Digital Bibliography

When I first started trying to produce digital texts, I didn’t really have scholarship in mind. I produced mostly digital stories and websites. I considered them ephemeral, and I just assumed that I would to keep updating them as technologies emerged. I also assumed that at some point, they’d fade away into irrelevance. I was fine with that. For two reasons.

First, for at least the last several years, I’ve tried to focus primarily on “being” right now. Of course, that means something a bit different to everyone, but for me it meant that I needed to let go of some things from the past, and I needed to move some of my future-focus to the present. That’s done me a lot of good. But this isn’t a navel-gazing, personal reflection blog (maybe), so I’ll get to the point.

The second reason I didn’t really reflect on the inevitable obsolescence of my texts is that I really like redesign work. That’s one of the reasons I like blog design so much, and why this one tends to change so often.

But digital scholarship doesn’t really lend itself to this sort of attitude. And that worries the heck out of me. Anxious, anxious. In general, I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone that the technologies we use to access today’s texts will look a lot different in 10 years. And the access technologies we employ ten years from now likely don’t exist yet. (…) Read the rest of this entry »

So begins another day in my month-long wait for Sophie. Initially, a free, open-source software project from the Institute for the Future of the Book, the project is now being developed by The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the University of Southern California, the Macarthur Foundation, and Astea Solutions. The second version of the software is supposed to be available tomorrow. But it was also supposed to be available on Oct. 15. But deadlines are made to be pushed back, right? Especially by not-for-profit entities providing a potentially game-changing software tool for free? Well, if they push the deadline back another month, I’m fine with that. No hard feelings here. I just want to get a look at this new version.

So what is Sophie? It’s basically a software product designed for the production of digital documents that sort of bridge the gap between web pages and traditional print strategies. Like a traditional book, it will often have a cover, will included pages, pictures, and text, as well. But Sophie books can also include much more sophisticated (pun intended, others implied) technologies, like single-page timelines, multi-page timelines, video, audio, slide shows, dynamically populating text, static text, collaboration, external links, internal documents, etc. I’m not sure about how this version of the software with interface with pdfs, flash content, HTML, databases, etc. I’m also not sure which browsers will be able to view these books–whether or not a plug-in will be necessary, and if it will be available right away.

If you’re one of the lucky/unlucky souls who tried to use the intital version of the software, you’re probably aware of most of its limitations. Sometimes unstable (especially on Windows machines), sometimes counter-intuitive. Sometimes impossible to understand what’s going wrong, with little help available online. But the biggest roadblock to Sophie’s success was the lack of browser integration for viewing and/distribution. Basically, if you wanted to view someone else’s Sophie book, you had to download and install the Sophie Viewer, and then download (and often troubleshoot) the Sophie book itself. Some of the texts were certainly worth it, but it was never going to become even a popular technology until it was viewable via browser. So let’s hope they’ve got it ready to go tomorrow. I’m hoping to put together a little book of my own to give it a test drive early next week. I’ll be sure to post it if everything works out.

In the meantime, I’ve embedded two videos below. The first is the latest version of Sophie’s into video. The second video, which highlights some aspects that the first doesn’t is also embedded.

I’ve also included this second video, which highlights some aspects that the first doesn’t.

If you’re one of those who are also looking forward to this release, or if you’ve composed in Sophie before, or you’ve got any questions about it, I would love it if you would take a minute to contribute a comment below.

Fingers crossed…

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.