Digital Bibliography

This past week, while attending some sessions at DMAC, I’ve been encountering some top-notch scholars whose work focuses on accessibility and disability. As a relatively you scholar, I’ve not spent nearly enough time, attention, or energy on making my work accessible to the widest range of scholars/readers as possible. I’d like to begin paying more attention to those sorts of concerns as I continue to produce work for this blog, digital texts, and other professional documents.

So, I wanted to see what it would be like to put together a short text with captioning. I just recorded the video below with my webcam, uploaded it to YouTube, and then use CaptionTube to caption the video. I’ve got a couple comments below, but here’s the video first:

I have two brief thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last two posts I’ve been writing about a digital text I produced and recently submitted to Kairos. The text is an interview with Hugh Burns. And so far I’ve written some about some of the ways I prepared for the interview and some of the equipment used to capture the interview. Now I want to write a bit about how some of the design started to take shape and how it changed a bit over time.

As I wrote before, I knew that Hugh’s professional experience ranged from a long commitment to a military career, research and development in artificial intelligence, and respected teaching career in Rhetoric and Composition. These are some of the ideas around which Cheryl and I developed our questions and conversation with Hugh. And, although I really didn’t have specific ideas about how Hugh would respond to the questions, his responses stayed pretty focused on the themes we expected. Which was great because Cheryl had set up the interview to be submitted to the .mil (“Military”) issue of Kairos (I don’t know the official title of the special issue, actually).

What I’m trying to get at here is that as I sat down to start thinking about the visual design and interactivity of the text, I needed to identify what I saw as the most important or most interesting themes: Computers and Writing Scholarship. Artificial Intelligence. Rhetorical traditions. Military Rhetoric.

Okay, so I had some themes. Now what? I had video, but that was nothing more than a simple headshot of Hugh talking. This was going to be a digital text, and I still had nothing to go on that wouldn’t have been just as effective as a print-based transcript of the interview. So what’s the point of producing this text in a digital form? Shouldn’t the form follow the function? Read the rest of this entry »

When I sit down to work on a digital document, I usually begin by trying to put three aspects of the piece into play at the same time. In no particular order… I need to decide or figure out what sorts of resources I have to work with, what sorts I might be willing to gather or create, and which might be most appropriate for the working ideas I have for the text. For this particular text, I knew that I had video footage from two different cameras we’d set up in the studio, and we’d also captured sound via an Edirol recorder. Because I’m not a pro, the video quality wasn’t exceptional. I have so much to learn. Our setup included two video cameras and an Edirol Audio recorder (all borrowed from the Digital Media Project at Ohio State). We were also lucky enough (with Cindy Selfe’s help) to snag some time in Ohio State’s production studio which had a sound proof room and an appropriately neutral visual background for an interview (I’ve seen enough interviews with bookshelf backgrounds to last me for a while).

The cameras we used weren’t anything super special, but we we still very thankful to be able to use them. It was very generous of Scott DeWitt and Cindy to allow us to use them. Just a pair of basic miniDV cameras. Well-worn and used lovingly by Ohio State’s students over the past couple of years. (You could get cameras of this quality new for a couple hundred bucks now. Much less than that if you’re willing to buy used as you get to know the technology.) Read the rest of this entry »