Via Lisbeth, who’s researching the deaths of characters in online gameworlds like Everquest: The Last Email, a website that stores those emails to your loved ones (and others) with the things you could never tell them while you were still alive.
It seems like a service begging for a story consisting of those last emails. Of course they wouldn’t simply be messages of love. No, no, far more complicated. I guess Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse kind of does this, actually.
At a very pleasant dinner last Tuesday with Matt Locke, Tim Wright and Martin Trickey, someone mentioned Barcode Battlers, handheld games with barcode scanners. You collect monsters by scanning groceries - real groceries, see Campbell’s soup might be the coolest monster - and then you can battle your friends’ scanned barcodes. Isn’t that weird? I actually thought it sounded kind of cool in a surreal way, but this merciless sendup of the packaging, backstory, and well, everything about the game, set me straight. It seemed someone (unsuccessfully?) tried to revive the Battlers with a copycat game called Scannerz - which in fact, was reported on Boing Boing just two weeks ago. Circles, circles, circles.
Kaye notes that Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the Democrats’ candidate for Vice President in the upcoming US elections, reads blogs. And writes in the Kerry-Edwards campaign blog. Actually the whole blog is pretty interesting. Coming from a country where we elect a political party to lead us rather than a husband-and-wife team, I’m surprised at the way in which Teresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards are presented as almost as important as their husbands - look at the “Get Informed” section up in the left corner. I found the travelogue and the First Person posts particularly interesting as examples of how politicians are starting to use personal voice online - and contributions from bloggers. There’s also plenty of posts using the official, boring-authoritative-voice. I’d love to see an article analysing a politician’s blog like this thoroughly and comparing it to the traditional ways of promoting political parties, and to the other ways the Kerry campaign is currently promoting itself. Has anyone written that article yet?
Oh look, Mark Glaser’s virtual roundtable for this week includes US soldiers in Iraq who blog and Iraqi citizens who blog. Interesting.
A journalist asked me about the degregation of language in electronic communications, so I told him about the eloquence of blogs and the subcultures of leet and the art of codework and machine English. I looked up a piece I wrote mentioning NN and Mez’s emails, and found this quote from NN:
From: integer@www.god-emil.dk
Subject: [!nt]n2+0mor konfusd kr!!!!ketz. ! sh!ne m! metal!k zurfazez modulated b! 01 z!lnz Envelope + ztep at dze edge + uat !z ! z +? Dze modulaz!on korezpondz 2 dze beat!ng patern. !
I ignored emails like these (sent like spam to listservs) for ages, assuming they were garbage. When Amanda Steggell finally interpreted them for me, explaining that you just read ! as i, k as c and z as s, I began to see their beauty, though I still struggle to translate them. Amanda and her collaborators used NN’s words as part of the text for their performance Please try to speak English!, and she read them so beautifully!
I think the words above say the following:
More confused critics (crickets?)
I shine my metallic surfaces modulated by silence.
Envelope and step at the edge
+ uat !z ! z +?
The modulation corresponds to the beating pattern
There is beauty in this, and such a fittingness, that the words of a cyborg or of a machine (a being with metallic surfaces) should speak a language we must strain to understand. There is a beauty too in the idea that such a creature, should it exist, might spam mailinglists with its infuriatingly incomprehensible poetry. Who is NN? Grethe Melby wrote a wonderful article about her, them, it, in Norwegian. Salon wrote about her, too.
Can any of you read “+ uat !z ! z +?"? And is it true, that with practice, you can read words like these as easily as English?
We’re doing textual analysis and close reading this week, and while I had a nice thorough article about this in Norwegain, I needed to find an English one for our exchange students. Alan McKee has written a book called Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide, which is likely good. A few years back he wrote a short article outlining how to do textual analysis. It’s still available, in PDF via The Wayback Machine, and provides a decent introduction to students. Here’s the intro in HTML in case you hate PDFs. VirtuaLit provides really good tutorials on close reading poetry and short stories, looking at formal aspects as well as cultural and critical approaches. I think I’ll start with the more general media studies style textual analysis in McKee’s article though. Nobody’s actually written one of these how to read this guides for new media yet, have they?
I’m still surprised each semester when I realise most of my students have never, ever done textual analysis. I’ve also realised it’s my job to change this, so next semester’s Web design and web aesthetics is going to involve a lot of interpreting stuff on the web. Sure, we did some of that last semester, but not nearly systematically enough.
The paper version of my AoIR talk on distributed narrative ended up far too long, but no matter, it’s useful to me as an initial survey of what I think distributed narrative is, and I love having started. I put the PDF online, as well as the slides I used. Just images and screenshots, really, hardly any words.
Now I need to cut it to less than half the length by Friday so I can submit it for consideration for inclusion in the best of AoIR 5.0 book. I think it’s probably far too inconclusive and early-researchish to get in, but then again, a lot of people never wrote up their papers, even more will just not get around to submitting, plus you know, it’s a cool area, surveys can be useful, they might need a token humanist and regardless of its chances of publication, it’s useful discipline for me to keep writing about this to deadlines. So I’ll do it.
There’s another deadline I want to make on Friday too: trAce wants to publish a book of criticism of works of electronic literature that’s affiliated with trAce, and they want abstracts by Friday. Just abstracts. 2-300 words.
Terrorjesus is a hypercomic that really does have several paths through it - click the funny little curly arrows and you get a new, different page of comics. I enjoyed the loops of misunderstanding, though I only read for ten minutes or so. No time. Not today.
Interesting opinion piece from Rune Klevjer in Dagbladet.no (in Norwegian). It’s great that the Norwegian goverment is funding Norwegian game development now - though kind of silly that they’ll only fund kids’ games. Rune’s main point is important: games still aren’t seen as culture. Torill has a more thorough commentary than I’m likely to offer.
I had been wondering why women have felt the need to start up their own gadget blogs. After reading Engadget this morning, I know exactly why. First there were the weak jokes about wanting sexy “nurse bots” instead of functional transportation devices. But what really got my adrenalin racing was the report on the new portable PlayStations, where the tits of the women carrying the devices got more comments than the gadget itself. The reader comments were even worse. I furiously wrote a comment.
What the hell? This is such a pathetic example of sexism I’m astounded you guys can do this and not blush.
I’ve gotta assume the only reason is you think you’re in the boys’ showers at high school and there are no girls in sight.
Well wise up: if you want as wide an audience as possible for your website, you’d better bloody well not treat it as the boys’ showers.
I think PlayStation’s pathetic for using pretty women to promote their gadgets. What a stupid way of telling 50% of the population that they’re not interested in selling to them.
I think Engadget’s perpetrating sexism by focussing on the tits rather than the gadget.
And I’m appalled by the readers’ comments here. I’m guessing the women who STARTED reading this thread stopped pretty quick.
Engadget: are you REALLY trying to scare away your women readers?
Engadget had better bloody answer [Update: They did, and nicely, too.]. And I will be reading the womens’ gadget blogs from here on: Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women and Shiny Shiny: A Girl’s Guide to Gadgets.
While I’ve heard of No Pain No Game, or The Artwork Formerly Known as PainStation (did PlayStation sue them?), I hadn’t realise how much it hurts. That looks really painful. The game’s kind of like Pong, except played on a tabletop that gives your hand electrical shocks. And gets really hot when the game heats up. If you lift your hand to escape the burns and electrical shocks, you automatically lose.
No, I don’t think I’d do well at all.
In Norway there’s a tradition that the weather on your birthday is like a report card on how good you’ve been over the past year. Today the weather is a mixture of everything: strong winds, sun for a few minutes, a little drizzle, some grey clouds, sudden blue sky and sun again. I’m taking that as a sign that I’ve been really interesting over the past year.
Tonight some friends are coming round to help me drink up champagne left over from my defence party last year. Maybe I’ll mix some drinks too - look, The Webtender lets you tell it what’s in your bar, and it tells you what you can make! If I can get strawberries I might make some virgin strawberry daiquiris, too. The drivers and kids would appreciate that, I know. Oh, and little umbrellas for the drinks: my eight-year-old will adore that.
After a few cool years of pretending birthdays are for kids, I’ve definitely decided that I like getting attention on my birthday. I love cards in the mail, emails from friends I hardly ever see and the phone call from my sister with promises that the pressie’ll turn up, uh, soon. I’m thrilled that on barely any notice, many of my friends are happy to pop round and help me drink champagne!
Ooh! Look at the lovely composite photo of Nina Wakeford’s keynote at AoIR Anders took with his phone!
There are spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in the latest Norwegian and Swedish versions of Windows XP, as, it must be said, there are in most translated software. Interestingly, the Swedish translator has actually blogged a post wondering how this might have happened.
See, to give your presentation you’d just unhook your locket and slip it into a USB port - your slides would be right there. To show a friend photos of your daughter or your lover or your holidays, the same. I think I’d like a tiny speaker in the locket, too, for tiny messages just for the bearer, the kind of messages you might like to hear many times as you open a locket to look at the photos again and again.
The lockets are made by Emily Conrad, whose website is portableink.com.
Lilia set up a Topic Exchange thingy for AoIR 5.0-related blog posts - all you need to do, if you’re posting something about AoIR, is send a trackback to http://topicexchange.com/t/aoir/ and hey presto, a collaborative on-the-fly AoIR blog is created. Lilia also has a nice little list of bloggers at AoIR.
Wicked tongues have it that it’s the lack of wireless that’s the reason for the question mark in the title of this conference: AoIR 5.0: Ubiquity?. I found the computer room, after a while, hidden away but with every (working) computer busily being used. I miss the net.
But it was pretty cool that when I found Torill, Lisbeth and Anders, who’d been waiting for me with hordes of Danes, Lilia was there! As she said “Hi, I’m Lilia,” I realised that she must be that Lilia and yelped, “Lilia Efiwhatsit?” And instantly blushed, because how embarrassing not to quite remember her last name. I could have sketched the layout of her blog for her with fair accuracy, but I’ve never before spoken her name.
I arrived late so missed all yesterday’s sessions, but had a great dinner with lots of chatting with Lilia, and with Torill, Anders and Lisbeth who are really among my closest colleagues though they live in Volda, Oslo and Copenhagen and I only see them once or twice a year.
This morning there were so many sessions I skipped them all out of confusion. I bumped into Alex on the way to registration, discovered that though breakfast is officially over at 8.15, you can actually eat until well past nine, and sat munching bacon and working out which of the hundred or so sessions I’d like to attened. Tomorrow’s the most interesting day. There are blog papers all day long, unfortunately at the same time as the social network and community sessions, and one on hypertext by Jenny Sunden and Lisbeth’s on deaths in games. And Nina Wakefield’s giving the keynote, just as she did at ISEA.
I’d better get myself over to the “Discourse Analysis and Uses, Collaborative Writing, Wikis” panel. If I can find it. There was a sign at breakfast with a warning that Arundel 401, where that panel is, is hard to find. Complicated campuses are very difficult to navigate… And it’s started raining. Oh dear.
I found some of your life: someone found a memory card from a camera in a taxi, and is posting a photo a day, narrating as though he’s the photographer. Ethically really iffy (would you like it if it was your photos?) but such a cool idea!
Also, I downgraded from Word 2004 to Word X so that I could use the Cite-While-You-Write feature of Endnote, which is lovely because you can easily add references and reformat the bibliography at your leisure. Endnote has yet to release an upgrade that lets it talk to Word 2004. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that the Word/Endnote combination also seems to radically slow down my computer, giving me spinning wheels of misfortune that offer the perfect opportunity to pop over to another more responsive window and just, well, just get totally distracted. As I am now. Back to Word.
Oh dear. My daughter’s friend rang and invited her to stay the night. “Can I, can I, mum, please?” Of course I let her, thinking to myself that this was indeed convenient, it gives me five or six extra hours to finish my paper for AoIR, how perfect, how practical.
Only I really don’t want to write. I want to go out and dance, or veg in front of the television set, or dream about the new sofa I ordered today (a real sofa! Not worn out! Not second hand! And it’s blue!) or do almost anything but write.
Finishing the paper before I’m actually at the conference does sound wise though, don’t you think? Oh dear.
I’m not going to get away from it, realistically, am I? Amazon gives you a discount if you use their A9 search engine - which disconcertingly remembers not just my name, but also a couple of slightly embarrassing searches I did in 2003. Google probably already stores every search I do, anyway, given Blogger recognises me by name when I go there and Google owns Blogger. (Btw, A9 isn’t a new search engine. It uses the Google algorithm, but displays stuff differently.)
I must remember to use the SwitchProxy extension to Firefox and go via an anonymous proxy next time I want to do an embarrassing search.
I’m off to AoIR on Sunday. Today I’m frantically writing my paper, which is supposed to be uploaded before the conference starts for website archival. This is definitely a Good Thing, and definitely good for getting me well started on really writing the distributed narrative stuff I’ve been planning for months.
In between writing I’ve got to do shopping, make some kind of dinner that will work for kids some of whom are doubtlessly muslim, lactose-intolerant, highly picky about food and/or allergic to peanuts, and plan an afternoon for my daughter’s “friendship group". It’s a great idea: the teacher’s set up groups of four or five kids who don’t play together much at school, and parents host playgroups for them, the idea being that if kids know each others families they’re a lot more likely to get on with each other and respect each other, and the more you can build these kinds of ties the better. Bullying prevention, in other words. So far it seems to work admirably, and the kids are really enthusiastic. I’m especially pleased that both boys and girls are keen, because the girls and boys in my daughter’s class usually don’t interact at all outside of schoolwork, apart from the occasional chase or fight. Anyway, hosting the friendship group will be fun, and maybe really challenging, and definitely quite exhausting. The parents are coming to pick everyone up at six so it’s not endless.
OK. Write paper. Then shop and cook.
I had fun in class today. It’s such luxury having a small group of active, engaged, smart students! And I love that they write each single week. It makes good discussions flow so easily.
My piece on electronic art in public spaces was published in Ballade.no today. In Norwegian, of course. And it’s about Norwegian art.
You’re going to want to be in Bergen on November 10-12 this year. We’re hosting a conference that is going to be such fun: Digital og sosial. Yes, it’s about social technologies, but more importantly, you get to experience social technologies through workshops, wikis, chats, blogs and lots of opportunities for hands on enjoyment. Read the program for yourself - oh, well, if you don’t read Norwegian, you’ll want this page.
Closest to my heart is the section on electronic literature, on the afternoon and evening of the 11th, which is the first event organised by ELINOR. This part of the conference is free, too! We have Scott Rettberg, founder of the Electronic Literature Organisation and prize-winning author of electronic works, who’ll be talking about The Network Novel. Lisbeth Klastrup, current leader of DiAC at the IT University in Copenhagen, will be speaking about electronic literature in Scandinavia. After that we’ll be doing open space-based workshops. Open space technology is a way of running self-organising conferences that Seb told Liz and me about this summer. Liz has collected links about it, and I even read the book, and though I’m not quite ready to do a full three days of it (though maybe someday?) I think three hours will be a wonderful start. Finally, after people have found themselves some dinner, we’ll have a party with readings and an open bar and a bit of finger food, if there’s money left in the budget.
The conference as a whole is going to be great too. Quite apart from the e-lit goodness, there’ll be inspiring talks by luminaries including Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen and Cory Doctorow. There’ll be workshops where you can learn to use wikis and blogs and you can write collaborative fictions and learn about Creative Commons licences in Norwegian and the Norwegian part of the Wikipedia and hear about a location based narrative project in Bergen and even more. We’ll blog and wiki and chat digitally throughout the conference, really seeing how that digital layer can enhance and excite a physical gather. It’s going to be fun!
You’ll need to sign up by October 11. It costs 1500 kroner, which is a great deal: it includes two dinners, three lunches and lots of coffee in addition to the intellectual and social sustenance. If you just want to come to the electronic literature afternoon, that’s free, but you’ll still need to sign up. See you there!
I’ve already forgotten how I found Bitch PhD, but I love it. It’s written by an anonymous university professor who writes about not having read the reading she assigned her grad students, about taking her son ("pseudonymous kid") to his first day of school, and organising her dates with various men. OK, I admit it, it’s full of sex. She’s in an open marriage and you know, the anonymity, the sex and the nitty gritty details of writing last minute abstracts and preparing teaching and, well, it’s blog nirvana for a young freshly-tenured lass like me.
She has a great blogroll of academic blogs that, well, also aren’t plain vanilla academic.
My iPod’s battery only lasts for 40 minutes after each charge now. Luckily it’s only six months old so still covered by guarantee, and so today I had my second experience with Apple’s service telephone. This time one of the guys who used to work at our local Mac store answered the 815 number I rang, and he was just as friendly as the Apple phone people in California were. There’s plenty of time for chatting while on the line, because either their databases are really slow or there’s just a lot of information that has to be entered. So did you escape the rain by moving to Oslo, I asked. How’s the weather today? No idea, he answered, but it’s pouring down here in Dublin!
Never fails to surprise me. That the Norwegian number I dialled may lead to a completely different country, on a perfectly crisp connection.
There are twelve Norwegians at work at the Apple call centre in Dublin right now. And Danes and Germans and Swedes and all manner of other nationalities.
Noah’s written a useful post showing the development of the writing for the soon-to-be-released game Fable. It’s interesting seeing examples of what bits of dialogue looked like as the writers wrote it, as it was sent back by coders and rewritten by writers again.
For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. (Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse, p 70)
My phone beeped early this morning with an SMS from my mother: “I’m safe.” She’s in Jakarta on business. Yesterday she was at a meeting just a couple of blocks from the Australian embassy; today there’s a three metre deep crater there. The explosion was heard 15 kilometres away.
Australian officials say one of those seriously injured in the blast was the five-year-son of an Australian father and an Indonesian mother. The boy had been granted Australian citizenship just days ago. His mother died in the explosion, which wrecked buildings across parts of Jakarta’s business district. (BBC)
How can you add more to a sentence that starts “his mother died"? Easier to rail at the disrespect of such a comma than to change the world.
gmail-is-too-creepy.com not only outlines why it’s probably not a great idea to give Google all your email (they will never delete anything and they can link your email contents to your searching and your blogging and your comments on Blogger weblogs), it’s also not a great idea to send email to someone else’s gmail account. I for one feel no need to centralise all information about my online activities with Google. (via Dennis Jerz)
Today the sun was shining so brilliantly that I scrapped the lecture plans and took my students to town to do field work instead. We collected photos of stickers, tags and street art, talked about viral marketing and art outside of galleries and then we fed our photos into Flickr, beginning to talk a bit about social networks and how people are developing more and more ways of organising the web, or of facilitating self-organisation. We’re reading Emergence and tomorrow we’ll discuss that and the sampling assignments they brought to class today.
Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post won the Ars Electronica prize and was described to me in email as one of the most beautiful works of electronic literature ever. It’s found literature really: bits and pieces from chat rooms and discussions that start with the words “I am” or “I like” or “I love” are displayed glowingly across a space as they’re read aloud by a single computerised voice (male, British accent). As more and more phrases tick in the words build up against the music as a calm ocean of voices. Or was that just because the second video had loaded in a browser window I wasn’t watching and so its sounds mixed with the one I was watching? You see, I’ve not seen Listening Post, I’ve only watched the videos, which are indeed rather beautiful.
For me the moment came during my twentieth or twenty-fifth or maybe fifteenth lesson in Alexander technique. My RSI had almost gone, I was feeling happier but still so horribly anxious about finishing my PhD. After another conversation about the principles of Alexander technique my teacher remarked, “you know, you could do this.” I was quiet. What? I could be an Alexander technique teacher? But how absurd: you need three years of training in London! And it’s about bodies, not at all about the clear, rational, bodyless thought I still try to require of myself. My teacher continued the lesson without further comment. I still don’t know if his words really meant “you could be an Alexander technique teacher". I do know that those words started an opening of what had become a prison. They gave me permission to see that I needn’t always be an academic. If I never finished my PhD, I would find other passions that engaged me as much. Perhaps they’d even make me happier. It wasn’t until my teacher said those words that the thought even occurred to me: I can do otherwise.
I didn’t quit. Quite the opposite. Knowing that I could quit gave me the strength to finish my PhD without panicking, without that utter fear of failure you get if it’s the only thing you think you can do. Yesterday I was given a permanent job at the university. I can be an academic for all my life if I want to. Perhaps I will be. Or perhaps, quite possibly, I’ll decide to do something different at some point. That openness makes me happy.
I’m hired! Permanently! Forever! YAY!
S 78/04: TILSETTING I STILLING SOM FØRSTEAMANUENSIS I HUMANISTISK INFORMATIKK
Vedtak: Arbeidsutvalget tilsetter Jill Walker i utlyst stilling som førsteamanuensis i humanistisk informatikk med virkning fra 01.10.2004.
I’ve been teaching here at Humanistic Informatics on temporary contracts for over a year and a half, and it’s been looking very likely I’d be staying for quite some time, but it was only just made official. I don’t have the contract yet, but it’s definitely decided: the minutes of the last meeting in whichever committee decides these things confirms it.
In Norway we don’t do tenure the way Americans do. (Do any other countries? Australia doesn’t, anyway.) University employees have the same rights as any other worker in the country, and it’s illegal to keep the same person in the same job on temporary contracts for longer than - two years, I think? If you want someone to do a job for that long, you have to hire them permanently. I’m glad we don’t have the American system. Sure, the years of uncertainty before tenure is (hopefully) granted may produce more frenetic publication, but I know I work better when I’m less stressed and less anxious.
An added bonus is that in Norway there’s no intermediate step between a nice fresh lecturer like me and a full professor. I suppose that means I’ll have a longer wait till I can go for my next promotion, but it also means that my title right now, førsteamanuensis, translates to English as associate professor. Dr Jill Walker, Associate Professor. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Wow. I could stay here for the rest of my life if I wanted. I think it’s highly unlikely that I will, but I love knowing that I can keep this job at least until my daughter’s grown. That’s, like, a whole decade!
Oh look! This has to be a sign of Success! Ian made a green version of my blog design! I stole the stylesheet for my first blog design from Stewart of Sylloge.org (I later apologised and was forgiven), and it’s so cool to have other people use my stuff as well. I wonder whether you can put creative commons licences on stylesheets? I think I just wrote: “use what you can” on mine.
Ooh, I hadn’t heard of this one: a novel in a box, The Unfortunates, this one first published in 1969 by the British author B.S. Johnson. Thanks Tinka, for alerting me to it!
It would appear to have something in common with the possibly only envelope novel (konvoluttroman) in Norway, Bing and Bringsværd’s Sesam 71, which contains many strange items including a dictionary short story. Newer dictionary stories include Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1988) and Grønn’s Det som er strengt (2000). But they’re published as bound volumes. There’s a difference.
There are a host of other paper hypertexts and cybertexts, of course, ranging from the I Ching through Cortazar and Nabokov and onwards. Less frequently mentioned is Sven Åge Madsen’s Dage med Diam, which is a branching narrative - if you’re curious, you can read excerpts from the English translation.
Update: I received an email reminding me of Marc Saporta’s Composition #1, which is also a story in a box. I thought I’d been forgetting something. No Norwegian library has it, it was published in 1962 and never republished, and I can’t find it for sale anywhere online. But Nick’s posted his personal reading notes from encounters with the 1963 English translation in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Amazon.fr lists the French original but has no copies. I’m going to be near Philadelphia next month - I think I’ll go read it there. As MadInkBeard points out, Composition no. 1 is “oft-referred to but rarely examined", and I hate that. It’s true of too much hypertext and electronic literature.
Update 9/9: Implementation of course does something similar though not on cards, it’s on stickers, and as for dictionary stories there’s Sarah Salway’s The ABCs of Love: A Novel of Romance from A to Z, which isn’t at all bad though a very breezy read intended for airports I think. My main complaint with it is that it sort of wants you to read it from A to Z, though there are cross-references. Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (translated to almost every language I should think) is a classic of alphabetical organisation, of course; Barthes loved breaking out of linear narrative and argument.
Isn’t that cool! I made it at Feedburner, where I’ve also constructed a new feed combining stuff from here, from Flickr and from my Del.icio.us links.
Now I just have to figure out where to put my little automated ticker thing. Feedburner suggests you could use it as an email signature - but I hate email that’s not plain text so I won’t be doing that. (Though it’s kind of tempting in a freakish way) So for now I’ve just put it on my Flickr profile. I subscribed to a feed from all my friends’ photos at Flickr, too, which is brilliant! That hadn’t occurred to me before, but it’s so cool! I’m finally totally digging RSS.
There’s a rabbit, somewhere, who’s convinced your cursor is a tasty rabbit carrot. Cute :)
After kids’ TV last night a woman spoke: If you have any questions about what happened in Russia you can ring this number to speak to an adult at the Red Cross. My eight-year-old didn’t comment or seem to react to this, which I’m hoping means she hasn’t heard about the children, the school, the screams, the deaths, the terror. I turned off the television, hugged her more often than usual and didn’t buy a newspaper with images spread across the covers. But on Monday a schoolfriend might tell her anyway. Can you imagine the frightened fragments kids would tell each other? Can you imagine the fear children would feel after hearing something like that and knowing that it is true? If I knew she would hear about it, I would want to talk with her first. But most of all, I want her not to hear about such terrors until she is old enough to do as we do: block it out, help by sending money if she can, but know that she is safe. Mostly.
It’s not fair. Not at all.
IT Conversations looks like a nice alternative to radio: download interviews with people talking about blogging and the web and listen to them on your iPod. Jorunn recommends Halley Suitt’s interview with David Weinberger, while noting how unfamiliar his voice was to her, despite having read his blog for years (and she’s even translated one of his books to Norwegian).
I couldn’t help noticing that Halley seems to be the only woman on the site. Oh, Mena Trott’s in a joint interview with her husband, which is good, but infuriating (women are palatable if they come with a man?) Apart from that, the only interviewees are men. Of course, it’s billed as a one-person labour of love, and obviously an individual is free to interview whoever he or she pleases, but I’m so tired of the invisibility of women…
Ooh! Prince Joachim might be granted an audience with Queen Lisbeth of blogging today! I can’t wait for the updates!! And the photos! And the reporting!
Learningtoloveyoumore.com has many tongue-in-cheek assignments, from sewing an adult replica of a baby’s jump suit to taking photos of strangers holding hands. Several are documented on the website, and you can of course choose to accept any assignment and send in documentation to prove that you’ve completed it. The assignment I’d be most likely to attempt is Assignment #10: Make fliers of your day, where you write a paragraph about soemthing you did today, make 100 copies and post them around your neighbourhood. It reminds me of Hanna’s sticker blogging idea. The idea of Learning to Love You More is to liberate” from creativity. Exact assigments make it easier to create. And we can all enjoy drifting through the results. Is the idea. I quite like it.
Pentagon Strike is a great example of argument in images, aided by some text, music and fast transitions. It’s a Flash piece that lasts for about five minutes and that uses a lot of images to argue that whatever hit the Pentagon on September 11 couldn’t have been a passenger jet. It’s interesting how this is a kind of visual argument that certainly could have (and probably has) developed for television, but that’s rarely seen there. On the web it’s perfect. It doesn’t take long to watch, it cites eyewitnesses (are we trusting the mass media less and ordinary people more?) and shows us evidence so we can draw our own conclusions. Or at least so we can feel that we’re drawing our own conclusions - I don’t know enough about the subject or who made this piece to know if the images are authentic, and they move so fast I’m not even quite sure if I saw what I thought I saw. Compare this to the other kind of web-based argument: the same argument made in words and links. As Torill pointed out about blogreading, the links are crucial: they not only give a sense of accountability but also genuinely allow the reader to read more and judge for herself - to do her own research. I found this through Kathleen - it’d be interesting to follow the links and see how it spreads. If only I had the time…
Je suis prof de la université, dear readers, quite a fresh one too, having earned my PhD less than a year ago. This autumn I'm teaching a grad course on digital culture and I'm trying to write articles about networked, distributed, viral fictions. I'm also starting up ELINOR, the new Nordic network for electronic literature, and helping to organise Digital og sosial, a conference in Bergen on Nov 10-12 that is going to be awesome. Add to this an eight year old daughter, a gorgeous lover abroad and a newfound desire to move to Paris and you have jill/txt: complicated and I love it!
jill.walker@uib.no
This semester I'm teaching HUIN204 and HUIN303, a combined pair of upper lever undergrad and MA level courses on digital culture. There's a weblog with all the info, of course.
I'm a reader, critic and blogger of electronic literature and art. My PhD thesis was on the way certain kinds of interaction can draw a user into the fictional world, and includes interpretations of hypertexts, installations, web dramas, spam, games and hoaxes. Currently, I'm becoming interested in forms of narrative that explode the individual work and distributed their stories across the web, across media or across, say, blogs. Most of my publications are online, and you can also read summaries of many of my talks and presentations.
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