Ah. The Mac Observer actually moved on from the “Macs don’t get infected by computer viruses” and tried to figure out how many viruses actually exist for Macs. Out of 71000 known viruses, there are 553 Microsoft Word Macro viruses which could affect Mac users using Word, there are 26 that can hit Mac Classic operating systems, and there are zero known viruses that target OS X.
We’re like Superman. Impervious. Ha.
The main thing about orkut.com that’s different from other social networking services is the network view it gives you of people’s friends. They’re arranged according to how many other Orkut users count them as their friends. If a user has a lot of friends, only the ones who have most friends themselves show up in the network view - the most popular in the middle of the patchwork friendship quilt. The strength of social ties is not visualised at all.
I’ve never met the people in the centre of my Orkut network, though I’ve communicated with them, I like them, and I expect I’ll hang out with them when I’m at a conference they’re at or in the same town as them. Luckily my network’s small enough that the people I care most about are still visible, albeit on the outskirts. In my standard profile view, though, there’s only room for nine friends. Out of these nine, I’ve only physically met two, and while I liked them both a lot, and I look forward to seeing them again, I’ve actually only met them once. My closest friends and collaborators, people far more important to me, are already invisible.
I suppose any representation of reality will have some blind spots. This one seems fairly severe.
Uh oh. Only a few days left till the deadline for submitting a 500-1000 word abstract to Internet Research 5.0, the annual Association of Internet Researchers’ conference. Place: Sussex. Theme: Ubiquity. Dates: September 19-22, 2004.
MUTE is filesharing inspired by ant colonies that keeps each individual anonymous. Like an ant.
The students had written about apple.com and microsoft.com, and today we added screenshots. The first group happily cut, paste, saved and uploaded screenshots of webpages almost identical to the ones we saw two days ago, Apple showing iPods instead of iLife, Microsoft having added a few more stock photos of smiling white people. An hour later the second group screamed in horror when they saw that apple.com had changed, a lot: Pepsi bottles all over the screen? “Why on earth are they advertising for Pepsi?", the students asked. Tom Henrik had heard something on the news last night about Pepsi doing deals with all the cool kids, but strategy or not, this website looks ugly. And I love my Mac and hate Pepsi. I don’t want my Mac dirtied by a connection like that!
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This morning my boots slipped on black ice covering the gray stone steps outside my front door. By afternoon a soft layer of snow covered everything, silencing stress, beckoning children to make angels in the snow. By evening, a student had emailed me to ask to reschedule our meeting tomorrow so she can go tobogganing down Fløyen instead. We don’t have snow days and cancel school for snow in Norway. We should probably have tobogganing days, though. |
There’s work at our department on a project on norms and standardisations, and four of us are doing ten minute intros on how our fields relate to this in the department seminar tomorrow. Of course my requested ten minutes will be about blogs and norms and standards.
There are dozens of angles on this. I could talk about how fast the weblog genre is changing, and how standards eternally play tag with reality. RSS, for instance, was designed for news sites five years ago and doesn’t completely work for weblogs, so a new set of “specifications for syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites", Atom, is being collaboratively developed by bloggers themselves. I could talk about how TrackBacks were implemented by Moveable Type but have been made open enough that other tools can follow the same standard, and many have. I could talk about how a peculiarity of one blogging tool - linking the timestamp to a stable URL for an entry (permalink) - became an unwritten standard despite hardly being intuitive or good usability. I still use this convention out of habit, though I’ve noticed many others have moved on to more obvious permalinks.
I could take a different angle and talk about how blogging becomes an expectation, as in the US presidential campaign, where candidates are expected to have weblogs. Dean was first, I think (Blog for America, Generation Dean Blog, Wired interview the others followed course (Kerry, Edwards, Clark), now even Bush has one, though it’s more the form (frequently updated posts) than the spirit (personal, subjective) of the weblog you see there. I could mention academics who’ve complained that they don’t want blogs but hate that their voices, because unblogged, are ignored by blogging colleagues.
Either angle could last for my allotted ten minutes. I think I’ll see what the others say and speak accordingly. Collecting a few links in advance never hurts, though.
A long morning of wild yet possible and incredibly inspiring ideas sent those grumps away! Brilliant!
I woke up grumpy. I cheered a little at my joyful child jumping on me but the relentless before-school routine of shower, coffee, breakfast, lunch packs, nagging, get dressed, come and eat, brush your teeth, hair, put on shoes gnawed that away away. Child safely at school I look at the calendar. It’s all red and blue: blue for work, red for parenting. There’s no orange for Jill, none at all, not between last Friday night and this Friday night.
The problem with loving your work is that it’s easy to work all the time. Just check this, fix that, write a bit of this, finish up that, write another email, read this book, it’s useful for work, you know. The problem with parenting alone, even if it’s only every other week, even if you have supportive grandparents for your child, is that you’ve always got to be sensible, adult. Enforce bedtime, get your child to school in time, help organise friendships, monitor homework, ensure warm enough clothes, administer cough syrup in the middle of the night. Oh, there’s silly bits too, heaps of fun bits, good bits, love, she dashes back to kiss me before running through the school gate, but oh I need orange time. Time for Jill.
Don’t worry, even IKEA has a walkthrough. (Via GTxA, and noted by many at Delicious)
One of my students (Helge? Eirik? I remember where they were sitting…) told the class that Dagbladet.no, major Norwegian newspaper site, emphasises serious news before six pm and silly news and games after six. Explains a lot. Would anyone know of a seriousish reference for this?
I love how students transform from unresponsive mutes to vibrant knowledge-spouters when you find ways to let them talk. Too bad I couldn’t find a way to wake the network in Auditorium B from its unresponsive state, too, but we did fine anyway. Students are quite able to chat with their neighbours to try and figure out the aim of a newspaper site and an auction site from memory (we did dagbladet.no and qxl.no), and to discuss the connotations of today’s MIT homepage. Here’s a screenshot in case it changes, and look, a handy, Norwegian, explanation of denotations, connotations and associations - the difference isn’t obvious the first time you hear the words. The biggest change came when I told the students they were experiencing problem-based learning (that must have been the voice in my head asking where the 2 x 45 min lecture was) and asked them to spend fifteen minutes pouring over printouts of microsoft.com and apple.com’s front pages discussing the differences with the two people closest to them. After all that at least ten different people (trust me, that’s a lot) took part in the larger discussion, and lots of great points were made. I even started getting the hang of their names! A great thing about teaching web design and how to read the web is that the students tend to have lots of very varied knowledge about the web.
For Wednesday the students are blogging posts comparing Microsoft and Apple’s websites. We’ll discuss these and do peer (and teacher) feedback on Wednesday - hopefully if we do a fair bit of very focussed writing like this, the graded blog post analysing a website, which is due in a month, will be totally honed and excellent. Perhaps they’ll spend a month writing and rewriting their Apple and Microsoft readings, or the posts they wrote about “Faen” and The Unknown, and their handed in work will be brilliant. Or at least they’ll have written several posts in the genre before handing one in.
I want to improve at writing productive assignments and tasks. I find it hard to describe what, exactly, a good, short post discussing a website should contain. Often my explanations seem far too long. Matt’s assignments are exemplary and I’m secretly planning to steal them all for next semester’s Digital Media Aesthetics (if they hire me) but sadly, they’re not quite right for web design. They’re great for general inspiration, though. Just look at the wisdom in that assignment on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Maximum learning for the students compressed down into a manageable assessment load for the teacher. Perfect.
News from Magic Lantern that there’s now a blog tracking their presidential election game Frontrunner as it progresses towards release in March. Screenshots show you can pick your candidate - Gore or Bush, from the looks of it. I suppose playing this year’s election might be a bit much…
Hey, the university newsletter has a photo of me and my beautiful daughter sipping wine and cordial after the graduation ceremony! And here are a gazillion or so official photos.
The going rate for an invitation to Orkut (the latest of many rather pointless social networking systems) is currently US$11. (via eleganthack)
Torill just posted an excellent photo-documentary of what actually happened during the graduation ceremony. Apart from the rector patting my shoulder, which was about all I managed to report. I look cute in my robe with buckled shoes and a handbag, don’t you agree?
Orkut is clearly doing the snowball rolling to critical mass thing right now - I signed up this morning and since then everyone seems to suddenly have twice as many friends. It probably won’t do much more than Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe etc, but it provides a slightly different way of looking at your network of friends which is interesting. Though kind of creepy. It’s affiliated with Google, and seems to use a PageRankish way of sorting your friends, emphasising those people with most other people counting them as their friends. The invitation to “share the karma, rank your friends” is faintly scary. Want an invitation so you can see what it is? Leave a comment.
update: Right, so of course, I just got my first “be my friend” from a person I don’t know. He might be great! He’d add to my FriendRank and make me more visible in the Orkut networks. But, uh, I don’t think I’ve met him or read his blog or anything. Hm. This Orkut thing is set up for defining even the vaguest connection to someone as “friendship", even more so than the other social networking systems - the more friends, the cooler you are in the system. You show up at the top of every community you’re in if you have 300 friends. That simple. Hm.
An article in Søndag Aften provides an annotated list of a dozen or so Danish works of electronic literature - that is, literature that uses the medium and isn’t just a book converted to a PDF or unlinked webpage. Poesi.dk has lots of poetry games - there’s an exquisite corpse in constant development, there’s a poem in flux that you can change as you like, and other amusements. There are other works too, that I’ll explore another day.
Poetikon is a Norwegian poetry site, edited by Morten Skogly. Most of the poems are short traditional pieces contributed by users, but there are some poems, I believe mostly by Skogly, that use the medium for more than simple publication. Bokstavlek is one of these, a textual instrument for the user to play with, creating her or his own words. Pull letters down to become birds sitting on the wire. As a small black dot runs along the wire the letters are sounded out as the birds fly away clutching their letters. They return quite soon, creating a charming fancy of a poem or phrase in motion. To play with Bokstavlek (which means letter-play) go to Poetikon and pull down the menu till you get to the Flash works at the bottom.
I think we Scandinavians can stop being alternatively smug and anxious about the horrors of US immigration. Gonzalo’s story of arriving in Denmark is totally disheartening.
The speech went great, the ceremony was impressive, the robes, the procession and the setting exactly like Hogwarts. Before the ceremony the rector smiled to me and to my surprise knew just who I was. She patted my shoulder, thanked me for agreeing to give the speech, and told me she was sure it would be great. Her smile and manner towards me was just like that of a loving aunt or a friend of my mother’s, one of those experienced women who’ve watched you grow up and take pride in your success. Her gown was of deep red velvet with ermine edgings like a queen’s, and her speech was a celebration of women’s progress in academia. 47% of the new doctores were women last semester. Rektor reminded us that it’s a hundred years since the first woman was awarded a doctoral degree in Bergen. After receiving her degree, Clara Holst contined her research abroad but on returning to Bergen, she was only given two half-year teaching contracts. She retired completely from academia when she was just forty and nothing more is known of her life.
It still isn’t easy for women to remain in academia: only 13% of full professors are women. That number hasn’t increased a lot in the last decade, despite the female-friendly Norweigan rules that award full professorships based on merit rather than available positions, and despite the growing numbers of women taking doctoral degrees.
After the ceremony the university newsletter journalist snapped photos of me and my daughter, as we were sitting chummily discussing how best to manoeuvre drinks and foods at a reception. I wish I’d been better able to answer her questions about how to get more female professors. Today I wrote her an email, telling her how much it meant to me that the rektor of the university patted my shoulder and smiled. Men have given me amazing support, don’t get me wrong. Without Espen’s belief in me and his steadfast pushing me into situations I didn’t realise I could master I doubt I’d have realised I could start a PhD, let alone finish one so successfully. But I think rektor’s pat on the shoulder was the very first time I’ve experienced motherly support in the university. And I really liked it.
When I have thirty years more experience than I have today, I’m going to be a motherly, encouraging professor. I’m going to encourage young women and men to succeed and I’ll smile to them when they do as though I’ve watched them grow up and share their parents pride in them.
I added a paragraph about joy to my speech and now I feel just so happy and enthusiastic - this ceremony thing’s going to be great. I’m going to concentrate on the pleasure of research and of sharing knowledge and on how unbelievably brilliant we all are to have managed to finish. Yes!
Wunderchicken has a great, must-read, wild post about weblogs as punk rock - and reckons the problem with blogs now is that some of us have started sucking up to the record companies. (He finishes by saying that doesn’t matter - doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.) He notes attempts to define weblogs, lock them in (classification is for lizards, he writes, with a link to a post at Burningbird’s I rather like), and Dave Winer’s statement that weblogs are publications and should not be treated as parties, and instead wonderfully writes:
I’m hoping now that my weblog definition was inclusive and enough about an aspect of weblogs (as narrative) that it won’t contribute to shutting down the parties, but heck, perhaps definitions are omelettes causing eggs broken but sometimes you need the omelette, right?
It’s that table set for 12 with no food or guests that Ian and I were discussing. Of course the way we choose to classify things will affect the results of our surveys - how many women tech bloggers there are depends on how you define tech blogs, obviously. There’s power in definitions.
I’ve entangled myself in enough defintions in my life to know that I, personally, would for the most part rather go straight to the heart of things, look at the specifics, read, closely, explore the nooks and crannnies. I like specificities.
Oh and look at this Dave Eggers quote he cites, at the end, where he says that really, it’s fine people sell out. Well-written rants are delightful:
Damn. I’d been holding back, telling myself, no, no, just write your own speech, honey, that’ll be good enough, and it’ll be yours, don’t go trying to figure out what other people say on such occasions, what you’ve got to say is what they want, otherwise they’d have asked someone else to do it. And I was doing great, I really was, until one of those pauses in writing hit me, you know the kind, and my fingers idly googled “graduation speech” and of course there are gazillions and none anything like my words and all seem far more eloquent than mine could be.
Oh dear. My speech, you see, was about how much more confident and academically mature we are now, after getting our degrees. Yeah, right.
And oh my goodness. Look, this woman is coming all the way from Palestine to attend the ceremony. There’s no way my speech can do that justice.
Tomorrow’s the graduation ceremony for everyone at our university who got a PhD last semester. 50 of 70 doctores will be there. We get to borrow gowns and do an “academic procession” and we’ll be presented with our diplomas and we’ll listen to music and be served champagne (I hope) with our families and and and and everyone else gets to listen to my speech on behalf of the new doctores. It’s way cool to have been asked to give such a speech. It’s very strange to be giving it.
A brand new stipendiat (PhD research fellow) has just moved into the office next to mine. She jolted me into realising how amazingly I’ve grown and changed in the last four years. She looks impossibly young for one thing, just as every primary school kid did the day I started high school, and she seems just as confused about everything as I was when I was a brand new stipendiat. She’s also just as eager as I was. I’m sure she’ll do a wonderful job.
I think that’s what I’ll talk about. It’s to celebrate those of us who finished, after all, and good heavens, we really finished! Despite the frustrations and the anguish of being on one’s way, we finished, we did great, we learnt so much, and now, somehow the process doesn’t look that bad anymore. Also, we now know exactly where to find the department hole puncher.
Via Andrew, I found a wonderful article arguing that in the humanities, “method” is mere rhetoric forced upon us by social scientists. Method is not how the humanities work. Asking a humanities scholar to explain his or her method is like asking somebody whether they’ve stopped beating their spouse. (Is this question famous in English, too? “Har De sluttet å slå Deres kone?") It’s a question that sets premises that make any answer wrong - unless you refuse to answer, and instead change the terms.
Studying literature I’d never have thought of this at all. Method was irrelevant, something social scientists did. We read and thought and compared and combined theories with texts. But when I applied for a PhD the research council asked for more details about my “method". Now I’m supervising Masters students here at Humanistic Informatics who all have to do a “method” course. As I’ve understood it, this method is mostly if not completely comprised of methodology from the social sciences: interview technique and analysis, statistical analysis, correspondence analysis, these sorts of thing. Great for doing surveys, irrelevant for close readings or considerations of the nature of net.art or pervasive gaming. But every grad student I’m supervising comes to me and asks me anxiously about method.
Andrew may have saved me. An article, by Arild Fetveit, controversial, says Andrew. If it’s controversial, so am I: “The Trojan horse: how the concept of “method” serves to marginalise humanities perspectives within media studies.” Only the abstract, and this translated title, are in English. Here’s the abstract:
Oooh! An already blogging student has already blogged the start of blogging, and look, he really got it, actually he got it better than me. Look, here’s my pedagogical technique: show the students CSS Zen Garden, then give them MoveableType blogs, mention that the default templates are really, really boring but can be changed with CSS, and hey, I won’t even have to bother to teach CSS, they’ll figure it out for themselves.
Heck, it’ll probably work with some of them. It’d work for me :)
My students have started blogging. I set up a blog for each of them and the clicking of keys in class today was a pleasure to hear. My teacher’s blog for the course has a blogroll of all the students’ blogs, and I’ve tried to connect a fair number of the posts so far from there, as well. Modelling the networking and linking that happens in blogs, you know. Yes, it is rather a lot of work, and no, I’m unlikely to be able to continue doing this every week, but it’s satisfying to see the network grow. You need to seed it.
Barbara Gentikow gave an interesting presentation to our department today, about a new project she’s starting up at the media department about new media and materiality. The project’s funded by KIM. She audaciously claimed that Norwegian media research so far has been media blind, that is, it’s concentrated on the content and not on the materiality of the medium that content is mediated through. Their project will discuss fairly traditional broadcast-style new media: digital television, journalism using digital editing practices and digital sound. They’re using Habermas and ideas of democracy about this.
I was interested that the researchers are embarking on this project with a lot of experience and competancy in traditional media and theory, but with little knowledge of new media. Barbara presented this as a possible asset - apparently there is an ethnographic tradition that emphasises precisely this kind of cultural ignorance as a very productive and creative starting point for learning about an area. When you’re not an expert on new media, you enter the field without preconceptions, and that can be an advantage in some ways. I think Clifford Geertz was one of the ethnographers she mentioned as a proponent for this approach. (I should google that but don’t have time) Annette Markham’s Life Online used this approach too, and it’s a great read, with many good insights and just a marvellous style and presentation. The cultural ignorance approach (I’m amazed it has a name, actually) does run a risk of redoing research that’s already done. Perhaps it can also present these ideas more successfully to a culturally ignorant audience.
I kind of like being totally engrossed in and passionate about what I study :)
Rune Klevjer’s running an interesting course on computer games this semester. I’m giving a couple of lectures into it, on hypertext and digital narrative. I think.
I just got an email offering me $14 for each book sold if I advertise a book called Blogs to Riches on my site. You’d be paying a modest $47 for a copy; I’d get 30%. More likely, you’d not pay $47, I’d get nothing, and the publisher would get some PageRank. Oh, he’ll sell some copies. Writing and selling such a book would no doubt be a way of making dollars off your weblog.
I wrote back and told him that if he sent me a copy so I could see what I’d be marketing, I’d consider it. You never know. Hey, at least he didn’t comment spam me.
Blogtalk 2.0 is in Vienna, July 5-6, and proposals are due on March 17. Only 500 words, and it might be rather interesting.
Torill notes an interesting case where a defence force-employed expert on electronic warfare (!) was accused of publishing racist material on Usenet. He quit his job voluntarily and the case against him was dropped, it seems, but he then sued the organisation who had reported his racist Usenet posts for violating his privacy. He lost that case, unsurprisingly - Usenet posts are hardly private. One to save and use as an example in some class, sometime…
We’re having a networking lunch for people working, teaching and researching with or on networked art, literature, media, communication and culture: Thursday 22 Jan, at noon at Spisestedet på Høyden. If you’re a person like that, in Bergen, please join us! People who tend to turn up to these lunches include Jon Hoem, Jeremy Welsh, Trond Lossius, Hanne-Lovise Skartveit, Thomas Brevik, Carsten Jopp, Susana Hertrich and more. The next net lunch will be on February 6, when Jeremy Yuille’s in town from Melbourne. He works with sound and computers and sonic design.
Jane’s many ways of telling her story without quite telling her story fascinate me. She writes obliquely. Having followed her words for weeks, months, I’ve made myself several stories of what might have happened in her life, in her days. My story of her story changes, shifts, and is never confirmed, and it fascinates me far more than closure. Reading for the plot? No, we read blogs for their mysteries, their half-spoken secrets and for their possibilities. Or at least, I do.
(I wonder, are these strategies truly opposites, or do they just feel that way?)
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“Hey, move out of the way! Your shadows are in my photo! I just want those tracks, not shadows.”
“Actually, no, stay. I like it like that, with you in there.” |
Being able to reuse teaching materials is brilliant, and embarking on my second year of teaching I’m just reaping my first crop. And you know, they get better each time, because I’ve learnt from last year’s problems. Well, from some of them, anyway.
Tomorrow’s lecture is on weblogs, and the students come to it having read a chapter of Tekst.no on hypertextuality as well as heard Scott Rettberg’s guest lecture last Wednesday. The coming Wednesday I’m giving each student their own weblog and we’ll start writing.
So I was poking around for old slides and what do you know, I have dozens of powerpoint presentations on weblogs that can be adapted for tomorrow’s class by replacing a slide or two. That’s convenient. And it’s easy to think up a new way to use my favourite (OK, probably the only) Norwegian pre-digital, print, hypertext story to both practice reading and work with some basic hypertext terms. And it can all be done with a big group of students and no computers. Cool!
I wonder if I could plan all my teaching in reusable modules like that. I suspect that as the semester progresses it’ll become less viable, but even just collecting a few modules very deliberately would be useful. So here’s one for “Faen”. In Norwegian.
Dette er et opplegg jeg skal bruke for å innarbeide grunnleggende hypertekstbegreper og introdusere tekstlesning av ikkelineære tekster. Det er beregnet til å brukes i store studentgrupper uten datamaskiner og uten mye forhåndskunnskap om hypertekstteori, og jeg regner med at det vil ta ca. 45 minutter. Studentene vil ha lest kapittel 3 av Tekst.no på forhånd, og får utdelt Tor Åge Bringsværds oppslagsnovelle “Faen, nå har de senket takhøyden igjen” (fra Sesam 71) på forelesningen.
LEKSE: Les en av nettutgavene av “Faen". Hvordan fungerer denne teksten i forhold til papirutgaven? Hvilken effekt har det at hver node er i et eget vindu i stedet for listet opp på en side, sammen med andre noder?
“Faen” beskrives kort på side 190 i Tekst.no og det er skjermbilde på s 279.
19/1 - Kommentarer etter gjennomføring: Studentene trengte 15 minutter på å lese teksten, og da var ikke alle ferdige. På 45 minutter kom vi bare til punkt 8, men jeg oppsummerte resten fra kateteret. Det ble noe diskusjon men jeg følte det var mindre studentaktivitet enn jeg hadde innbilt meg at det ville bli. Glemte å spørre studentene hva de syns.
Anders Fagerjord has posted his PhD defence story, with photos - and do you know, not only had his opponents read his blog, one even read from one of his first blog posts while interrogating him…
Carsten wrote a really nice post about Scott Rettberg’s talk here a few days back. It was brilliant being able to start a semester with new students by throwing them into the thicks of electronic literature. Scott gave a great introduction to electronic literature and the pleasures of writing on and with the web, and as Carsten writes, his enthusiasm and joy really comes through when he talks, and perhaps especially when he reads from the projects he’s been involved in. I’m hoping that seeing something completely different from standard commercial sites right at the start of semester will open up the students’ ideas of what is possible in this field.
Guest lectures are a wonderful academic tradition. Not only do they inspire us researchers, it’s instantly obvious that hearing and seeing a different approach than the regular teachers is motivating and inspirational for students. Last semester at least one term paper was largely inspired by Noah’s talk here. Yesterday I found a student has already connected Implementation to pervasive gaming (her MA thesis is going to be fascinating). It’s like a mini conference, ideas and connections everywhere. I love being at a department where we have lots of guests.
Hey! Jesper Juul is now a doctor! His colleagues gave him an x-box to celebrate the occassion :) Congratulations!
My five am morning was starting to get to me. We sang and danced through the afternoon, but by eight Mary Poppins and I bore not a passing resemblence. Finally achieving bedtime I read her a story thinking of sleep, not the words I read. She listened while counting her money, silently placing each coin on the doona, stopping to interrupt my stream of sentences with a question: “Mummy, when was 1995?” I answered before thinking: “A year before you were born, honey.” Then it hit me. She’s younger than a coin. My baby, who can read and write, who can be such a pest and such a darling, is younger than a shiny, new coin.
I think she’s asleep now, after reading for a while. I’m going to go and kiss her cheek in the dark.
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We went to Copenhagen and walked north for hours until a boat marked like a bus met us as though on purpose and took us south then north again whereupon we walked south once more past palaces, galleries, design, office workers hurrying home, burnt almonds and beer, neon lights, trains, hotels and sex shops till we paused for dinner. This morning, propelled by the energy of a goodbye kiss and an excellent week, I sat crosslegged at the airport and read and wrote. Yes. |
Yikes! I just got over 1200 comments all pointing to various subdomains of e–pics.com. Even with mt-blacklist it takes a while to delete them. Without it I would have been stuffed. The master blacklist doesn’t include this URL - add it if you’ve got mt-blacklist! My blacklist, btw, is public.
Links for today’s class (which will be intros, what we’re doing this semester, a bit about this HTML stuff and where it comes from and the basic HTML tags): w3.org, example of SGML-tagged text, brief history of markup formats, w3’s brief history of web, old web browser emulator, CSS Zen Garden, Lynx emulator, last year’s blog for the course, some of the student projects.
Trond Lossius is a Bergen-based electronic artist who is also known for his involvement in and leadership of BEK, Bergen senter for Elektronisk Kunst. Trond now has a three year grant at the Art College which sounds like a sort of creative practice-based PhD-like deal. Sounds brilliant.
Trond recently started blogging at Lostlog and there’s already lots of interesting news there. For instance, Kurt Ralske, an American video artist, is giving a talk at the Art College in about twenty minutes. Jay David Bolter is giving a talk here in one and a half hours. Jan Rune Holmevik is defending a PhD on open source and the humanisties today and tomorrow. Scott Rettberg’s giving a talk on collaboration in electronic writing next week. Anders Fagerjord is coming up on February 4 to talk about his work. And there’s all the locals! For a small town, Bergen is a veritable rocking hive of new media activity! Yay!
Staying up though having decided it would be far more sensible to get to bed. Reloading the airline’s website until the “planned” time is joined by a timestamp only two minutes later than the time planned, one minute ago now, followed by a word in black capitals: DEPARTED. Gate B29. Imagining the soft harsh rush of an aeroplane forcing itself into the sky on its way through the night to me.
Twenty students have signed up for my web design and aesthetics course, and they’re rolling in steadily, a few a day. I wonder how many there’ll be in all? The deadline for registration isn’t till February 1. As a student I loved that I could shop around and go to a few lectures before committing to taking a course. As a teacher I hate it. I want to know how many students I’ll have! Now!
Games are not just being used for making political statements, they’re also being used quite deliberately in recruiting. America’s Army has been around for a while, and now Nick at Grandtextauto notes that there are lots of sites devoted to Special Force, a game recruiting would be anti-Israeli suicide bombers. The Howard Dean game, thankfully, is an example of a game recruiting for non-violent though (of course) political purposes.
Responses are invited to a report on open source in Norway: “Åpen programvare i Norge - status, effekter, hindringer og drivere". The report and more information (in Norwegian) is available from e-norge, the government’s information site about IT strategy in Norway.
The news is so entertaining these days: did you know that passengers on flights to the US will no longer be allowed to queue for the toilet? No gathering in groups. I assume that following this strategy wireless internet will be banned on flights to the States before it’s even implemented. And almanacs, of course.
I wonder how they’ll organise the toilet needs of passengers. Potties? Draw a number perhaps? Sign up before departure? The in-flight multi-user quizzes could be modified for this - but oh dear, imagine the secret messages plotters could send by losing or winning a quiz!
Presumably the courts’ recent ruling that passengers can’t sue airlines for deep vein thrombosis due to lack of movement while flying was noted by the US government before requiring no movement while flying.
Last month I flew out of the States unintentionally carrying one of those pocket knives with screwdrivers, axes and corkscrews attached to it. I was horrified when I got to Oslo and found it in my bag when I was rummaging around for something. I’d completely forgotten about it - obviously it should have been in my checked luggage. While I’m pleased to still have my pocket knife, which was a graduation present, I’m rather shocked that it wasn’t found and confiscated. Knives get through security but we’re not allowed to queue for the toilet.
We’ve got a busy start to the semester here at Humanistic Informatics. Jan Rune Holmevik, MOO guru and wonderful person in general, is defending his PhD. Here’s the press release, with a nice photo of Jan, and a brief description in Norwegian. His title is Traceback: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities, and it’s an exploration of how the humanities can engage with information technologies more directly. The dissertation is half practical, half theoretical, including both theoretical discussions of hacker ethics and methods and of the open source movement, and the source code to the enCore MOO platform Jan’s developed, using these approaches. Jan and his partner Cynthia Haynes’s work on MOOs is inestimable. They published two books, run LinguaMOO and their work has led to thousands of other educational MOOs being set up using the enCore code. Jan certainly deserves this degree.
A Norwegian PhD defence, as you know, involves ritual and lectures. Jay David Bolter is Jan’s first opponent, and he’s giving a lecture too. And Scott Rettberg’s coming for a visit, much to my pleasure, and he’ll be giving a talk next Wednesday. All these people have made significant contributions to the field of new media, and if you’re in Bergen I’d recommend attending all of this!
Students are back on Thursday, and I want to plan finish planning schedules, assignments and guest lecturers before then. I’m still a rather new teacher, you know, and I want to feel in control of this stuff. Mind you, at this point I still have no idea how many students I’ll have. It would be very nice to have that clear in my mind before the first class.
This semester I’m teaching HUIN105: Web design and web aesthetics. Students are supposed to learn the basics of HTML and CSS, and will construct websites in groups for 60% of their final grade. The remaining 40% of the course is about reading the web: understanding and interpreting web genres and practicing writing for the web. Like last spring, I’m using blogs extensively. Each student will have their own blog and will write throughout the semester. We’ll do lots of in class blogging and in addition to specified weekly writing tasks there’ll be three graded assignments over the course of the semester. One of these assignments will involve designing the blog and explaining the design choices, both in terms of information organisation, concept, style and visuals.
I’m finding it really hard to stop myself from putting far too much into the syllabus. I want to teach them everything - and of course, if I try to do that, I’m bound to fail. But it’s so hard to have to leave important things out!
Just last week I was complaining that Norway, being a small country, doesn’t have a Netflix, and it turns out that it does: F24 uses exactly the same model as Netflix and has even been mentioned on blogs I read. I suppose I wasn’t paying attention. So anyway, if you’re a Netflix or F24 customer, you pay a monthly subscription fee, list the DVDs you want to see on the website, and receive them in the mail. When you mail ‘em back (prepaid envelopes are included in the subscription) they send you new ones.
Strangely, F24 appear to have started this operation with virtually no eye to marketing or community building. The only links to the site, which has been running since last April, are from Jorunn’s and Thomas’s blogs, and there’s an ad for them at DVD-arkivet. They haven’t even submitted their site to Kvasir’s catalogue. Their site has an area where you can submit and vote for videos you think they should get, but there’s nowhere for discussions, reviews, comments. I’d feel more secure in paying money if I knew there was an active group of people using the service. As the site is now, there might be ten unhappy users and it’s about to go broke tomorrow, taking my subscription money with it. There are a few posts about F24 in no.kultur.film - in June they were reported to be fairly slow at sending out new films, in October a user reported being entirely satisfied. Commentors to Jorunn’s sceptical post have mostly been less than satisfied.
I signed up anyway. The selection is at least as good as that at my local video store and not having to go out into the cold dark rain snow sleet to get - or return - a video is too good to miss. They have a rudimentary recommendation system. And oh, no more late fees!
Oh, hey - if you sign up, use Filed under:net culture — Jill @ 22:03 [ Responses (2)]
My friend, colleague and fellow Bergen resident Jon Hoem has started writing a blog in English alongside his longstanding Norwegian one, and has also restated his PhD project to be about personal publication, especially looking at blogs and wikis and what happens when sounds and video is added to them. Excellent!
Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin are this month’s guests on Empyre, where they are discussing The New Media Reader and whether or not new media is a field and has a history, and where they are to be joined by artist Jill Scott. The discussion is already lively.
Dejavu provides old browser emultators, allowing you to view period web sites and current websites through emulaltors of historical browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape 1.0. This trip down memory lane reminded me of the pleasure of those first white backgrounds on the web. Until Explorer 2.0, grey was the default. I’m not sure if you could change the background colour until then. I guess I’ll be using this in one of those “history of the web” lectures I’ll be giving in a week or two. My oldest extant website is from 1998, quite ancient, really. I still like it. Not the looks, exactly, but the writing and the way it’s built. It’s not bad at all.
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In Bergen kids dress up on New Year’s Eve and go carolling from house to house. My daughter was a vampyre bat. She and her friends collected outrageous amounts of sweets and stayed up till midnight. A happy night was had by all. |
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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