture at 320 x 240 while playing the movie. That’s a good idea!

Finally, the archive and category views will show videos which will be micromovs. These will be 1 frame per second 320 x 240 copies of the actual videos that will play when you mouse in, pause when you mouse out, and if you click on them they’ll take you to their individual entry. For new ones I’ll include the sound track, but for the older ones where the sound might be elsewhere I won’t worry about it.

There are no comments, but comments in a blog are a sideshow more than a contribution or integral to blogging. More significantly there is no trackback so links to individual posts won’t be able to ping each other for notification, but I can look after than manually using referrer stats from the site, though not sure I’ll bother.

Tags: Network Literacy, practice

A Videoblog Redesign

Published on October 3, 2009 in My Vogs and practice. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Well, I’ve started a rebuilding project where I’m moving all of my vogs to a single site. This is necessary since at the moment they’re spread across way too many places so I just want to consolidate them into a single location. This will help me in terms of documenting and extending my practice, as well as supporting my ongoing vogging. I did a new WordPress installation, and then paid for an off the shelf, more or less video-centric, theme and started adding material. But I’m unhappy with how the theme handles video, and I’m also unhappy with its look.

First of all it doesn’t really deal with QuickTime very well, and really prefers flv. If I used flv then videos would play in a nice window and so on, but since I use QuickTime I can’t embed QuickTime elegantly so have had to resort to embedding QuickTime poster movies. This just adds quite an additional bit of work since the theme has a poster image, but since it won’t support QuickTime when you click on the poster it takes you to the entry when I then have to use the poster movie to load and play the actual clip.

The second issue is that the design is half of what I want. I like that it provides an image centric main page, but I want it to be more minimal, and even more video based. What I want to have is an index (and archive) pages that have video thumbnails. What I think of as micromovies. These will be small, 1 frame per second, versions of the videos that, when moused over, will play. If clicked on they will take you to the blog post with the embedded video. So, I was going to build it all more or less by hand, with the content in Tinderbox and writing some templates to export out of. I still might do that, though the alternative is to sit down and spend 2 or 3 weeks actually getting my head properly around WordPress so that I can customise or even write my own theme. Or I guess find some money to pay for someone to do it for me.

The thing that worries me about WordPress is that a) if I rely on some plugins and these aren’t maintained then the blog will break if I upgrade WordPress. I could not upgrade the blog (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it) but I’m not sure that’s likely, or feasible. The advantage of Tinderbox is that I have simple static URLs and html pages generated, it is trivial to change the templates to modify the site, and I don’t need to rely on third party plugins. Dunno. Think I’ll make a prototype in Tinderbox and see what I think.

Tags: my vogs, practice