June 2008 Archive Page

I'm fairly proud of myself because last week I did something I've been wanting to do for years... I made little tiny icons, and put them in the right place on my two main websites.  Now you should see them in your browser bookmarks and tabs.



Incidentally, I love what Firefox 3 does to the address bar.  Whenever you start typing, the bar fills up with suggestions based on pages you've recently visited. What a wonderful, practical, invisible bit of brilliance.

The "blogs.setonhill.edu" icon is really too small to read, but the colors still brand the content fairly clearly. I'm pretty happy with the stark white J.  But what's the deal with the NBC logo next to my Seton Hill e-mail address? I dunno.

I'm not a big fan of SHU's content-management system, Jenzabar, but because the service was recently overhauled and upgraded, I thought I'd give it another chance.

How frustrating -- the site breaks the "go back" button.  Every time you try to go back, it dumps you into a general screen, and of course then you can't "go back" to where you were before.



If the site has to break the go back button, wouldn't it be kinder to completely block the action, so at the very least you stay where you are (a minor disappointment) rather than dumping you back into the main menu (a significant usability hit).

Fantastic narrated slide show on the impact of drugs on a community. Striking black and white images, with an equally powerful interface. (Brenda Ann Kenneally.)

Look who's up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper:

Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler, Ada Lovelace, credited as being the first programmer, Emily Short, who played a major role in the development of the interactive fiction development system Inform 7, and Pamela Crossely, creator of SIMPLE for academic management of web pages and related Unicode-capable applications for teaching and research. (grok-code.com)

Inside Higher Ed goes to hell.

Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name "Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee" three times.

Raymond stroked his chin thoughtfully. After a minute he began chanting "Mizrakreth..." After all, it couldn't hurt just to get a bit more information.

Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won't get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting.

Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by retraining her non-functional immune cells. Along the way, students learn about the biological processes that enable macrophages and neutrophils - white blood cells - to detect and fight infections. A database of immunology facts is also included.

Science Journal (WSJ):

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.

In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.

Editor and Publisher:

The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, "WMD," "iPhone" and "anti-virus" are in, while "barmaid," "blue blood" and "malarkey" are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of describing the Sept. 11 attacks, and a different rule for use for "African-American."

Via the Reeves Library weblog, which recently also announced the discovery of a bit of journalism history and a letter found on what should have been a dark and stormy night.

I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris's Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote "Parasites on the Internet." Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

Wired:

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to -- well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising -- it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.

[...]

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.

Jakob Nielsen:

Print publications -- from newspaper articles to marketing brochures -- contain linear content that's often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use.

In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition. On the Web, such content often feels like filler; it slows down users and stands in the way of their getting to the point.

For example, in print, discussing the tall-friendly rooms in the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas feels somewhat interesting. That's not the case online when a user is looking for tall-friendly rooms in Chicago (or wherever he or she is going next week).

Web content must be brief and get to the point quickly, because users are likely to be on a specific mission. In many cases, they've pulled up the page through search. Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Inside Google Book Search

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.

How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog:

The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it, wikis include tracking information so anyone can look at who makes changes to the texts and compare the different versions at different points in its creation. Try to do that with a collaborative paper written in Word.

From a University of Minnestoa press release:

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university's College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential."

Greenhow said that the study's results, while proving that social networking sites offer more than just social fulfillment or professional networking, also have implications for educators, who now have a vast opportunity to support what students are learning on the Web sites.

"Now that we know what skills students are learning and what experiences they're being exposed to, we can help foster and extend those skills," said Greenhow. "As educators, we always want to know where our students are coming from and what they're interested in so we can build on that in our teaching. By understanding how students may be positively using these networking technologies in their daily lives and where the as yet unrecognized educational opportunities are, we can help make schools even more relevant, connected and meaningful to kids."

Interestingly, researchers found that very few students in the study were actually aware of the academic and professional networking opportunities that the Web sites provide. Making this opportunity more known to students, Greenhow said, is just one way that educators can work with students and their experiences on social networking sites.

My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes.

So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I'd encourage my daughter to express herself through art, and maybe in the process reawaken the visual part of my brain.

So, in my spare moments around the house, I started sketching web page layouts, or characters and props from the bedtime stories I've been telling my daughter. (Recently, I had a burning need to know what an engine room looked like in our ether-powered blimpship.)

Carolyn has picked up the habit from me -- we supply her with little notebooks which she happily fills up.  She drew this picture during church this weekend. There's Carolyn on the left (note the "C" floating above her head) snuggled up against her brother Peter.  Note also the little hearts inside the letters.

At the time she drew the above picture, I was sitting between Carolyn and Peter, and I wouldn't let her squirm across me to show this picture to her brother.  Blinking back tears, Carolyn sat down in the pew and drew another, very different picture:

That's Carolyn on the left again, with a heart hovering over head as before -- only now the heart is broken, and each broken half contains the letter "P". One finger points to herself, the other points pleadingly towards her brother (whose shoulders droop in sorrow, and whose own floating broken heart contains little "C"s).

I have been reduced to a vertical barrier -- an impersonal force separating the two siblings.

This one makes the o'l head spin... here's the background. NBC journalist Tim Russert dies at work; NBC holds off on reporting the news until the family can be notified.  Someone who works for the company that supplies internet access to NBC updates the Wikipedia entry for Russert before NBC breaks the story. Scandal? Innocent mistake? Just cause for termination? (Silicon Alley Insider)

According to the NYT, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates. IBS says a "junior-level employee" changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry--and freaked out about it--someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back. And then IBS took care of the employee. NYT:

An I.B.S. spokeswoman...added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC." NBC News said it was told the employee was fired."

Fired?

If the employee learned the news because NBC was officially distributing it to affiliates under embargo, that's one thing (the firing would be appropriate). If the employee heard about it unofficially, however, from friends at NBC or I.B.S., then the firing was outrageous.* UPDATE: An NBC exec disputes the NYT report, and says the IBS employee was merely suspended, temporarily. We'll update if we can confirm.

It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

NYT:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

In contrast to the way things are going in the outside world, our print newspaper has been growing steadily since I arrived.  The quality of the articles, the physical size of the paper, and the number of issuses per year have all increased.  The traditional journalism skills the students learn while producing the print paper translate well into academic studies, but the end result is that they're being prepared for the jobs that are disappearing as journalism continues to move online.

That's not to say that students aren't exposed to new media. They blog in every one of my English/journalism classes, we've had students interning with web CMS and video production,  and I teach at least the basics of Flash.  But so far, each time I have presented students with the opportunity to expand either the print or the online publication, the momentum has ended up favoring the print side. 

I'm hoping to be more active in the online paper this fall, tying more class assignments into the technical and conceptual work that goes into maintaining the online paper, so that the small online staff can focus on innovation and quality improvement, rather than simply duplicating the print paper online.

New media skills continue to be in demand, there's a strong market for editors and technical writers, and journalism is not disappearing.  I'm hoping this fall to make the Setonian Online more central to the students' perception of what counts as valuable professional development.

Wish me luck!

A group of Seton Hill graduates who bonded through the SHU blogosphere in 2003 and 2004 have continued to use their blogs, and there are some newer students who have made an effort to continue their blogging this summer.

Since the rise of social networking sites, the typical SHU student blog has gotten more academic, since the students who are intrested in developing their online identity and relationships already have several well-populated choices.

I only joined Facebook a few months ago. I've connected with a few old friends and people I know from conferences. I envisioned that a handful of students would "friend" me out of pity, but I found myself welcomed fairly quickly. 

Yet I'm surprised at how relatively dead Facebook is this summer.  I guess when there aren't that many shared real-world events to plan, reflect and post pictures about, there's not much point in visiting Facebook. Stuart Turton on PC Pro has some simillar reactions:

Facebook was a shorthand for my life - "here's who he is, what's he's doing and how he did it" condensed onto one page for your pleasure. Old conversational gambits were suddenly redundant, nobody ever had to ask "what you've been up to this week", because you knew and more so, you know exactly what I was thinking about it "Stuart is bored, Stuart is confounded, Stuart is wondering just why he is writing this."

In the end, the novelty has worn off. I don't think Facebook is any less useful than it was, but the novelty of being in my friend's pockets 24/7 has worn off for me. And presumably for them too. So, we're back on email and mobile. We make plans in the pub and dissect the resulting carnage over dinner. I'm won't close my Facebook account, that would take effort that I don't quite have the will to put in.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

Inside Higher Ed:

Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers -- sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable staff members -- have found themselves losing their jobs. (High school newspaper advisers are even more vulnerable.)

"All you have to do is look around the country to see how many conflicts there are," said Mark Goodman, the Knight Chair of Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University and former executive director of the Student Press Law Center. "This has really gained steam."

It was with several recent such controversies in mind, and numerous instances of censorship at high schools in California, that the state's Legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation this month that would prohibit a college or school district from firing, suspending or otherwise retaliating against an employee for acting to protect a student's free speech. Last week, with the measure, SB 1370, sailing for passage and a trip to the governor's office for Arnold Schwarzenegger's hoped-for signature, the University of California quietly revealed its opposition to the bill.

In a letter to State Sen. Leland Yee, the legislation's sponsor, a lobbyist for the university system "respectfully" warned Yee that the university did not expect to abide by the requirement if it was enacted.

Although the First Amendment doesn't apply to Seton Hill because we are a private institution, I'm happy to work under an administration that upholds the principle of academic freedom.

I was busy at the Hypertext '08 conference these past few days, so only now am I following up on the AP vs. Bloggers story. According to NYT blogger Saul Hansell:

one key issue is the A.P. wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its articles. He suggested that this will put The Associated Press in direct conflict with bloggers. "If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use," Mr. Cadenhead wrote on his blog.

Although The A.P. wouldn't talk to me, several people I interviewed who have spoken to A.P. executives this week said the organization appears to be internally conflicted and has not yet been able to come up with a clear fair-use position.

But unless something changes, Mr. Cadenhead's experience indicates that The A.P. is going to assert a much stricter interpretation of fair use than most people on the Internet are used to.

Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis:

I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre white type on a black background shaped into, oh, a chess piece or a tombstone, Reveries a brighter, more casual handwritten style, with a shape like a fish or egg.)

Using these visual representations of the most frequent words in each book enabled me to get a sense of the totality, but then I also drilled down and began comparing the significance of particular words.

Chair: Ken Anderson (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)
Enhancing Access to Open Corpus Educational Content: Learning in the Wild (Long Paper)
Seamus Lawless, Lucy Hederman and Vincent Wade

Lack of relevant and accessible digital content hampers the implementation of e-learning. As these eLearning tools begin to try to offer personalization, the tools require access to an increasing amount and variety of content. eLearning educators are compelled to generate their own content, which can be an excessive workload.

Trends --content creation moving from the linear authoring of publication to the aggregation of existing; rise of the prosumers, who produce an consume content in increasing volumes.

WWW already holds content useful for incorporation in eLearning options, but the issues of content discovery, repurposing, mean that even WWW content isn't an easy solution.

Address the reliance of eLearning systems on bespoke proprietary content. Open content availability reduces the need for educators to reinvent the wheel every time they create a course. Addresses the information overload in eLearning experiences. Help students identify what is actually relevant ot them in their specific educational context.

Open Corpus Content Service -- OCCS -- WWW and selected digital content repositories. Discovery and harvesting of content -- open-source web crawler, JTCL and Rainbow classification.  Indexing with NutchWAX. Visualization -- didn't catch the acronym.

Train the Rainbow text classifier - this dictates what gets included in the cache of content.

[My humanities-trained mind is crying out for examples! I'm putting a lot of conceptual information in temporary storage caches, but the buffer is running out of room.  The speaker is actually very good -- but I'm waiting for the payoff that I'm conditioned to expect a humanities presenter would have started to deliver by now. I'm learning just how important the little chart with inputs and outputs is as a convention in scholarly presentations in this genre. We're spending a lot of time on the left-most edge of a rich flowchart that I gather will start moving across the page... we're still on "Training." there we go, now we've got the "Crawling" section. Steve sitting next to me is looking up terms the speaker is using... I'm net yet sure I need to put that level of new information in my neural net until I've seen what it all adds up to.]

Okay -- now we're being walked through an example crawl --

The educator prepares the crawl by identifying the subject area, with seed file generation and training set generation Ran for almost 2 days, found 370,000 + URLs, passed some 67,000 on for further processing, judged 36,000 at 90%.  Had human subject matter experts evaluate the returned content to find out how well the computer's predictions mathed the human expert decisions.

[Drat... at this point the Seamus says he's not going into heavy detail -- yet this is exactly content I was waiting for.  This is the material I'd like to have seen so that I understand what the system is designed to do, but it's what he rushed through because he judged it as less important.  Steve just shut his laptop. Coincidence?]

U-CREATe interface integrates a link to OCCS.

[Okay.. I think I've finally made the phase shift.  I came to this talk expecting to read a book. Instead, I got a very meticulous description of new tools for constructing books. Or, to pick a different metaphor, I came expecting to watch a dance, and I got an detailed analysis of how muscles work on the cellular level.  Now we're getting usability results -- the convention of the scienctific research paper is to deliver the conclusion last, but humanities papers start with the thesis (the answer to the research question).]

Social Web Applications in the City: A Lightweight Infrastructure for Urban Computing (Short Paper)
Frank Allan Hansen and Kaj Grønbæk

Allan says his work focuses on linking physical places. How to do digital physical linking using 3D barcodes. Present programs built with this infrastructure.

Background -- trying to use ubiquitous hypermedia to support urban web applications -- want to let users brows and create and share information while they are mobile in an urban environment. Not just browsing, but browsing information related to the urban environment where they are.

Anchor information in the physical world; identify aspects of the physical world that we can use to anchor our links. GPS offers one sensor useful for anchoring links.

Ubiquitous link anchors: ID Mapping. Not a static model; we specify an anchor value and the system finds resources that match that anchor value. The 2D barcodes [a pattern of squares, not bars -- that name 2D barcode seems oxymoronic -- new to me, but an established term.] provide a visual anchor for the link. A URL can be converted in to the 2D barcode, scanned by a cell phone, and used to deliver a resource.

Examples... TagBlogger -- 2007 Arhaus festival, lets users access official location-sensitive information; create and share digital overlays. Had to develop the software and deploy 2D codes in the city. Tags on official festival posters; also tags along a route [pedestrian, I presume].

[I wonder... did the barcodes get vandalized? At any rate, sounds like an interesting project, and far more workable than the old CueCat debacle, which would have required people to carry a specialized device around and tether it to a computer.]

A State of the Art Survey of Soft Skill Simulation Authoring Tools (Short Paper)
Conor Gaffney, Declan Dagger and Vincent Wade

Conor presents. There are physical simulations (you learn about the physical object); procedural simulations (flying an airplane); soft skills (take place in a social context, based on interpersonal relationships).  Sales, interviewing, leadership.

Typically you get a short clip of the person being simulated, the learner takes on a role within the simulation, and learns by doing.

The simulations are cost-effective, convenient if online, save, educationally effective.

Demo [Thank you for giving the example this early!]

Teaching psychiatric medical students how to deal with patients (this is PARRY for the 21stC). Looks like the same mechanism for adaptive tree fiction.

Difficulty with soft-skill simulations -- difficult to compose. Not only the complexity of the dialog, it also has to be educationally sound simulation.  [I wonder if anyone in our family therapy program would be interested in a tool like this.. .obviously I'm interested in the ability to create a model interview for journalists, but the mechanisms will likely be similar to what a family therapist might face.]

VISIOn Composition Tool; Experience Builder; Captivate 3.

• VISIOn sems to be an outliner
• Experince Builder is accessible through a web browser.
• Captivate 3 most typical type of composition tool out there... approach is more towars hard skills, limited soft skill applications. No back links -- artifact of the procedural hard-skill origins of the tool.
  

Conor then went through each option and evaluated each on the key requirements... the lack of backlinks makes me completely reject Captivate 3 for my own interests, and to be honest I think I'd feel more comfortable working out the structure in Inform 7.

Will present more about the ActSIM composition tool.

Mark B - the sentimental novel is intended to teach us how to act and behave in certain situations. How does an environment devoted to writing hypertext differ from an environemnt designed to teach soft skills?

Chair: Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems, USA)

Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper)

Raquel Recuero

Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide... I wonder that this audience might include so many quantitative researchers that she might have spent a bit of time explaining more about ethnography. Again, I'm used to scholarship with a long discursive introduction, so I always feel out of place when presenters rush through their introduction. I'm generally far more intersted in the related research and the motiations for study than in the mechanics of the model, but that's a feature of my disciplinary training.

Ethnographic study of very personal connections in a small web network of Brazillian bloggers.  Motives for blogging include creating personal identity, social interaction.  Popularity is a strong draw; getting more comments, being the center of a network; a blog is a "publicity strategy"

Age range 15-50 years. Some 32 of [did she say 40 some?] bloggers in the community responded.  Tracked "interaction memes" (everyone does it; publish the meme to belong) and "informational memes" (an opportunity to create authority and popularity by being the first to post a meme).

Interaction memes -- send a questionnaire or the equivalent of a chain letter, bond with your gorup by answering these questions creatively.

This is different from publishing information that there's a new online journal or YouTube link -- these kinds of links aren't repeated.

Interactional memes are connected to creating a personal space. Informational memes are connecting to creating authority and knowledge. What social capital does the blogger want?

Interactional memes -- visibility, interaction, social spupprt. (Relatively more emphais on maintaining new ties.) [This is about modding and mutating the meme, so that it maintains its novelty, not passing it along.]

Informational memes --  visibility, reputation, popularity, authority. Bridging (creating new ties) rather than maintaining and strengthening existing ones. [It's likely that bloggers who regularly come up with new ideas probably have at least some "long" connections with people who aren't tightly connected within their groups.]

Making Revisions Hyper-Visible (Short Paper)
David Kolb

14 years ago, published "Socrates in the Labyrinth."  How do you revise a hypertext?  Mentioned some philosophers who published retractions and revisions; scholars publish both versions.  Notes that Auden and other poets revised their works when collecting them for many reasons, both internal and external.

Revising literary works and revising expository or argumentative works. Consider that Joyce revised "afternoon, a story" -- if you mark them they seem like part of the text. There are very few reasons to emphasize revisions in a literary hypertext. In an argumentative work, you might make those revisions and the reasons for them explicit.

Not just the revised text, but also the meta-comments about the work.

Print -- you have two volumes, with the later one footnoting the earlier one. The new version generally replaces the old version, since print operates on an economy of scarcity. Hypertext has an economy of abundance.  Wikipedia and Word hide the revisions. In hypertext, you will link the old and new versions. You could leave the old structure and add notes. But a significant update would include new links; the revision will embrace the original (or large parts thereof) but add complexity.

Revision of an argumentative hypertext will lead to a new hypertext with an more elaborate link pattern. [I'm following this closely because I'm working on the development of the map to Colossal Cave Adventure, and all this talk about nodes and paths is sparking lots of ideas.]

Why revise hyper-visibly? Helps scholars clarify what was meant; helps readers identify the changes; helps readers judge whether the changes are useful; provides more chance for the author and reader to think together about the issues.

Audience comment: This is a subset of a more general problem -- we don't have rich enough object models in which the objects were all accessible in versions, this problem would go away. [I can't help but think again of the variable implementations of Douglas Adams' H2G2 -- TV show, radio play, IF game, movie...]

Audience comment: When we change words we often intend to change the whole work [but the example was poetry, rather than David's example of expository.]

We're All Stars Now: Reality Television, Web 2.0, and Mediated Identities (Short Paper)
Michael A. Stefanone and Derek Lackaff

Derek began by echoing Raquel's paper. Why would someone post the cursed rabbit confessioal meme? What happens to identity when it gets mediated. Invoked the post-coporality promised by Turkle and others. [I'm reminded of My Tiny Life, where Dibbell notes that the best writers got the most virtual "action" -- while people were no longer limited by their bodies, the were, in a textual environment, defined by their ability to write. I think it was insightful for a writer like DIbbell to percive that a world that doles out rewards according to writing talent is really no more fair than a world that rewards looks or riches.]

Reality TV recently voted 2nd worst invention of all time, but it's very popuar. Rise of Web 2.0 represents ability of people to participate. [I note that "youtubing" has entered the lexicon... ]

Observational learning -- requires a model, a learnable behavior, and a context that conduces people to model behavior. [Reminds me of the Frontline video, "Merchants of Cool," that tracks trends through the various forces that combine to manage what the "mooks" and "midriffs" of the world think are cool.]

Hyphotheses -- Reality TV consumption related to time spent on social networking sites, breadth of networks including online only friends, and photos shared online. Asked participants to self-report.

People who watch TV news, fiction, documentaries has little effect on network size, connectness, or photo sharing; rate of watching Reality TV is significant.

Takeaway - we have empirical links between traditional media consumption (watching TV) and the "really cool things that are going on online."  Definite change in the understanding of social space. People talking about the social networks that they're part of in new ways. Having an identity online is increasingly banal.

Look at specific media genres -- not TV as a whole, but what kind of TV being watched. [The reality TV genre really got its start during a writers strike in 1989. COPS, Americas Funniest Vidoes... also a resurgence of sitcoms based on figures who could provide their own content, such as Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen... probably building on the success of The Cosby Show.]

Future directions -- attention as power, validity of articulate network structures.

Audience comment: Note that professionals and academics put up lots of information about themselves; we do a different kind of self-promotion, but is it really different from youth social networking?

Response: The scale of social networking sites is greater... novel in the scope.

Mark noted that it could be social networking that gets people interested in reality TV.

The Revenge of the Page (Long Paper)
David Kolb

The little paper on revision you heard a little while ago was the paper he had intended to write... the issue of complexity began as a footnote, then became an appendix.  The dream was complexly linked hypertexts with long, complicated hyperlinks; patterns of links that demand rereading and demanding contemplation beyond the boundaries of the next link.

Quote from Mark B invoking the concept of complex linking... Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Complex literary effects to be achieved from this idea.

14 years later, "Let's face it, there aren't very many complex hypertexts like that."

Wikipedia's links are all single-step links, going from one self-contained mini-essay to another; links are "you want more information? Here's some more."

Reality: Google Analytics looks at Kolb's own example of a complex hypertext: Kolb's Sprawling Places. [I have got to follow up on this for my work on Colossal Cave.]

Kolb notes that Google Images is sending most of his visitors attracted by words in photo captions. Almost nobody visited a large number of pages. Most people navigate through the site by clicking the menu bars rather than the inline links.

Trivial number of people encountered his text in the way he hoped reading would develop. Does it make sense to continue to support the idea of expository and argumentative texts with complex linking patterns.

There are some assertions that can't be made well in a single page; understanding of some concepts requires complexity. [I would add that complex sites can also meet the needs of multiple users, giving newbies a way to explore unfamiliar terms, and advanced users more depth, generalists more breadth, etc.]

The page metaphor -- we expect a page to contain a little mini self-contained essay. We browse things we expect to be relatively self-sufficient. Web-writing tools are optimized for the creation of pages. The link becomes the link between pages rather than part of a chain of links.

But there's a deeper reason. Node and link hypertext itself is one node at a time. We expect one node to replace the other. Maybe we need to do more than we've done if we want complexity. Maybe hypertext is more than nodes and links.

Collage/montage? Make the individual pages more complex. You could use the collage effect of a page to create complexity within the page.  Pages are becoming more than pages -- embedded rich media.

You might also make more than one node visible. You can have a web page spawn another window, but that's seldom done.

Replace complexity of linkage with complexity of spatial juxtaposition. [That's a return to the model of the highly annotated illuminated medieval manuscript.]

More sophistication in the relationship between tet and graphics. Images aren't simple illustration. [That's an interesting connection to the idea about links..  an image that merely illustrates is like a Wikipedia link that simply offers more information. A link can also offer an alternative opinion, provide context, refute opposition, etc.]

layertennis.com -- color commentary on two graphic artists competing with each other to generate images in the same file on different layers. The play of images and text is a way to bring complexity into web habits of reading.

Audience comment: Shocked that the invention of the web browser is a done deal and there's not much else to do with hypertext.  The web browser chains hypertexts in the same way that the book when it was first invented was chained to the wall. [But hold on... the illuminated medieval manuscript was chained to the wall because the value of the labor and materials that went into the production of that book was probably higher than the value of the building to which the book was chained. How does the "browser as chained book" metaphor map to the present information economy? The pen that's chained to the desk in the bank isn't there to prevent people from writing, it's there so that people who are in the bank can count on having a pen there for them to use.   I don't see the chianed book reference hanigng together beyond a surface analogy that the medum of the browser is like a chain, but the chained public book was chained so that more people could consult the book and not hide it in their private collection.]

Chair: Andreas Hotho (Universität Kassel, Germany)

The Very Small World of the Well-Connected (Long Paper)
Xiaolin Shi, Matthew Bonner, Lada Adamic and Anna Gilbert

Matt Bonner is the presenter; this paper won a "best paper" award at the banquet last night.

Vertex Important Graph Synopsis. (Promises a definition!)

Opening image -- "Network or Hairball?" Huge networks are difficult to study and share. To shrink or summarize a network, you create a subgraph of vertices you decide are important. Study these important vertices, and compare their behavior to the rest of the graph.

Degree, betweenness, closeness, PageRank.  He's spending time describing in detail all the importance measures. Assortativity vs disassortativity... [The graphs of "betweenness" and "PageRank" look very similar, which I gather is because Google bases its linking algorithim on betweenness.]

Demonstrated how subgraphs can differ greatly based on which importance factor your subgraph selects for. [To translate into my discipline, I suppose this is a close reading of a small portion of a text, by blocking out all the information you don't want to find.]

Leass than 10% of the nodes are needed before the subgraph results look very close to the overall dataset. 

This is the third time the presenter has apologized because a dotted red line is invisible in the slides being projected. His oral explanation of what he lines should signify is clear enough, I gather, though he's referring to special kinds of graphs that network researchers (not I) would be expected to understand.

A blog aggregator in his dataset was connecting to many, many nodes, not just the most important nodes, so there's a notable anomaly in degree. [I'm actually intersted in this, though he's mentioned it only as a footnote and offered to say more on it during the Q & A if desired.]

["NP-complete: reducible to Steiner..." nope, the slide changed even before I could write this down as an example of a statement that's perfectly straightforward but requires background knowledge that I would need to look up. I missed what "Keep One" and "Keep All" mean.]

[What I'm getting out of this is a mathematical illustration of the thesis that it is possible to gain useful, accurate information from a study of a subset within a dataset, and that other factors (which are over my head) seem to control for whatever bias you introduce when you select a set of nodes for a particular characteristic. Unlike the "close reading" metaphor I used earlier, if you know what you're doing, you can select a "synopsis" that emphasizes the features you wish to study, and identify how closely your subset matches the overall dataset's similar features.]

An Epistemic Dynamic Model for Tagging Systems (Long Paper)
Klaas Dellschaft and Steffen Staab

Klaas pressented, beginning with a basic introduction of tagging [probably not necessary for this audience, but it was brief and... and I don't mind an introduction that gives me a minute or so to adjust to a new speaker's cadence, accent, and relationship to the visuals.]

How do users influence each other in tagging systems?

User interface, user brain, background knowledge, and "something else" all influence tagging behavior.  We can only observe the tagging behavior [well, we can learn something about the user interface, too, but I think that comment is intended to contrast with the inscrutability of the brain.]

Klass introduces foksonomy, [again I would assume most in the audience already know the term, but I'm always intersted in how individual scholars define their terms... this is necessary in the humanities, since we don't always have empirical evidence to help us define our terms.]

Presented sample of coding mechanism "co-ocurrence stream" .  Measured how many occurrences, how many users, how many different texts, and how many resources.

After 100 occurrences of a term, you have about 50 texts.  The number of distinct texts is growing but the rate of growth decreases... it's a nice logarhithmic scale showing that each time the tag appears again, it is more likely that the tag is used on an existing text, rather than a new text.

The frequency of texts is inverted -- The most often used text has a 4-5% probability, text #100 was 01.% probability. [Did he describe that as "fat tail distribution"?  I assume that's the oppossite of the "long tail"?]  Not quite as even as the tag graph, but

Resource streams [I missed something... does this mean he's graphing the channel by which the document is delivered, or by which the tag entered into his dataset, or the timeline of each entry in his dataset regardles of source or other characteristics? He briefly went through some related research, so obviously this is a common concept that I would know about if I knew the literature.  The whole idea of measuring the time between the creation of links is an exciting new concept for me, since it blends well with composition pedagogy that considers writing as process rather than product.]

[Equation that I can't type fast enough] Probability of selecting from background knowledge -- probability of selecting word w for topic t modeled by -- [drat the slide changed.]

[Another equation] probabilty of repeating a previous tag assignment.

Now he's finished presenting the model, and he's moving on to compare the observed behavior with the behavior he modeled.

[I'm starting to pick up on the biological metaphors -- mutating of tag assignments, limited number of texts in the pool.  I hadn't realized just how deeply the "virus" metaphor is rooted in this subject matter... Does the metaphor drive the science? Are there patterns that don't already have known biological instances that aren't pursued because there isn't already a vocabulary to describe them?  I'm going to have to re-read The Selfish Gene for all the parts that I skimmed over when I was reading it simply to undersand "meme".]

After more than 1000 tag assignments, the frequency of assignments is more or less stable. There's a drop around tag number 7 in resource streams.  Cited http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/Research/Tagdataset and http://tagora-project.edu

First question, from the conference host, was about whether the user interface affects tagging behavior? [Here I am, thinking that I'm an idiot, and a big-shot followed up on something that dimly appeared to my Humanities brain. I confess I didn't follow the answer but that's my fault -- I was high-fiving myself for having wondered about that earlier.]

Understanding the Efficiency of Social Tagging Systems using Information Theory (Long Paper)
Ed H. Chi and Todd Mytkowicz

Todd presented. Organization of knowledge... the printing press was "a start" at organizing human knowledge. [Well... the codex, the classical form of the argument, rhyme, abstract thought... but I digress.]

Great-- Todd notes that the audience doesn't need an introduction to tagging, but notes the value of communicating the way he frames tagging. We all have individualistic motivations for tagging, but the result is a global knowledge map; the research posits that tags create a lower-dimensional representation of the material the tags describe.

This is a distributive process with hundreds and thousands of users, and trying to infer high-level behavior is challenging.  If we sample del.icio.us data, we don't own access to the entire dataset, and therefore don't know whether we're sampling the data accurately. Noted the Measure/Model/Innovate cycle, and indicated roadblocks when you're measuring a dataset that you don't own.

Information theory -- how much information do tags tell us about an underlying document.

Entropy measures the uncertainty in a dataset. A heterogenous set has maximun entropy at log n, minimum of 0. You can increase entropy by increasing the number of things in your dataset; or you can keep n constant and make data more uniform [did he mean to say less uniform?]

[I lost track for a while because my blog was having trouble saving...  picking back up]

Overview of the data collected from deli.cio.us over about 120 weeks. The number of documents increases rapidly... there have to be many tags for every individual document that comes into the system.

Entropy of the document set is rising... the diversity of the document set is increasing over time. People are creating new content for the system, rather than re-enforcing opinions that have already been entered into the system. This is good for del.icio.us in the long term.

Tagging in delicious is both encoding and retrieving. Encoding -- users have some notion of document space and future use; how likely are you to use a document in the future? We're sending a message to ourself in the future that we're going to have to retrieve. [How intersting -- this concept might be very useful in getting students to think about the value of taking notes in class or annotating their journey through a challenging academic or literary text.]

Around week 80, there's a dramatic stabilization of the entropy curve. The number of tags are increasing over time. People are becoming more and more likely to set up a tag that's already in the document space. [What happened around that time to create that change? Did some blogging tool or some content site like Wired add "delicious" tags to its content?] 

Tag "efficiency" is decreasing -- crested around week 40.  Tags are becoming less and less signficant. The descriptive power of English is limited.

Do people change their behaviors to re-capture some of that efficiency? People are starting to add more tags to each item in response to the navigation pressure. Ziff's principle of least effort. If you are just archiving a document, you probably won't put much effort into the tagging.  Putting the notion of tagging in to the framework of information theory.

[My observation... the delicious interface changes over time, so the nature of tagging changes over time.]

Rather than delicious suggesting tags others have used, try asking the user to come up with new tags [as Google does in its picture-tagging game].

[During the Q and A I asked whether the drop at week 80 was realted to a change in the del.icio.us interface, but Todd says not. They did notice other phenomena that corresponded with changes in the user interface.]

Brent Batson (via):

Academics have long talked of the "academic conversation." Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?

Scott Sharkey:

Often called a dead genre, interactive fiction continues to flourish long after reaching the end of its commercial lifespan. In the decades since whiz-bang graphics drew away the attention of the masses, hundreds of games have continued to evolve the genre -- to the point where it can be a little intimidating to approach cold. If you've never experienced interactive fiction, or haven't returned to it since its commercial decline, maybe we can offer a little direction. Here are five of our favorite titles from the last decade to ease you into things.

His picks: Lost Pig, Ecdysis, Takes of the Traveling Swordsman, Galatea, and Photopia.

John Kleinberg

This year's conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking.

A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections).  (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005)

Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a university karate club in the process of splitting in two.  34 nodes in the social network, 2 years researching each of these nodes, big chunk of a PhD work to investigate the conflict.

Compare the 30-year-old study of 34 nodes to the kind of information we can get out of massive network datasets -- both more and less information. It's easier to measure, hard to pose nuanced questions about what the connections mean. We can hand-code small subsets, but not on the large scale.

Notes that the goal is not to accumulate huge amounts of data, but rather to find the point where these two lies of research converge.

Intrinsically missing from large-scale studies -- we need to enrich our notion of link structure, so as to be able to talk about more complex, subtle questions.

Social networks aren't static structures -- they are circulatory systems for ideas and information. Tension between the global reach of diffusion and the localized views that most datasets (even massive ones) provide.  You can watch one person adopt something and see who's influenced by that, but you can't really watch the first 1000 people to adopt iPhones. How to find a dataset that will let us watch something spread, not just locally in the neighborhood of a node, but on a larger scale.

Example: chain-letter petitions.

Quoted from Vannevar Bush on the associated trails running through documents, and people as trailblazers. A person blazes a trail through a network of documents... a chain letter is a document that blazes a trail through a network of people. The document follows the social structure.

Shows the traditional picture of information propagating along a neat tree.  But the full tree is unobservable. But a chain letter petition includes traces -- a signature of all people that this particular incarnation of the chain letter has passed through.

People change the list, changing spellings, or adding joke names, or truncating sections. The analogy to mutational events is computationally very useful.  Every kind of genomic mutation that you can imagine.

Showed 20,000 nodes of the Iraq chain letter -- looks like hair.  More linear propagation than lateral propagation. Really few branches. (Jon has clarified that we're reconstructing the chain based on what we find... we don't have the whole tree.)  Trees for other chain letters have similar structure.

Timing gets you closer to the answer. Viral spreading is implicitly synchronous -- that each branch propagates at basically the same rate.  Biological viral infections impose internal schedules, but people don't forward information at the same rate, so different branches will progress at different rates.  Notes that there's been productive recent research in the time people take to respond to emails.

Because people within social networks will likely get multiple copies of a chain letter, the relative dates at which people woke up and found multiple copies of the chain letter in their in box means that the chain latter followed a depth chain -- only one copy was produced from each related group of friends who received it at the same time and got a copy from someone else before they acted on it. LiveJournal friendship networks produce a similar tree shape.

Spatial clusters... even in online social networks, there's a large amount of homophilia (you are friends with people who are similar to you).

Opposing influence -- sometimes people act only when they have multiple stimuli (multiple requests to send on the chain letter).

Altough you may hear about the chain letter from a remote link, you are not likely to participate until you've heard about it from enough of your closer relationships... so the chain letter only spreads locally, it doesn't jump a great distance to bridge the gap between you and a distant connection who shares few of your friends.

Can we use this information to predict which viral events will lead to cascades? Columbia University "Music Lab" has a leader board. They ran eight parallel versions of the site, letting the universes evolve independently. The leader board feedback leads to inequality. Random symmetry breaking in the beginning gets amplified. Genuinely bad songs didn't get propagated, and good songs weren't totally published; nevertheless there may be an element of inherent unpredictability in the efforts to predict viral success.

Protection of anonymity. Handing data over to researchers with anonymization is "weak to the point of being dangerous."  When we have detailed data about people, anonymization runs into trouble.  Someone who posts under multiple identities can readily be identified as the same person.  [I love the word -- "de-anonymize."]

The implications -- we may not object to our use trails being published without names attached, but as Jon notes it's possible to correlate the anonymized private data (such as Netfilx rentals) with public data (such as IMDB ratings).

The attacker of an anonymous network can have more power if they are part of the system. It's not hard to plant yourself in a large network, and leave some kind of privacy-breeching Trojan horse. If you knew the information would be released, it's surprisingly easy to compromise privacy by exploiting the pattern of links. The pattern will be so rich that anything  you create will be highly distinguishing and highly findable.

A network of 12 nodes is sufficient to identify within a dataset of 100M nodes. Would it be computationally hard to locate a particular node of 12?

In LiveJournal, you and 6 friends chosen at random can carry out an attack compromising (within the domain of an anonymized data set) 10 users. This can happen even unintentionally -- you and a group of friends likely already have a unique linking structure that compromise a set of people you've already linked to.

 A clique is a set of nodes that are all interconnected; an independent set has no links.  In a large set, you've got to have either a large clique or a large independent set.

Takeaway -- one way to prove that something exists is to show that there's a high probability that it will occur in a random structure.

The IM graph is not random, but we're randomizing the subgraph we're targeting. It's very unlikely that your subgraph is in the set of data released. We don't need to randomize to get that signature -- friendship structures already lay the groundwork for this kind of attack.

Reflections on privacy -- social networks are skeletal structures, but they are something that needs to be treated with care. Anonymization of data doesn't really protect users -- only our contractual agreement with the service provider is protecting our information.

 t ^ -1.5 describes the likelihood that you will answer a given e-mail in t days.  (Barabasi 2005)

Toronto Globe and Mail -- MySpace "doesn't just create social network, it anatomizes them. It spreads them out like a digestive tract on the autopsy table."  Do we want to know all that we can learn when the guts of our social networks spill out?  These relationships have been implicit, but social networking makes those relationships explicit.

Chair: Ethan Munson (University of Wisconsin)

Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)
Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann

Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly through material that's unfamiliar to me... I'm waiting for the statement of the research question and I'm hoping she'll define her terms... aha! Here are some definitions.]

Intent to communicate -- the probability that a person will engage in some communication with a person in her network.

Delay in propagation -- how long it takes for one person to contact a person in her network on a given topic.

Communication context -- the set of attributes that affect communication between two individuals. Has been established that context is dynamic, relationship between messages, past communication behavior of a person, and response patterns of people in the person's neighborhood.

Neighborhood context, topic context, and recipient context. [That was a detailed slide.. I didn't get to process it before she moved on.]

Chart shows people can be categorized as having a strong tendency to send or a strong tendency to receive messages. People can be generators, mediators, and receptors of information.  Also categorizing people according to strength of ties - strong or weak, a value that changes depending on what information is being transmitted.

As near as I can tell, the research looked at the past communications between people, and predicted how likely they would communicate with each other on a given topic, and the time delay. I'm not sure what it means to say that their predictions had only 12-15% error rate as opposed to some other measure by which there were 25%-30% of an error rate... how does the control group differ from the group that presented the smaller error rate?  Are we looking at a refinement of an existing method to predict future behavior?  That would be such a n00b question that I'm not going to ask it. There are limits to my willingness to parade my ignorance.

Correlating User Profiles From Multiple Folksonomies (Long Paper)
Martin Szomszor, Ivan Cantador and Harith Alani

Martin Szomszor: The current Web 2.0 direction is towards the user having different profiles for doing different things. We expose a lot of information about ourselves across various sites. Research suggests that lots of us will have lots of different profiles, to help us do lots of different things.  Spoke of the popularity of tagging/folksonomy -- people like expressing themselves through the tags they supply.  The way people tag is heavily influenced by the way people around them tag.

People tag in multiple sites that focus on different domains that focus on different tasks. Can we use this behavior to find a figerprint that can identify a user across all these different profiles. [What's the application of this research? Targeting ads?]

The research searched for userIDs in Flickr and del.icio.us, filtering out the low-activity sites. People on different sites often used the same tags in different sites.

A slide noted different kinds of tags likely to be repeated -- dates, activities such as "cooking," and events such as "christmas."  As people tag more across more sites, the overlap increases.

Due to the free-form nature of tagging, people aren't always consistent ("podcast" vs "podcasting" or "blog" "blogs" or "blogging") even within the same domain. Filter out the overlaps. Discarding such terms as dates, dealing with misspellings and compound nouns; used Google to do this work for them, since Google will suggest a correction when you mistype a word. Then moves to WordNet and Wikipedia, normalizing terms and looking for synonyms.

Little change when uncommon tags were rejected. Biggest change in the results occurs when the dataset is correlated with Wikipedia, checking for acronyms and such. 

Compared each individual tag cloud with the group. Most people have a fairly small delicious vocabulary size. Filtering did not really help identify the profiles of users across systems. I'm not sure how to interpret the statistical significance, but it looks like tag clouds are not a terribly reliable way to identify what the researchers feel is the same person using different profiles.  Correlating all the tags to Wikipeia did result in an increase in the likelihood that this method would accurately identify the same user on different sites.

Google API was released just after the paper was published; thus there are new tools that help researchers find all their accounts, so there's more data that they can use to re-run the filtering with a better set of data.  Other issues -- does "sf" mean "science fiction" or "San Francisco"?  A user who uses "second" and "life" as two separate tags is actually referring to the single subject "second life" -- a more accurate study would account for that.

[As you can probably guess from the quality of the notes, this talk was much more accessible to me. I even asked a question about whether the research looks at the content on the other end of the link that's being tagged. No, it doesn't, but it's possible to do so.]

Measuring Social Networks with Digital Photograph Collections (Short Paper)
Scott Golder

Noted that his talk is more about explicit links.  Began with a picture of shoeboxes, the historical photo storage technique. Then added XML tags around the photo, saying that what we'd really like is a system to turn a shoebox of photos into a dataset.

The most important information is the identity of the person in each photo.

Showed a photo from his own wedding, showing a group. People are more likely to take a camera to, and travel to, special social events. We're not capturing people's work networks with the same mechanism that is so useful for capturing someone's social network.

Postcard study -- mailing postcards from Massachusets to Kansas.  Diary study -- ask people to record in a diary all the people they talk to. You can have people in a classroom mention names -- who woudl you ask to help you get homework.  Large-scale quantitative studies of networks, including e-mail networks. Connections between people in a corporate e-mail network. Trade-offs between a study with large n and a study that provides a lot of info.

You're likely to be in a photo with soemeone you know, so pairs of people in a photo is a good way to build a network.

A photo of 30 people implies a much weaker link between any two in that goup. As the number of people in the photo grows, the amount of weight implied by the link decreases.

This doesn't work for smart album generation. (Promised to tell why later.)

Noted Facebook's photo-tagging feature.

Link strength is useful for predicting who else is likely to be in a photo. Only a few key people were in many photos, most photos had only a few people. Only half of the photos had any people in it at all, and many had only one person. There were few photos with large numbers of people.

The value of being co-depicted with the owner of the archive. Photographer can't also be in the picture with you. Being co-depicted with the archive owner implies some effort -- the photographer hands the camera to someone else. Friends of people in photos with the owner are also more likely to be rated higher.

[I wonder... did the act of looking at a subset of all your photos, and seeing a picture of you with someone else, have an effect on the user's self-rating? What about asking the people in the photos to rank their closeness with the photographer? I asked this question... Scott said he had not considered that.]

A close friend brings a stranger that you don't know to an event, and gets into your archive by virtue of proximity to your close friend. So close friends bring strangers into your network. [This seems tautological... close friends probably also bring people who are close to you into your network....]

A question from the audience -- is the timestamp of a photo important -- if you've been taking photos of the same person for 10 years, wouldn't that show more closeness? [I wonder also, is the archive owner's distance from the photo any indication of emotional closeness?]

Can Blog Communication Dynamics be correlated with Stock Market Activity? (Short Paper)
Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann

This line of inquiry might help us understand the predictive power of online chatter; could be useful to companies intersted in their online reputation.

Looked at stock market motion of specific companies correlated with communication on in endgaget.com. [I wonder... how do the information dymamics of comments posted in response to entries posted on a specific blog differ from the information dynamics of bloggers who choose to create their own blog entry on a topic. Commenters don't drive the discusion the way the original posts do.]

Example -- last year's release of the iPhone. LIkely that lots of people on endgaget will be talking about the iPhone, and when the event actually happens it's likely that the stock wil move.

[Does the dataset note positive or negative comments?]

Characterize people as early responders and late traliers; frequency of communication is loyal readers and outliers. 

Presumes that stock market activity is related to blog behavior over the previous week. [But surely at least some of the blog communication will be responding to stock market events... but I supposed that would make more of a difference on a website devoted to business. Well, you have to start somewhere, and Munmun has clearly stated this is an assumption.]

Conclusions -- excellent results coordinating blog chatter with stock motion. "Remarkable predictive power." Future directions -- looking at the predictive power of groups and communities, vocal majorities and silent minorities.

Q -- does the work look at the sentiment of the blog posts? (No, this work does not look at the sentiments )

[Munmun indicated that it was possible to predict whether the stock would go up or down, but I'm not sure I understand how -- if people post more frequently is that a sign that stock will go up? Or if more outliers post, does that mean the stock will go down?]

Inside Higher Ed:

Understandably, professors frustrated with large class sizes turn to technology such as clickers in an attempt to engage students. Often, the technology become the handmaiden of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and text messages to friends. Of course, there is nothing untoward about a professor wanting to engage students, about wanting to maintain their attention and elicit their responses. Sadly, today's educational zeitgeist insists that to reach the 21st century learner professors must use a blend of technology, education and entertainment. There is an assumption that today's student is long on technology skills, but short on attentional abilities. To engage students we must entertain them.

Because I'm unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter's explanation.   A couple times I had to tell the eager presenter to give me a minute to take in all the information before they started talking.

One poster I had no trouble understanding at a glance was Charlie Hargood's poster on his narrative generation project. Themes, motifs, connotation, denotation -- this is familiar language about storytelling, presenting in the context of a model for generating rich narrative.

At yesterday's workshop, Chris Crawford dismissed the idea that an interactive narrative should be judged on anything other than its interactive depth; if you want literary richness, then read a book.   I would have like to hear Chris and Charlie discuss their differing approaches to the same problem. (Charlie says he was attending a different workshop yesterday.)

The core I took away from Charlie's presentation (which is a proposed model, rather than a working demo or a finished product), was his term "natom" for "narrative atom." In the past I have referred to the interactivity of a text-adventure game as a more-finely grained than a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, and "natom" is a wonderfully evocative term for each individual grain.  Charlie's model includes tagging each "natom" according to its "features," using the tagged features to denote "motifs," and presenting "themes" as connoted by these "motifs" (as well as by other themes).

Since my approach to interactive narrative is so thoroughly colored by my knowledge of interactive fiction, I couldn't help but point Charlie to the "recipe book" that's part of the Inform 7 design environment. That recipe book includes about 200 examples, most of which were written by Emily Short, that present the code for such concepts as "a person who can be in love with exactly one other person at a time" or "a telephone that lets people talk to and hear characters in distant rooms."  The IF community has done a lot of tagging and sorting of the corpus of IF works, and I wonder if IF would be a good testing ground for his world-building model. Can his model accurately represent the kinds of stories IF authors have generated?

At any rate, I gave Charlie some pointers for learning about the theoretical and critical output of the IF community.

I don't attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me.  The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction -- it's a research paper bared down to the bones.  Flash scholarship?  60-second-scholarship?

About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined up in the aisle. Each was given one minute to present their ideas. The host had an ooga-ooga horn that he squeezed when the one minute was up.

It's painful to watch someone cut off in mid-sentence, but it's a fascinating genre. Plus, this one-minute pitch is designed to get the conference attendees to stop by the presenter's table later on.  It's an efficient way to for conference attendees to sample all the posters, and it's a good chance for the presenters to encapsulate why their work is worth a closer look.

Okay, now that I've processed what I think about the genre, I'm ready to shift my focus to the content of the talks.

Paper 15 and 16, on on improving/expanding browser functionality were the most relevant to my interests so far. Paper 18 explicitly mentions blogs, so naturally I'm interested.  Paper 19 "Social WebEx Usage" is an educational tool that interests me; from the quotes from students it seems to be teaching Java, which is not an application I'd need.

Students whose posters are rated the best will give 10-minute talks tomorrow, and the winners of that will go on to the next phase.

Today's keynote:

Brughel painting showing the social dynamics of a village festival.

Grounded the talk with a presentation of statistics on user-generated content (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), noting that whether those users are interacting with one another is another question. Noted that his research is observational rather than experimental, and that he won't be able to go into detail, because rather his overservations will focus on what we can learn from the large number of users.

Noted that until recently, most content was created by a few and consumed by many. Noted the "remarkable inversion" in the creation of content.

Wikipedia - great example of something created from the bottom up. Invoked Nature's experiment comparing Wikipedia articles with print encyclopedias.

Interested in the overall quality of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. Study how Wikipedia is produced and generated. Correlation between the number of edits and its quality.  With D. Wilkinson in First Monday, published on clear correlation between the number of edits and the quality of the article.

Transitioned to the importance of the scarcity of attention. Information that people used to pay for is now freely available, but what is rare is our attention.

Not psychological attention, but social attention. Citing a source so that a reader can attend to it.

How does the phenomenon of attention pay in the importance of information? What is the role of novelty? How do you maximize the amount of value you get from a website given the fact that we have a limited amount of attention.

Noted that very few people are publishing "real scholarly work" on this subject.

In areas of low information density, attention is not a problem. (Showed a desert scene with a stopsign... "information poor environment").

A picture of Howard Rheingold in Tokyo, staring up at the insanely detailed advertising displays.  In an information rich environment, attention is valuable, ephemeral, and difficult to obtain.

Two ways to gain the attention of a group.  One: to broadcast.  At least initially it gets the attention of the people.  Another way is propagating the information virally.

Included graphic from a study on Amazon.com recommendations.  Most things do not propagate very far, but every so often you have a long chain.  Propagation of recommendations of a medical book has many shallow nodes, but the network for a Japanese graphic novel has far fewer nodes, each of which gets much more activity.

People are more likely to buy a DVD recommended by many people than they are to buy a book.  Two recommendations leads to a spike in recommendations for book purchases, but after that it drops off.  The DVD graph rises steadily with more recommendations, with the value approaching a higher figure.

As novelty fades, we pay less attention and search for more.  Novelty interactes with collective attention in a highly nonlinear but predictable way.

Prediction 1: the attention among all items is distributed in a log-normal way.
Prediction 2: attention decays in time as a stretched exponential (long tail, invoked radioactive half-life of about 69 minutes, roughly the amount of time a news story is on the front page of a website).

Suggested dynamically reconfiguring a website based on the number of hits the stories receive.

Noted that, while we do attend to novelty, we are also social beings, so we will attend to something simply because others are attending to it.  How does popularity affect attention?

[I note that Huberman defines "novelty" as "recency" rather than anything to do with the content. It seems then that it would be easy for a computer to notice when a link has unusually intersting or unusually boring content when the measured clickthrough rate differs from the predicted natural decay... I suppose that's what he means by the "popularity" of an item.]

Public opinions are another attention structure. How do opinions form and evolve?  Noted psychological study on group deliberation and group polarization, demonstrating that people tend to move towards extreme views. On the web, it is costly (in terms of time) to write a review. Conjecture -- people will only write a review if their opinion differs from the dominant opinion.  There's a softening of reviews over time.

Voter's paradox -- why do people bother to vote when your individual vote is so insignificant in a country of millions of voters?

In larger groups, individual contributions have to be larger in order to have a significant effect on the end result.

When it is costless to express an opinion, polarization occurs. When it is costly to express an opinion, a softening takes place. [What implications does this have for multiple-choice or short-answer quizzes, and papers?]

The group opinion does not change, but the selection process governing who expresses an opinion does change.

IMDB -- I think I missed something here; did he compare the effects of assigning a rating (a low-cost operation) with writing a review (a high-cost operation)?  He rushed through this point in order to end on time

Q and A.
Q How does free will enter into the picture?

A. There's a huge difference between people and the objects that physicists study. Rocks falling and photons behaving can be described by an equation. People, unlike rocks, molecules and atoms, take into account the future when they make each action. "I'm not here as a result of Brownian motion."   Using physics-like metaphors to discuss phase transformation is just that -- a metaphor.  Not forcing the world of people to be like something that we know from physics.  Calls for "a certain amount of humility" when facing the study of human actions.

Q: Clarification of "novelty" -- is it just chronology?

A: An idea is novel if it is not repeated; if you insert something in a familiar piece of music, people will attend to it.

Q: What implications for diversity of opinion?

A: Paris Hilton keeps finding novel ways of attracting attention, so he gives her credit for a certain amount of intelligence. There's a competitive component -- attention research actually can be liberating because distinct and diverse opinions attract attention.  The fact that whole world is collapsing to the point where we all see the same information is a different phenomenon.

Q. In the current issue of Atlantic, there's an article about traffic management of automobiles in UK vs US.  The article says our road system is oversaturated with too many signs.

A: That theory is about a collective attention phenomenon, but not about perceptual attention to individual elements.

Q: Invitation to speculate about tension between the familiar and the new, and the "sweet spot" that attracts... movie genres is an example of people liking things they already know.

A: We haven't done much on that. A personal home page or newspaper is familiar, but has to have content that changes.

Q: Note old comparative psychology study... what kind of animal would a rat want to play with most? Rats liked to play with rats best, but they also liked the human hand. Hypothesis -- moderate unpredictability was good. The guinea pig always had the same behavior (hiding), but the hand was unpredictable. (The speaker noted that this was a comment not a question.)

Best evidence of ice on mars:

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

Literatronica:

Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction... mathematical literature.

Mathematical literature -- not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories.

Lexicographic Hypertext -- basic HTML with nodes connected via links.  We navigate through the network to get from the beginning to an ending.

Tree fiction -- constructing a narrative through choosing options.

Adaptive Fiction -- the computer delivers chunks based on what the user knows about the story world.   Same lexia, but the links to continue reading is different based on what the reader knows.

Temporal development of the plot. Juan agrees that we should not really find a plot as the authors... the reader will, however, find a plot.  The reader finds a plot that was rendered on the fly during one sitting.   In a printed book, you measure by pages... in electronic text, Juan suggest measuring by time invested.  [Meaningful time invested?]

Story changes to flashback create a greater cognitive gap than a change of scene. 

The computer should keep track of what the user has done. Shortest path algorithm.  System will calculate the links between every pair of lessons.  The author only has to build a limited number of links, let the computer handle the hard work of tracking and managing the connections.

Introduced a twist -- the hypertextural attractor (lexias that attract a lot of traffic, connected from many lexias, could be repeated).  In traditional hypertext, repetition of these key nodes can be a problem -- IBM researcher examined the liklihood that a reader will lose interest during a navigation event; repition increases significantly the probability of losing the reaer's attention.  

Hypertextual Friction - if a narration has too many narrative jumps, or a sequence of lexias that's disruptive, we increase the liklihood of losing the reader's attention.

Author, reader, computer are three actors.  We can create a dynamical system that adjusts the text according to the relationships.

Juan invoked Aarseth's Cybertext, ergodic, noetic... Within a system, when a consciousness outside that of the reader acts this is extranoematic.

We will discover essentially the same narrative space with new tools.  If we all play Oblivion we will eventually visit the same places.  In a book, readers will acquire all the contents of the narrative space. The difference is how they are collected.

Showed graphs of interest versus time (steep drop off, slow increase.)If readers pass a certain number of lexias, they are more likely to keep reading.

Firction increases as the reader experiences the space... as we become familiar with the world, we have fewer options.

Juan says the results will be published in a few months.... maximize interest, minimize friction, recalculate each time the user clicks, which requires a supercomputer.

Implementation -- we start with a lexia, adaptive links displayed based on the probability that the next link ensures narrative continuity. [How are these calculated -- not by keywords, but by the shortest-path algorithm?  What would the applications of a similar tool to keep track of what page a reader clicks off of a walled website like Facebook, or on a given newspaper's website?]

Juan notes that each lexia could include video... number of links per page could change. [I wonder... are inline links possible?] 


Mark Marnio spoke of his experience using Literatronica to write A Show of Hands. 

Says that Literatronica solves several important problems facing writers of hypertext.

Proglems include the sense of aporia when Aarseth is lost in a hypertext... "I'm not sure that Aarseth likes literary hypertext" -- that concern of not knowing when it ends, encountering repitition, etc.  Mark differentiated his characters from Joyce and Jackson's (which he characterized as white and upper-middle-class), saying he hoped to bring in more types of stories from a broader array of stories. 

His work is inspired by Chicano literature from the southwest of the US.   Sees Joyce drawing on "the new novel," and wants to draw from the Telenovella -- soap opera. Noted how Charles Dickens reworked melodrama; has in mind a goal to move towards a more popular form. Open up electronic literature to a wider reading audience; center on families, move away from theoretical and historical and literary texts.

Mark noted that he labeled his threads with the characters that feature in each.   "I got trapped by my own storytelling."  Showed a graph in which different threads converge in a lexia that ends a chapter, moves through a liminal section, then opens back up again.  [Reminds me of The Heist, which describes an event from multiple perspectives, and after the reader has seen a few perspectives,then offers the reader to click on a different level to advance to the next main story event.]

Mark noted his desire to communicate initial conditions, so that the reader can track the changes in that character.  There's a challenge in getting even experienced readers to move beyond about 50 lexias. Mark walked the audience through the process of scripting out the relationships between lexias... you really only need to add one link to each lexia (which suggests a linear relationship... the story depends on chronology, so that makes sense).

Chris Crawford has been working on Storytron for 16 years. The computer gaming industry was not intersted in or able to solve the problem of interactive storytelling. Left the gaming industry to solve that problem on his own. Has been explaining Storytron for 10 years, says that during that time he has "failed miserably." 

About 2-3 months ago, someone said "The problem with your technology is that it's revolutionary," in the sense that it's too much change coming too fast, requiring conceptual leaps that people can't handle.

The major leaps Chris had to go through: "People, not Things!"  Entertainment or art should be about human beings, not about guns or monsters or ammo or food or spatial reasoning or puzzles. 

Chris: "Games are cold and heartless because they don't have any people in them."

Game people all accepted the notion that people are a good idea, but they don't embrace it -- making the same old games with characters that you didn't interact with in a meaningful way.  Games now "don't have any story, any really compelling content to them -- they're just things."

2nd: (Chris says this will be harder for the hypertext audience to grasp.) The primacy of interactivity in the computer medium.  Interactivity is to computers as cinematicness is to movies -- it is the essence of the medium.   You can use a computer as a slide projector, phone, movie making -- but the one strength that computers have is interactivity -- the prime asset of the medium. 

Mark B: Why would this crowd have a hard time grasping that?  What's the anticipated straw man?

Resposnse to Mark M:  Interactivity is a meaningful choice for the player, achived by processing by the computer.

3rd: Forget plot. Plot does not belong in interactive applications.

Plot in interactive media is like talking about color and shadow in poetry.  Plot is a standard that simply doesn't apply in an interactive environment... plot = the player's actions don't matter. Plot -- pre-defined plan for the events that will take place.  (Metaplot is an advance notion of the general themes you intend to explore... that can be done interactively.)

Theoretically, an interactive environment should permit any action that's dramatically consistent with the author's goals.

Crawford's First Law of Software Design: Always ask "What does the user DO?" (Not what he user sees, hears, etc.)  The choices are expressed as verbs.

List "Here are the verbs I want the user to execute."  Demonstrated that with just a few verbs, you can identify the piece of software.  Software is defined by its verbs.

Next Leap: Linguistic User Interface (LUI)

Interacting with a computer is talking to the computer.    [Is "giving orders" really "talking"?  Is it necessary to translate an already metaphor-laden action such as dragging an item to the trash can into words? "Make friends with Betsy" -- an example Chris used - is powerful language, but we communicate through gestures, proximity, eye contact... we communicate subconsciously in many ways that lose quote a bit when we translate it to language.]

Language is the protocol that people use.

Linguist -- Sapir-Wharf hypothesis.  Language and the perceptual reality of the speaker are closely locked together. Language mirrors reality as perceived by the speaker.  Language is hard to put into a computer... you can't put reality in a computer therefore you can't put language inside a computer.

Every artist is creating a tiny universe... storyteller creates a little dramatic universe that contains only the appropriate level of detal. Create a "toy universe" and a "toy language" to go along with it.  The universe and language are a single task -- you can't create one without the other.

Next idea: Inverse Parser

The words they require are hidden.  Only show the user the options that are appropriate to the particular moment. Build a sentence, word by word, setting a goal.  You're not the supplicant any more -- "Please accept my text!"  Instead the computer does the work so that it only shows you the relevant choices.

"The computer does all the work, not the user. That's the way it's supposed to be!" [Hm... well, in certain cases, yes, but that would pretty much kill the whole concept of the riddle. CF the chess example in The Garden of Forking Paths.]

Storytelling is best done by storytellers, not programmers. 

Raises a gigantic problem... storytelling is algorithm-driven.  Interactivity is about thinking how to respond.  The computer is supposed to come up with an interesting reaction to user input.
Gives the example of a refrigerator door -- the light goes on when you open the door.  Keeping a given reader interested requires computation, requires the language of mathematics.  And storytellers are not particularly mathematically, nor are they very technical.  We don't need millions of storytellers to do this, we just need a few dozen to get started.

Make the tool eaiser.

Chris -- getting the storytelling part working was easy... that was 4 out of the 16 years.  The rest of the time has meant making the tool easier for the non-technical person.

Demonstrated the script describing the inclination of the actor to accept a proposed deal.

Last example -- "Bounded Numbers" -- Bounded numbers, between +1 and -1.  You can never get a number outside that range.  All manipulation just push the variable between those ranges.  Gave the scenario of your brother has been bullied... how do you compare your confidence in your strength, and your love for your brother.  Every value gets a bell curve, based on average.  Arithmetic is a lot easier for the non-technical person if all values are based on a scale with 0 as average, 1 the most possible, -1 the least possible.

To do anything with all this you have to embrace all these concepts, which stops many people from using the technology.

The Storytron "Grand Opening" is July 15.  In 20 years, will be paving a parking lot over Electronic Arts.

Why can't programmers tell stories?  Steeped in a style of thinking that is inimical to storytelling... it takes an exceptional programmer to cross the line. and vice-versa.

The conceptual difference is not a personality thing. The games industry has not embraced the humanistic elements of storytelling.  "They do great Potemkin Village characters."

Chris says there has never been a character in a game that you can have a meaningful emotional relationship with. (Emily Short briefly reacted to Chris's dismissal of the death of Floyd in Planetfall.)

When gamers are "in the zone" -- they've cut off the frontal cortex, so that kind of gameplay is "untouched by human neurons" because the cognitive part of their brain is cut out of the cycle.

Dene noted that being "in the zone" happens in sports as well... you block some of the data from the outside, but can still be very physically active.  Being in the zone is more complex than Chris described it.  Dene offers "immersion" as the key between trivial an non-trivial activities.  Dene notes that what counts as trivial and non-trivial for kids is different from adults.

Chris says that your body has a natural correction system that kicks in when you are in the zone.  "There's always death as a feedback mechanism."

Chris feels the gaming culture will be seen as kiddy entertainment like Disney.

Mark M -- can you make the grains of output larger?  Invoked Noah Wardip Fruin's Talespin effect -- the software does robust processing, but the output is harder to appreciate as a completed work of art.

Crawford noted that cinema's first frame of reference was the theater... static camera where the audience would sit.  It took a revolution to realize that cinema does things differently.

I suggested that the granuarity of Storytron would fill the space of a cell phone or IM.

Mark B -- invoked Roger Schank's work on storytelling. Is Crawford reviving Schank? (Chris distanced hisself from Schank, saying he looked at his work long ago then set aside and went off on his own.)

Mark M -- you can make ELIZA interesting by plaing around with ELIZA.  There are "bad examples of ELIZA."   Mark sees the data going in and the data going out.  Once you start playing with the grains coming out, and what they look like, you start addressing its literary flavor.

Chris: "Why do I want more literary flavor?"

Mark M: "That's what I want."

Chris: "Then write a book!"

Chris -- expecting a literary output is dismissing the primacy of ineraction.  The level of interaction is where the richness.  The visual and literary part aren't expected to be rich. The medium has zero literary value, positive intearctive value.

Mark B: Asked Chris -- I've got this character the reader is supposed to love... how do you make the character lovable. 

Chris: Make her lovable in what she does, not what she looks like.  Make her interested in who the protagnist is.  The character should be empathetic, she will inquire, respond to the player's statements.  Chris notes that the core point is on the mark -- we don't know how we'll be able to come up with algorithms to define interactive stories.

Chris -- the best people for the new technology are "young, angry failures."  The established writer has no need to seek an outlet in a new medium.  "That's how I think we'll find our best story builders. Losers."

In responset to my question, Chris said that he spent about a half hour with Emily Short's Galatea and found it "interesting." I noted that in terms of meaningful interaction with a virtural character, the interactive fiction community considers it to be the mark to beat.

Dene joined us remotely from her lab in Vancouver, demonstrating multimedia works that are performed through hyperlinks triggered by a performer's actions in a 3D space.  The demonstration is intended to challenge the notions of a hyperlink as a silent component of a 2D work.

First demonstration -- Virtual DJ.  

Spinning circles of light seem to track the performer as she moves a motion-tracking controller in 3D space.  Four cameras track down on a 9x9x9 space; we saw 8 maps of "Level 1," the music and lights are located in different directions, so one has to remember where each zone is.  She carries a small container that emits an infrared light, picked up by the cameras.  Space divided into a 3D grid, with different media objects programmed into the grid.  A PC reads the performer's location in space, talks to a Mac which runs sound and visual elements. Software: "Reason"


Things of Day and Dream, corporeal poetry.

Software: "Ableton" (it sounded like that... unfamiliar to me)  Recorded a poem, divided it up into chunks... video clips keyed with the text in 13 zones.  Each chunk of spoken word invokes a different chunk of video, with music playing throughout.  Text, video, and music all embedded in 13 different zones.  Very short -- just a minute and 5 seconds.  Grid divided into 2 regions, 10 different phrases on the "dream" side, and 2 with "awake," and in the middle is a liminal zone.  [Question... what does live interaction add to the performance? Watching someone else -- a specialist -- interact with a 3D space is one kind of experience...]


Rhapsody Room. 

Spaces trigger individual words, also keying changes in the sound track and lighting. "Jolt," "sky," "final".   Pronouns high, in the middle were the modifiers, and on the ground were the verbs.  Intersting experience.

[The complexity of navigating through the 3D menus reminds me of the frustrating experience of navigating multiple 90 degree turns through nested Windows menus.  It takes a precision that seems mechanical and robotic... how often does the system poll the location of the controller? How does that affect the nature of the experience?]

The whole studio setup reminds me -- just slightly -- of the "mood room" in Anthony Clarvoe's PICK UP AX.  Lab set up with a collaborator in Canada... very little lag time.  There's too much lag to create classical music.

Question from Mark Marino: how do new users interact with the system?

Dene says it takes people about 20 seconds of moving the controller up and down, but within 30 seconds people start moving around.  People who are comfortable with their bodies and uninhibited are all over the place, but people who are more reserved are more timid with the controller.   Designed to be portable and friendly to new users.

Rather than a mouse running across a desk, the mouse is a tracker, the surface is air, and a hyperlink is an invisible point in 3D space.  [I guess her controller doesn't have a clicker, so it's all activated by "hover".]

Invoked Jeff Parker's "A Poetics of the Link." 

Patterns, repetition, cycles... a physical instantiation of the interaction of cameras, trackers, light, computers, along with the human performer's body, brought to fruition by the hyperlinks.  Disorienting, but not silent gaps.  We tend to think of hypertext disjoined spaces, but Dene sees them as potentially contiguous.

Dene -- "event link" -- multidimensional event space. Invoked Aarseth's notion of time in ergotic works. Time in the tale, time of the telling, and the event time.  DIalectic between aporia (gaps) and epiphany (insight).  Dene sees her work as lacking gaps.

3D perforamce works are about signification and mapping... performer finds her own sense of order. Transition, relay, and movement. Emphasizes the performer inside the system. Human, corporeal contribution to the work of art.  Add, along to the perception of reading along multiple paths, also the mutiple paths of performance, multiple ways of the human performer interacting with the work.

"Corporeal Poetics."

The controller has no "click" function, so all the 3D ineractions is "hover."

Diana Slattery, "Glide" - build a visual language and gesturing, hand gestures.

Kate Pullinger and mouse-over.  "Breathing Wall" -- breathing into an apparatus to move the story along with the breath.

Mark B. asked how this counts as literature -- is it scored?  Virtual DJ isn't written down, Rhapsody Room is open enough that anyone can innovate, but Day and Dream takes practice to perform.

The notion of ephemeral beauty is part of the allure of this kind of work... "Do I really care" whether it's possible to capture it?

The space can handle four different trackers, each triggering different actions in the various spaces.

The demos we saw were all based on the tracker's location in 3D space.

In The Mindful Play Environment, it is possible to use trajectory, speed, proximity of trackers to each other...  Dene's website has a video of that work in progress for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Steve introduced Susan Gibb as a driving force behind the writing and digital media culture in a small town in Connecticut.  (I'm really impressed by what comes from Tuxnis Community College).

Susan presented us with the thinking behind the creation of a 300-node creative hypertext work in StorySpace.

Susan walked the audience through the process of a single "writing space" morphing into a story.  As the writer moves in time, the character reveals her past through vignettes. Reflections (from the present looking back) and memory (more dramatic and lyrical than the present.)

Hypertext welcomes "those neat distracting ideas" that we have to squelch into order to develop an idea in a linear format.

[My question... what does this do to focus? Are 1000 story spaces, of which 300 are really good, better than a story with 300 good story spaces?  Are 300 story spaces, of which 30 are phenomenal, preferable to a story with just 30 spaces?  Moving from brainstorming and world-building to the narration of details can be tricky... Susan is very careful and meticulous about what she does, and while like Alan she's inspired by the openness of the medium, my mind jumps to how I can use this in a class full of students who are taking basic comp, and therefore haven't developed even the basic skills that contribute to a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent webtext.  Susan's experience introducing multimedia to older people can build on the print literacy that a 75-year-old has developed over a lifetime of reading.]

Susan discusses the separation between the writer and character, and referred in passing to "One of the Annes," which I found interesting. 

[I never think of the "you" in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel as having multiple personalities, but of course if the book were a "Develop-Your-Own-Consciousness" novel or "Interpret-Your-Own-Metaphors" book, then perhaps I'd need different language to describe the experience.]

Just after I wrote the above, Susan just mentioned the CYOA format...

Susan notes that a linear form needs a reason to go off on a side-track, but in hypertext you don't need a reason. [Again, does that limit the focus? I don't mean to suggest Susan is encouraging frivolous side-trips, since of course the reader can avoid sidestories.  What implications does this have for "Murder your darlings" -- Quiller-Couch's advice for writers who cling too much to passages that just don't fit. "Marginalize your darlings"?]

Susan says she feels she hasn't mastered the hypertext form... she says she doesn't mind when the reader misses side stories, but she does have a "full" text in mind and she wants to make sure the reader experiences it all.

[Is this why she says she hasn't mastered the form?  Would there be no difference between vital nodes and optional nodes if she had mastered the form, or if she masters the form will she be more confident in her ability to steer the reader, or if she masters the form will she embrace its differences and not worry it?]

Her narrative structure depends upon a loop, leaving the reader with uncertainty... suggests the image of macrame, with the threads forming a "complete story".

Susan noted that short sentences increase the pace in hypertext, but also the number of writing spaces. A short lexia forces the reader to stop and contemplate. [I'm puzzled... I would think that a long lexia would slow the reader down. I wonder how the use of bold keywords and bulleted lists would affect the reader's experience of a literary hypertext.]

Next example -- A Bottle of Beer -- a sample in Hypertextopia. Ended with a quote from Steve, emphasizing the value of even an incomplete sampling of a hypertext space. To "finish" a hypertext (as a reader) is less important than the value of contemplating the nodes one encounters.

In a question, Mark referred to "killing your children"  and a "defense of hoop-de-doodle."  "How do you decide what to cut and what to move to the margins?"

Susan noted that editing with each writing space means it's easier to trim the nodes.

Chris: 100 identical people each take different paths through a text, creating 100 different paths.  To what degree, if you were to estimate the quality of the experience, would there be a few that are really great, some that are horrible, or would they be pretty much the same quality?

[Susan noted that she liked the slide presentation tool Keynote, a couple of times referred to "angry people" who followed a particular path through the text... ]

Marc from USC -- notes that Susan seems to value her work when the ideal reader meets the ideal story... value comes from sympathy between the experiences.  Do we always have to write stories that look more like the new novel, and less like the discursive novel -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders.

How to get away from the concern about ensuring the reader get the "right" or "full" story?

Steve -- notes that we have not yet fully explored the aesthetic of linking.  "It may be that every path in a hypertext is the only way to read it.  Not the right way, or the wrong way."

Juan: If we have a message, the narrative piece created by the author, can be acquired by the reader... how closely does the reader's final perception of the work match the intention of the author?  [Juan's point was about information, but the establishment of the author's intention is subjective, and the value of a work fluctuates in culture, just as the author's intention fluctuates over the life of the author, and our understanding of that intention fluctuates based on what kind of access we have to the author's notes, letters, etc.]

Mark notes that craft is important -- a work that's not communicating its message might have a technical imperfection.
 

Alan Bigelow discusses his art installations featuring the short-form Flash genre. In his introduction, he stated that he doesn't think that he writes hypertext, and spoke with hope of a future in which new media authors know what terms to apply to their work.

The opening screen of his American Ghosts refers to a "webyarn," but he also suggests "net art," calling himself a "mid-career artist" because he's been working in this form for about 8 years.

Bigelow says he tends to give his readers limited choices, because he doesn't want the reader to struggle through the narrative.  Refers to interactive choices in his works, Love Is and MyNovel.org and IPledge.org.  Spoke of the value of securing domain names since they draw traffic.

While American Ghosts played, I laughed out loud at the Paul Revere clip.  After the work ended, Alan discussed the inspiration for the work, with American archetypes from the revolutionary era reimagined in terms of their 20th-century counterparts.  After the five indiidual clips play, we see a final unified clip that punches the final message. (It's a nice effect... descrbing it would be meaningless... just spend 5 or so minues looking at all the American Ghosts clip.) 

Referred to the Steven Kurtz debacle as an inpspiration for his work -- a reason to resond.

Notes that he produces only 3-4 pieces a year... "tortuously slow" -- hard to compete against companies, Hollywood, that sees the revenue potential for the short interactve form.

Mark aks Alan to go back to when he was first producing American Ghosts, and asks... what do you want?  What is the "American Ghosts" you could do if you had unlimited resources?

Alan answered by gesturing at his laptop... he would have produced exactly the same thing he showed us.

Mark notes then.. why, then, worry about what big industry is doing?

Alan notes --- blogs get readers because there's new content every day, but Flash artists don't do that.  Without the constant generation of new content, it's hard to build an audience.

Steve notes that Flash is changing... it's an "empty space." He asks, "what is it about the texture of the Flash enviroment" that draws Alan?

Alan identifies himself as a writer, not a programmer... calls Flash intuitive.  "It doesn't hurt that it's 97% penetration in browsers," so it's "a good bet for longevity."    Trying to design his works to display on an iPhone.

Alan invoked the example of Jason Nelson, as an artist reworking the cultural material of games.

Alan walked the audience briefly through the Flash source file, listing the tools he uses to create his work.

Mark asked Alan to "talk a little bit about why this is the right medium for your politcal message."  Alan called his art work his "private" way to present his opinions... noted his discomfort when server logs indicate that someone from a government organization is viewing his work.  Identifies himself as a writer, says "I got bored with writing on paper."

Mark probed for an external motivation... beyond personal inclination -- what is the general motivation?

Alan responded... "As an artist, I work instinctively. I don't do a lot of self-examination.... The less self-examination, the better."

Susan Gibb turned the question around -- "How does this particular medium inspire you?"

Alan -- excoted by the possibilites of Flash.  "Always a challenge, and it's always intersting."

Steve Ersinghaus started the creative hypertext workshop by playing Changing Key: A "video hyperdrama" by Charles Deemer.

In the introduction, Deemer notes that the audience in a play is passive, and conjures up the idea of a family Thanksgiving in which multiple groups interact in multiple rooms, with the audience inserted into the drama like ghosts who can follow different stories.

[My note: A ghost audience who can follow different characters is not a full participant, like the payng audience who performs dramas with professional 'ractors in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age... Each of Deemer's videos is a separate, linear narrative... we're still watching Bobby Meadows wait for his ride, in a scene that's doubtless providing various hooks into the other scenes in the corpus.  The audience's attempts to put the story together is an active intellectual effort.

There's a trilogy of plays that are designed so that when a character exits in one play, he or she enters in another play. Can't recall the title of that trilogy...]

After watching Bobby's scene, Mark Bernstein asks the question -- is this scene a story?  (We didn't have the chance to discuss his question before Steve started the next clip, but I think that's like asking wether an individual ant is an organism -- an individual worker ant can't reprotude, and the male ants don't even have jaws so they can't eat...)

Now we're watching Kate's story.  Kate speaks directly to the camera (which I'm pretty sure is visible in the reflection of a window at one point). An intersting cinematographic detail -- during a confrontation between Kateand Dennis, both actors deliver their scene in an unbroken shot, with the shot of Dennis overlayed slightly over Kate's image (with the focus therefore on Kate).

After just watching two clips, and noting the ways the hooks in these two stories, begin to intersect, I'm intrigued by the complex authorial process necessary for creating an ensemble drama (like a soap opera or epic TV show, such as Babylon 5 or the last few seasons of Deep Space 9).

Chris Crawford stated that a story with seven choices -- "none of them informed" means the experience is not interactive.

In what manner is this presentation hypertextual?  We see different sections of overlapping stories. Susan notes that the clips don't actually present one event -- some of the characters don't interact with each other.  We spent some time dissecting individual shots, such as Bobby wiping his shoes, and noting the apparent separation between Kate and Bobby.

Mark -- differentiates between story and plot. The sequence we choose seems only to affect plot, but it's possible to affect he story -- it may be that putting the events in different sequence may communicate something different (but he's reserving judgment because we haven't seen enough of it).  "If it's not interactive, it's certainly ergodic." (Good point.)

Marc from USC -- notes the significance of dramatic irony, and its powerful affect on the viewer's perceptioin of events.

We skipped ahead to "Nuts and Bolts," which describes Deemer's use of Storyspace. To produce the video, Deemer has to do a linear storyboard. Notes that live hyperdrama involves improv, since the timeline of the various threads has to line up.  Video hyperdrama is easily manipulated so that timelines sync up. In fact, according to Deemer, for video, the script only appears after the separate filmed modules are assembled.

An interesting sequence defines a theater space for hyperdrama.  (Reminds me of the rebellion against the proscenium arch which freed Expressionist playwrights from followig the conventions of the well-made play.)

Marc from USC challenges Demeer's statement that hyperdrama needs an address; also notes the connection to reality TV (with multiple cameras). 

Somehow I worked a reference to Duck Amuck into a discussion of how instantenous scene changes affects the pace of drama.

Steven notes that he has offered to host Deemer to try to create the space for hyperdrama.

GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.)

Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled "Limbo of the Lost." At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point and click adventure again. This time, however, something seemed oddly familiar to him. Eric, being the avid PC gamer that he is, noticed that there were some similiarties between Limbo of the Lost and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

The first example of this can be seen in the screenshots from Oblivion and Limbo of the Lost below. Notice how everything is placed in exactly the same place and almost all of the textures are identical. In fact, the only real difference is the quality of the texture and overall graphical look. Even the portrait that can be seen under the stairs is exactly the same as the one that can be found in Oblivion. Also, take note of the placement of the rug in the middle of the floor and the placement of the stairways. These similarities lead to many questions. How rampant are situations like this in games that fall under the radar of the typical gaming crowd?

Now, it's possible that Limbo of the Lost purchased the rights to re-use the art and 3D models, but Oblivion isn't the only game the creators of Limbo of the Lost have borrowed from.

Inside Higher Ed raises an interesting question. If a student paper learns that sensitive information in an unprotected computer file, and then writes a story about it, how should the administration react after learning the paper still has a copy of that protected information? Here's what happened at Western Oregon University:

In a letter sent to university officials late last week, the College Media Advisers Board of Directors condemned the university's response to a student newspaper article published in September. The story revealed that sensitive information about student applicants, including their Social Security numbers and grade point averages, had been left unprotected from public view.

In response to the article, university officials rifled through the newsroom in search of a copy of the computer file containing the sensitive student information. The paper's adviser also lost her job amid the furor, and a student was disciplined for copying the file and violating university policies designed to protect private information.

The board, which represents student newspaper advisers, denounced the university's "lack of understanding of basic journalism principles and ethics." But in detailing its dissatisfaction with the university's actions, the board also offered help.

The university punished the student reporter for making a copy of the file that the university was responsible for protecting, which sounds like shooting the messenger. Was it necessary to copy the entire file in order to write the story?  Hm... I might have taken a few screenshots -- just enough to back up the story. The interim adviser blames the fired adviser:

"Her firing was entirely justified," said Yehnert, an English professor. "She was a terrible media adviser all the way around."

From Scholastic, a report that shows books still appeal to kids. Does this mean that mouse-clicking adults will think of books as childish?

A new study released today finds that 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, "No matter what I can do online, I'll always want to read books printed on paper," and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

However,

Two in three children believe:
that within the next 10 years, most books which are read for fun will be read digitally - either on a computer or on another kind of electronic device.

Want to quote 5-25 words from an AP story? That'll be $12.50.  ($7.50 for non-profit or educational use.)  The AP has published a form that details the cost of an "Excerpt for Web Use" license.

The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or I retain the copyright to our own writing (unless we explicitly give those rights away).  But to charge money even for brief quotations is to reject the Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- known as the "Fair Use Exception." 

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Note that copying an entire book (or song, or movie) in order to avoid purchasing it is not "fair use."  Showing a clip from a movie in class, or posting quotations from a novel to back up a review or literary research paper, are all covered by "fair use."

Access to the words of public officials, as reported from various news sources, is an important part of the democratic process.  A candidate being interviewed on ABC should be able to quote from what an opponent said on NBC, and someone who calls in on a CBS show should be able to quote from what a guest said on CNN. The Fair Use Exception recognizes that anyone engaging in "criticism" or "comment" should have the same the ability to quote brief passages from published materials.

Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore:

Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they've made screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft, where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy worthy of the Cuban missile crisis. Previously, this was the concern of only very high-level employees at multinational corporations -- but now 13-year-old kids are doing it.

Wright is the undisputed reigning master of creating games that contain subterfuge training. Ever wonder how The Sims became the world's top-selling game of all time? It's not because people actually play it. Most longtime Sims fans quickly tire of creating families.

No, what hard-core fans love is The Sims' elegant "house-design" engine -- which they use to painstakingly craft sprawling, monster homes, customized to the level of individual tile patterns they hand-draw in cracked versions of Photoshop. The Sims isn't a game: It's the world's most popular architectural CAD package.

Now Spore is going to do the same thing to the world of 3-D characters and the sort of work regularly produced by Pixar.

This morning in my mail I found an attractive printing of the proceedings from a January summit on journalism. All in all, this is a good print document that suffered when it was shoveled online.

I have no idea what kind of time constraints or "it came to the boss in a dream so do it that way or else" loopiness might have been facing the webmaster at carnegie.org or whoever else was charged with putting this document online.

Nevertheless, the journalists who shared their experience and insights with the Carnegie Corporation deserve an online venue that avoids the n00b mistakes that I teach my college freshmen to recognize.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction, by Vartan Gregorian.

Perhaps now more than ever, in this "age of anxiety," of globalization, conflict, non-stop opinion and an overwhelming info-glut, we need objective observers and reporters to help us distill the onslaught of events, data and information into knowledge and wisdom. It is in that connection that we should be able to look to the press to assist us in answering the telling questions asked by T.S. Eliot: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Eliot's query speaks to the "Home Depot-ization" of so much of the news that we interact with these days. The proliferation of online sources of news and opinion along with cable stations and an extraordinary, seemingly depthless supply of print and electronic sources of specialized, compartmentalized information means that one can pick and choose among the issues one wishes to be exposed to. That may be fine, up to a point and certainly, it is everyone's right to pursue their individual interests and concerns, but if all an individual chooses to know about or understand is tailored around his or her particular notions or points of view, such narrow vision may well leave them seriously under-informed about national and international affairs that deserve their attention in order to be a knowledgeable and active member of our participatory democracy.

I didn't attend the summit, but its focus -- on the relationship between journalism and democracy, on the value of journalism as a vocation that benefits society -- is one of my favorites.  I was very pleased last year when on the final exam, my journalism students were able to recite four of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. (Yes, five out of five would have been better, but they only got an average of 3.5 of the five passengers on Gilligan's Island.)

The website that goes along with the printed report is a good example of what happens when the information in a print document is shoveled online, without appropriate consideration of how differently people approach knowledge acquisition online.

The website was obviously put together as an afterthought -- it's clear that the "real" document is, in the mind of the organizers, the print document.  As an institution, journalism -- and the knowledge it contains and the wisdom it hopes to impart -- won't last long if that mode of thinking prevails.

At Hypertextopia. I found an interesting, but incomplete and unsigned (update -- according to some mouseover text, it's by Brian Yearling) hypertext that maps out part of the plot of Death of a Salesman.  I was interested in the subject matter, but I'm not sure about what value this particular hypertext arrangement offers. If it were possible to re-arrange the items so that we can walk chronologically through Willy's life, that might help make some points about Willy's character, but at present this hypertext isn't part of a larger argument that uses the information in its hypertext form, so I'm not sure what the value is. 

Saint EMC² is a more complete example, with text highlighted according to whether the link is an extension, opposition, or illustration of the linked text. That might be useful as a device to get students thinking about why they are linking.

Here's a thoughtful overview of Hypertextopia, from if:book.

The line between blogging and journalism is fuzzy, and bloggers have been sued for making statements that a trained journalist would know not to make. The Society of Professional Journalists offers training sessions for bloggers who want to know what journalists know.

People are practicing journalism through blogs, Web site production and interaction with sites maintained by mainstream news organizations. They are contributing to the world's 24/7 news cycle, making it easy and accessible for more of us to be in the know.

The Society of Professional Journalists believes the world benefits from more news coverage, not less. Through its Citizen Journalism Academy, SPJ seeks to help everyone wanting to practice journalism to do so accurately, ethically and fairly. The Society aims to help participants understand how responsible practices could increase their reach and help them have strong journalistic reputations within their communities and around the world.

"Florida, Florida, Florida," wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election.  In know the news cycle is moving on to other stories by now, but it's a shame we'll never know what he would have done for Election 2008. (Previously.)

At night, no one can hear you do a happy dance.

And I must stifle my victory whoops, so as not to wake up the rest of the family.  But I can still pronounce my geeky successes through my blog. A computer that was dead lives again.

I don't usually do hardware.

But last weekend, I invited a boy from another homeschool family over to help pull apart an old PC that the previous owner of my house left in the garage. As fate would have it, one of my computers had a hard drive failure around the same time. Not a spectacular crash, just a steady degradation of performance that finally made thing unusable. 

So it seems only fitting that I should start this weekend resurrecting a broken PC. (Hence the geeky joy.)

Chronicle

Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution.

Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.... Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self.

The article includes an interesting anecdote about Nietzsche and his typewriter, and also offers a clever interpretation of the death of HAL from 2001.

An excerpt from the book Grand Theft Childhood, which is being marketed as a message to parents that video games aren't the problem. As one of several supporting points, the artists argue in the following passage that it's not videogames that teach teenagers to think of the world as a place where violence and fear are normal:

Parents don't generally think about news as harmful to children, or that children even watch news programs. But surveys show that children and teens watch TV news regularly; sometimes, they just happen to be in the room when an adult turns the news on.  A child who sees a lot of violence on television, whether it's Law & Order reruns or news programs, is more likely to see the world as a scary place with lurking dangers far out of proportion to reality. But realistic depictions of violence, such as those on the news, are thought to be more likely to scare or desensitize children. As one child told us, "In video games, you know it's fake."

Given that older children and teens believe that news represents reality, and that TV news programs increasingly show graphic or sensationalized violence, there is a real risk of harm. Parents can help by keeping track of their kids' exposure to TV news, and helping them put it into context--for example, that stories get on the news because they are rare, and that events on the news--whether it's losing your house to a tornado or winning the lottery--are not likely to happen to them.

Research on television coverage of war shows that children of different ages are upset by different aspects, with younger ones more bothered by the visual images and teens by the complex issues, such as morality and justice, that are raised by news events.

In the business of journalism, there's a saying -- "If it bleeds, it leads."  That's a somewhat cynical recognition of the attention that people play to unusual things -- car crashes, school shootings, and plane wrecks. And visuals -- such as security camera footage, a chase seen through a police officer's dashboard camera, a journalist clinging to a telephone pole as a hurricane blows in from the ocean -- make good TV, because the images speak to our emotions.

TV is all about making an emotional connection with the viewer, but it's so one-sided.

Is too much weather bad for our children?  Coming up, we'll have a LIVE report from our own Slick Goodhair, who is outside, facing the weather, so that you can stay safe in your homes. He'll tell you the three simple ways you can save your family from the effects of too much weather. We'll also have a preview of a made-for-TV movie about a family that didn't trust their local TV journalists enough, went out into the weather completely unprepared, AND DIED! But first, these messages from our sponsors, who also don't want you to die. Have we mentioned lately that the internet is scary, that TV and movie stars are your only true friends, and that because we love you so much, and you've been so obedient good to us, we'll show you footage of adorable puppies!  Tonight! Live footage of yellow police tape at a completely deserted site where some event ended 12 hours ago!  Anchors infusing even the most routine story with tension and drama! Verbs disappearing from TV newscasts!  Present participles taking their place! Grammarians continuing to investigate!

Okay, I'm exaggerating. Television projects a distorted image of the world, in which the only thing that matters is being on TV... but there's a significant sliver of good, in that today's young people who watch The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, are at least familiar with comic riffs on the news.  And they can post their own opinions on blogs or on YouTube.

Now, much of this self-published material is dreck, but I'd rather my students create drek -- and learn from the process -- than passively absorb only what the media elite decide is worthy of attention.

I watch less and less TV these days, and more and more YouTube.  Of course, much of the content of YouTube is excerpts of footage from TV shows, or DVDs... when I heard the news that Harvey Korman had died, it was great to view some of my favorite clips of his performances on the Carol Burnett show and Blazing Saddles. The availability of archival material on YouTube let me put together my own retrospective clips show, drawing from material that fans of Harvey Korman had already decided to post online.  Composing my own personal playlist is an exercise in interpreting, evaluating, and re-contextualizing material that was created for a business model that favors linear distribution and passive consumption.

George Lucas, who recognized how much Star Wars fans wanted to participate in the universe he created, organized a short film contest.  Joe Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, posted on the internet every step of his creative journey towards building a science fiction series that played a huge part in revolutionizing the way science fiction stories are told. Now, practically every SF series works each individual episodes into a season-long arc, giving hints and planting clues that online fan clubs dissect and argue about. Of course, the soap operas have been doing this for decades. And even Paramount Pictures, which has a reputation for not being nearly as welcoming of fan interest in Star Trek, has in recent years given the OK for fan-produced amateur shows (some of them even involving the orignial actors).  I'm far more interested in what online communities do with TV than in the TV itself. 

Gonzalo Frasca touched on a crucial difference between video games and linear drama when he pointed out "Hamlet's dilemma would be irrelevant in a videogame, simply because he would be able 'to be' and 'not to be'" ("Ephemeral Games")  The creators of Peacemaker took useful advantage of this feature of the medium, encouraging players to role-play the leadership decision of both Israel and Palestine, in order to explore the depths of a complex and multifaceted environment. 

In games in general, I really appreciate that illusion of player agency -- when I know the PC so well that I willingly choose options that I might not necessarily choose myself, but which I know are likely to advance the story in a direction that supports the goals of my PC.

But I'm really blogging all this in order to point out how important it is to cast your net widely when you do research.

The prevalence of TV, and the prominence of TV journalism in the construction of a network's public identity has also burned into my memory some events that would have had little impact on my life if I hadn't happened to be watching them on TV, such as the US Federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound, the OJ Simpson verdict. And whenever I'm back in the Washington D.C. area and catch some of the local news, I'm reminded of how easy it is to tire of hearing about yet another drug-related shooting, yet another protest on the Mall, and yet another example of incompetence or scandal in the D.C. local government.

But my criticism of shallow local TV news shouldn't be extended to the international gravitas associated with the power of TV to provide an emotional message that unites.  I'm thinking of the American coverage of the JFK assassination and funeral, the Apollo 11 moon landing (my mother took a photo of the TV set, and I grew up looking at it in my photo album) and my own memory of watching the launch of the first space shuttle, scuds being fired in the first Gulf War, and footage of the World Trade Center's demise.  Someone has to be out there covering routine events, filling the airwaves with something or other in between the momentous occasions that make TV journalism really shine, and the reporters who can manage to tell a good story while also maintaining their credibility as journalists have my respect and admiration.

I haven't read Grand Theft Childhood yet, and I'm not confident that a few isolated quotes are sufficient to counter the findings of researchers who identified correlations between playing violent games and increased displays of aggression. I welcome the introduction into the memestream a popular discussion of videogames that challenges assumptions that I often see perpetuated in TV journalism.  Yet I note with some distress that the book is so usefully organized to supply "So there!" soundbites to defenders of videogames.

The UK Guardian offers this great interview with interactive fiction author and theorist Emily Short.

I think the renaissance happened about 15 years ago, during the mid-90s, when much better design systems for IF were suddenly available and a community coalesced devoted to writing IF seriously, if non-commercially. There's been plenty of development since then: lots of new techniques and new ideas about how to tell a good story, how to write a good puzzle, how to maximize enjoyment and minimize the un-fun kinds of frustration. But from the perspective of people inside the hobby, right now is not the beginning or even a rebirth.

I do see IF getting a little bit more attention from the outside world, from people who haven't been following it this whole time. I think that's largely because growing attention to independent gaming as a whole. The past couple of years have seen a huge growth in the number of websites devoted to following games not produced by a big studio, and that means that there are new ways to get attention for IF. It also means a change in prejudices. There are now more people who are willing to look at and try a new game format even if it doesn't come from a commercial studio.

There's also a growing concern within the gaming industry (as far as I can observe it) about how conventional game design is not producing enough good stories, enough strong characters, enough innovation. So there's more interest in turning to indie and hobbyist communities to see what we've been doing and whether there's any valuable technique here that would be applicable on a larger scale. I like to think that we do, in fact, have something to offer.

An amusing bit of neo-folklore.

Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as far away as San Francisco, Caracas, and Berlin, he took Sam up on that bet.

Naturally, just getting Paul Bunyan online was already no mean feat. There was no broadband available in the remote areas of the woods where they'd been working, so the first thing he had to do was string optical cable from the nearest T1 line, which was clear down in St. Paul. For anybody but Paul Bunyan, that would have been near impossible, but ol' Paul just ordered a couple flatbeds of the finest glass windows Minnesota had to offer, chewed'em all up in a single mouthful, and drew'em out between his teeth to spin three hundred miles of perfect fiber optics. Then he just coiled it all up in a loop, and walked all the way into town, stringing that cable all the way. So getting online wasn't a real problem.

As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein's lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and "Yes, Sister... No, Sister" was to give the kids something concrete but harmless on which to focus their rebellious energy.  I could come to school in mismatched socks and a garish tie, and nowhere in the student manual did it say I was doing anything illegal.

I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)

Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest."  (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?)  Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.

What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.

A fascinating exploration of learning at a very early stage. Thanks for the link, Robert.  (BBC)

Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs. These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude that the cuttlefish embryos must peer through their eggs, and learn to recognise their prey, a behaviour which will help give them a head-start in life.

Schneier on Security:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

I haven't read through the whole (dorkily named) article, but I'm blogging it so I can find it later when I update the "Writing for the Internet" course I'll be teaching this fall. I try to include at least a little history, since most students are surprised to learn the internet is about as old as I am. Vanity Fair:

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough--network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser--inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology.

An amusing post from Language Log, about the ill wind that blows for people who trust their spell checkers too much.

As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was "Highfalutin language is not enough." The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker's wordlist, but if it is written as two words, high falutin, then the second element of the compound can go unrecognized.

My kids are playing on the floor as I carry out my online routine.

Carolyn is mixing and matching from different Lego sets in order to create characters from the "Magnificent Blimpship" steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling her.

She aims Captain Rod Gearhart's gun at her brother's minifigure.  "I just killed you."

"No, I killed you," Peter retorts.

"But I killed you first!"

"I killed you first!"

This goes on for some time.

Finally I turn on them, with a voice registering about 7 or 8 on the "parental authority" scale: "Children, please play together nicely, and take turns killing each other."

Peter notices that I cracked a smile before I finished the line, but Carolyn pauses to think about the conundrum.

From Inside Higher Ed, an article about a Facebook app designed for college recruiters:

The solution they came up with essentially offers a series of "challenges" to students interested in SUNY Plattsburgh. Each challenge requires them to upload video or photographic evidence that they fulfilled their mission, so to speak -- anything from attending a sporting event on campus, visiting Lake Champlain or wearing Plattsburgh gear in nearby Burlington, Vt. The idea is to get prospective students excited about Plattsburgh traditions long before they even think about applying -- say, ages 14 or 15 -- and to pass on the application to friends who also might be interested.

Here's a great idea to annoy your online readers while generating ad impressions.  Take a random idea, come up with about 10 examples, find random stock images to illustrate the examples, and put one idea on each page, to force readers to click through each one.

Boston.com has a collection posted under the title "Business Galleries."  The advice in one, "Saving for College," is interesting, but the random stock photos of people using laptop computers added exactly nothing to the value of the article, and splitting it across multiple pages is just insulting. I feel exactly the same way when the TV news uses two 15-second "teases" ("Coming up after the break: Are America's children learning enough about what celebrities wear to their parole hearings?") for a 60-second story.  TV is about making an emotional impact, and when the news is trivial, you can get more bang for your buck by making the same shocking point three times, rather than putting all that time together to explore the issue in more depth.

Someone must feel that sprinkling tiny nuggets of content across multiple pages is worthwhile, though I'm always angry at the designer for making a deliberate choice that forces me to click, click, click.  I have ad-blocking software installed, so I never even see the ads anyway.

I can understand putting one photo per page if the photos are compelling enough to keep the reader clicking through the whole narrative, but come on. I'd rather see a random Flickr image than a generic stock photo.

The article made sure not to phrase the poetry lessons as punishment -- the one who actually bought the beer served a few days in jail. This sounds like a creative and proportional way to respond to the problem. USA Today (Thanks for the tip, Rosemary.)

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.