Within one minute of being placed into groups, my journalism students are up and out of the classroom. They have one hour to come up with a topic, conduct interviews, and produce a video (with a written intro and outro for the anchor to read) to fill a three-minute hole. We don’t have a full…
We see narrative everywhere. It’s a primitive urge, a way to tie cause to effect, to convert the complexity of our experience to a story that makes sense. We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the…
When I find something interesting that an online friend has shared via a linkbait site, I hereby pledge that I will link to the origin of the story, rather than a third-party site that republishes it without commentary. The people who share and like and respond to Upworthy and similar linkbait websites are just responding…
I ask my students to contextualize links with informative text, rather than hype. Puppies! Schadenfreude! Thinly veiled primal urges! If you aren’t weeping angry tears by the 3rd paragraph, a gargoyle has your soul! Prove your cleverness and sensitivity by sharing this link! Also so you can find this article again! Link traffic! Earlier this…
I played more of the Sierra point-and-click adventures than the LucasArts ones, but “The Dig” and “Full Throttle” were probably as important to me as half a dozen of my once-favorite TV shows or movies. (I’ve revisited these games by watching YouTube longplay videos.) There’s a fondness throughout the catalogue for the catalogue. Monkey Island…
This author is probably overthinking things, but I myself have been known to overthink musicals, so this is worth blogging. It turns out that Elsa is wrong — unleashing her powers in this particular manner brings disaster on the people she was trying to spare (though of course she also wants to flee their judgment,…
Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other’s timelines. The following graph shows the average number of timeline posts exchanged between two people who are about to become a couple. We studied the group of people who changed their status from “Single”…
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Beyond their music itself, their greatest strengths were clarity of image and the way they balanced. It’s a truism that no pop format is any good unless it can be expressed in one sentence, but the Beatles went beyond that, they could each be said in one word: Lennon was the brutal one, McCartney was…
Really. These things aren’t at all associated with nerds. Look at the manly color. Look at the size of those straps. Guys who wear this use metal filings as toothpaste. Chuck Norris wears these in memes! For God’s sake, would you look at the keywords! There’s no reference to how convenient these pockets would be for SD cards,…
I’ve told my journalism students that TV is not my favorite medium, but we are doing a unit on video journalism nonetheless. They have to know, and be experienced in, the conventions of television journalism if they are going to have a chance of escaping (and maybe transforming) its worst effects There is *no* reporting…
I don’t see learning to code as a substitute for learning another human language. True, computer programming is learning a “foreign language” in the sense that you are trying to map how you give instructions in your native tongue to how a digital recipient recognizes what you’re trying to say in its highly structured vocabulary…
filmmakers behind the “Hunger Games” movies will digitally recreate late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in a major yet-to-be-shot scene, sources from the flick said. Editors will use computer graphics and camera tricks — instead of rewriting the script — to film at least one heartfelt scene featuring Hoffman’s character, the gamesmaker Plutarch Heavensbee. “You can…
Labcoats, suits (but not if you are female!) or safari suits (but not if you are female!) are the academic uniform du jour. The names given to the academics are telling, with the majority being less than complimentary: Professor Dinglebat, Professor P. Brain, Professor Blabbermouth, Professor Bumblebrain, Professor Muddlehead, Professor Hogwash, Professor Bumble, Professor Dumkopf,…
Have you ever stopped to think about what you believe about yourself as a writer? Have you ever considered what you believe about the work you produce? Your beliefs run the show, usually subconsciously. And if they’re limiting or negative beliefs, they’ll stop that show dead in its tracks. You believe certain theories about why…
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When you’re writing just for yourself, you’re in control. Of everything. You control what your characters do, what they say and think and wear, what happens to them, where their story begins and ends. Every aspect of the story is completely in your hands. It’s your book. All yours. When you work with a publisher,…
The robots are quickly and surely coming for our jobs, and we’ve comforted ourselves thus far with a palliative that goes something like this: They can’t do our creative work. They won’t do our journalism or make our art or write our poetry. Except that the startup Narrative Science has $6 million to execute its…