Digital Bibliography

I was just recently invited to participate in a panel tentatively title “The Future of Computers and Writing” at this summer’s Computers & Writing conference in West Lafayette. Should be a blast. I know most of the other panelists and they are fantastic people. We’re all graduate students. The panel is officially something like 48 hours old at this point, so who knows what we’ll be specifically talking about. We’ll be working that out amongst ourselves over the next several weeks, I guess.

So this morning I sat down to start brainstorming for how I might contribute to the panel, or maybe think of some questions to get a conversation started between us. Per my usual practice, I started my brainstorming session with a mindmapping program called MindManager. But before I started, I thought “I should just blog about this. That might be cool.” Then I populated a couple of the text bubbles on my map, and thought "I should screencast this!” So there you have it. And so I did it. Here it is… (You can make the video larger by clicking on it and going to YouTube. Or you can download it to your desktop, too.)

Haven’t really reflected much yet on this strategy, but my first impulse is that I like it. Maybe I’ll write a post reflecting on using emerging digital tools to document the writing process (and why the hell anyone would want to do that). Or maybe about how this video demonstrates a relatively novel way of brainstorming. (Eventually almost all writing practices will be considered novel, as available tools and practices proliferate, right? Maybe. Another post?)

And a couple quick mentions before I check out. First, in the spirit of citation and remix, I’ve made a downloadable version of the video available. Please feel free to remix, cite, share, repost, etc. (Just remember to follow the guidelines of the creative commons license under which all content on this blog falls.) This post makes me wish I had access to some digital object identifiers which would help encourage citation. Maybe that’ll be another post, too.

I have taken my own turn at trying to think through what’s going to be on the Apple Tablet (here) and what the implications might be for writing practices and texts (here). I’m less sure of those predictions now, so as an extension of those ruminations, I want to make a quick list of not only what I predict for the tablet, but also what I WANT for the little device. You’ll probably be able to tell the difference.

1. Apple’s going to market the tablet as a way of revolutionizing the social-networking sphere of your life. Instead of having to be in front of a computer to (really) incorporate video and audio into social networking, this device is going to have a video camera (one for sure, maybe another on the back like the iPhone) to afford video conferencing, video calls, and video blogging. In this sense, the table will finally allow you to participate on your social networks WHILE you’re being social (i.e. out in the world with your friends) as opposed to after the fact (see pics from the kegger and my summer vacation) or before the fact (“you’ve been invited”).

2. Input methods will be:

• On-screen qwerty keyboard split in half and pushed to each side of the device for thumb-driven input (maybe radial layout, but still split to each side)
• Handwriting recognition where you actually write with your hand. Hot-key turns the entire screen into a temporary text-input field overlay.
• Speech recognition (maybe only via the cloud, to begin with).
• BlueTooth Keyboard availability (i.e. for bloggers who want this to sorta replace their Macbook Pro).

3. Things Apple will highlight that I DON’T care about: eReader technology, integration for magazines, integration for textbooks. These are NOT reasons that would compel me to spend many hundreds of dollars on an additional device.

I’m listening/reading now to some livefeeds from the event itself. I’ll leave these for now. I’ll see you all in the post-Apple-Tablet world.

Bring your internet, baby.

In the spirit of my recently declared pursuit of craft-honing, I walked down my block to an abandoned lot where an art collective’s warehouse burned downed a couple of years ago. I brought my still and video cameras. Such a beautiful day, I wanted to try my first outdoor video self-portrait (part of my “Myself As Another” project here). But the real reason I was there was to learn at least one simple thing about my digital still camera. I’ve been reading a bit about photography composition and camera techniques toward different purposes. I’ve always known that cameras had tons of flexibility and room for creativity, but I’d never given myself the time to learn even the basics. I’ve always been at least okay at framing shots, but my technical knowledge has been embarrassingly inept. So down the street I went, camera-in-hand.

I wanted to learn at least a little about shooting in a aperture-priority mode. From what I understand, aperture is all about depth-of-field. Basically, the aperture is the little round part of the camera (sort of like our iris/pupil), which gets bigger or smaller, depending on how much light I want to let into the camera. But since the other major factor in taking a photograph is shutter speed, aperture is really more about how quickly I want to let light into the camera. I think. (If anyone wants to correct or adjust my thinking on this one, that would be great.) If you want to have a deep range of focus, you want to have your aperture (f-stop) as high as possible. (I guess f/64 is a very high value. Ansel Adams used it, and he basically had all elements of his photographs in focus. On the low end is something like f/2.8, and that will give you a very thin depth of focus. For instance, if you wanted to photograph someone’s face, but you wanted a blurry background and foreground, you’d use a very low f-stop value.

click here for larger image.

I put my camera into aperture-priority mode, and dialed the f-stop down to it’s lower ranges. I’m not going to get super technical here, because I’m just trying to learn and think about the principles to begin with. I’m leery of getting lost too soon in the details. To practice this mode, I wanted to look for things that might create some depth. Something close and something farther away that I could capture in the same frame.

The first thing I found was this great, rusted I-beam that had been twisted violently in the intense heat and pressure of the collapsing warehouse. (If you wanna try something new, click here for a “narrated reflection” on what I learned from taking this photograph.) I tried to make the “head” end of the beam my focal point, and let the rest of the beam trail out of focus behind it. Not for any particular reason. No metaphor or story here. Just wanted to see if I could make that happen, given my understanding of what I was trying to learn. I like how it turned out, but the intended effect AND the sense of balanced composition. I like the energy the curves in the head and body of the beam create, and how this energy sort of “peels off” in the two shadows in the upper-left corner and the right half of the frame. This energy seems to even intensify with the slightly diagonal lines of the bolt shadows on the head. The lines look like they are straining to be straight in comparison to the rest of the curves and rough textures inthe rest of the picture. I love the complementary colors of the beam (orange) and the shadow (blue). I like the variation in textures, too. The color-created texture on the smooth parts of the head. The green dots of the glass strewn about in the gravel. And although I like the balance that the piece of plastic offers in the lower left corner, I just don’t get the sense that it really “fits” this composition. Rats.

click for larger image.

But for some reason, I’m more compelled by the bowling ball I found in the tall grass surrounding the crumbling concrete slab. (Here’s another “narrated reflection” on what I learned from taking this photograph.) I love that it looks so much like a globe, but that it’s sort of been abandoned along with this burned-out lot. The composition isn’t really too bad, I think. The horizon line across the top is just slanted enough to give it a little energy and to cut the eye off before it trails off the page, and that line is broken nicely by the white figures on the right and the clumped stalks in the center and slight left. Then there’s the little brown twig on the far left to draw the eye down the side of the image, where it stalls at one of the three slightly-dark shadow patches in the grass. There’s a slight incline of tone leading back up to the bowling ball. I love the color combinations of the black and blue scattered blotches on the ball and the sharp, jumbled pick-up sticks of grass and twig filling the rest of the frame. And I really like the dominant, sort of out-of-focus light-brown blade of grass stretching up and across the center of the image peeling off away to the right of the ball. What I don’t really like about this photo, I guess, is that that the lower-right half of the image isn’t very interesting or stimulating. Noisy, but not in an energetic sort of way. More like static. Less kinetic. I have to say that I find the image itself, just on the merit of its content, sort of charming.