Ok, here’s a recent picture. Now if I could duplicate my jacket in SL… I got it this summer when visiting the Netherlands, and it quickly became a favorite.
If SL had some place like Target, but so far all I can find are clothes that cost hundreds of Linden Dollars (LD) and look like they are for clubbing. I just need a T-shirt and jeans, really.
So I’ve just joined and tried it out and I must say, Second Life is a weird place. I wanted my avatar to actually look as much like myself as I could manage, but getting even close took forever. It was a pain, yet I couldn’t make myself give up on it–which was creepy.
This is the current result and I’ll post a recent picture of me for comparison. One thing; I could not find really short prim or flexi hair for women (hair you buy and that looks more real, and moves when you do.) Eventually I just got some men’s hair, but I still couldn’t find any that was really as short as I wanted.
Now I plan to spend more time exploring the cultural and educational scenes, but I don’t have much time to spend on it, because term starts in two weeks.
Today I spent about 7 hours reading “writing proficiency (something) tests” –I always forget what the S stands for because everyone just says “WPST” all the time. Anyway, it’s exhausting to read and score (holistic scoring on a 6 point scale, 2 readers for each test) so many. I think I read about 60-70, about 8 hand-written pages each. They were actually better this year then last fall, which is when I last participated in the reading.
Anyway, after a while we all just get kind of punchy because we’re drinking coffee and reading and reading, and stumbling across phrases like the one I share in this title. This was an actual title of an essay exam. Just think about it for awhile. And we had our perennial debate over what exactly we care more about; correct usage or clear arguments. I think this time I was more convincing about the importance of argument.
So I hope the trend continues, that students seem to be more ready by the time they take the test. One interesting note–students were writing about generational differences and without fail identified experiences with technology as on of the main differences between their own experience and their parents’ or grandparents’. I was impressed at their awareness.
Every now and then I enter some kind of mental phase when my brain feels overclocked. My thoughts speed up and run in parallel processes. Right now I am thinking about three different grant proposals; my undergrad and grad classes which start in two weeks; the orientation for new TAs next week; the 10 emails to which I’m awaiting replies; those I have to send out tomorrow; the Empire conference I’m co-chairing; a bi-lateral agreement with Piet Zwart; four calls for papers I might answer; my review of the ELO electronic text; my latest article for Sequential Tart; the skype calls I’m trying to arrange…
Does this count as a dynamic heterarchy? Intermediation?
Sometimes this might make me feel overstressed but sometimes it feels like my brain is whirring along, sustained by it’s own speed, in perpetual motion. It’s not perpetual of course, and the one problem is that it’s hard to sleep in this state. I have trouble dropping off until late and as soon as the sun is barely up my eyes fly open again. Just can’t stop thinking. And I don’t really want to except I’m getting rather tired…
Anyway, now, as if all this weren’t enough, I’m thinking about scholarly subjectivity, engagement, and Kenneth Burke.
I’m not going to launch a discussion of folksonomy and collective intelligence; look at this webcast from MiT5 for more on all that web 2.0 stuff. (not that I don’t take and interest). But, a few people have written about tagging in more concrete and useful ways (for me). One is Ulises Mejias who has written about tag literacy and says (brace for big blockquote):
Tags are very efficient ways of allocating attention in the face of informational overabundance. It takes very little time to bookmark and tag a resource. Because users are the first ones to benefit from classifying the resources that interest them, there is a very high motivation to tag. Thus, what people are doing in reviewing tags is capitalizing on attention allocated by others, specially on aggregated attention (what happens when large groups of people allocate attention to the same tag or resource, as seen in the ‘Most Popular’ tag or resource feeds in a DCS).
In short, Google yields search results that represent attention allocated by computers, while DCSs yield search results that represent attention allocated by humans. The former method (computer attention) is cheap, and hence ideal for indexing large amounts of information quickly; the latter method (human attention) is not so cheap, and not so quick, but it can yield more socially valuable information because it means a human being has made the association between a resource and a particular tag. Hence, this method is ideal for qualitative indexing. Furthermore, this method can be made cheaper and quicker by distributing the process across large communities and tying it to the individual interest of the user, which is exactly what a DCS does.
Mirko Schäfer takes this builds on this idea in a discussion of “micro-learning” in his article RTFM! Teach-yourself Culture in Open-Source Software Projects. (scroll down to section 6). He elaborates on how tagging can, in addition to making information easier to navigate, also offers users/contributors a framework for thinking about their own contributions.
Maintaining the database would entail correcting and improving the stored information by adding or changing tags. Instead of constantly expanding the given documentation material into countless directions, this approach forces the reader/writer to thoroughly re-think the context of the material, shaping it according to its possible connections.
So I feel somewhat obliged to tag, not just for my own convenience, but to help others. But, while I agree with Trebor Scholz (and others) that people have lots of motives for this kind of effort, and admit that I do as well, I still contend that an important possible (and for me actual) motive has been largely overlooked; care for family. There are people, some close friends, some not so close, that I (for whatever reason) think of as family in the sense that I care about their well-being and want them to be happy and successful. If I think they are benefiting from something I do, like tagging, then I will damn well take the trouble. –And I do know that few of these people are checking because they joined my network on del.icio.us, so there it is.
Now I can’t even remember why I felt I needed to go into this. Tick Tick Tick.
I’ve spent about an hour this morning editing the tags on my entries, and I’m not nearly finished! I feel a bit foolish because I’ve read many blogs and yet when I started this one I forgot about tagging the entries for about a month, so now I’m slowly going back and adding tags. But in doing that I’ve realized that choosing tags that are really useful actually takes some though, otherwise I end up with a ridiculous number of tags that each have just a couple of entries, which defeats a lot of the purpose.
Of course I could be like Neil Gaiman who has made tagging into another creative practice that serves not so much to organize individual entries into broader categories as to make them even more distinct from each other, but since this is a research blog (mostly) I think I would drive myself crazy, and maybe my readers as well (if there are any!).
But now that I am trying to tag entries when I write them, I realize that sometimes it’s not easy to identify what the most dominant categories will really be, so it may have worked out better that I went a month before starting. Looking back at the summer’s entries, I can actually see the major themes and pick those as tags, which should also make it clearer to passersby what I’m writing about here. And I think this works differently in blogs than at sites like Del.icio.us–I’ll write about that kind of tagging later.
This is a really pragmatic approach and it’s in tension with another impulse (of mine, at least) to use tags that will intrigue readers and make me look more interesting. So for example, instead of just tagging posts about particular people as “friends” or “scholars” or something like that, it’s tempting to say “academic rock stars” which is silly, but sounds fun, or “people I wish acknowledged my presence” which makes me sound completely neurotic, but still my be more interesting. Over on the nettime list our discussion of ex/including the personal from/in academic writing has made me think in a more organized way about how much I constantly and keenly feel this tension. It seems at least some others feel it too, but it’s hard to talk about even when we sort of give ourselves permission as we have in this particular thread, because I can’t help but feel that my normal levels of enthusiasm and whimsy, which I usually filter out of my academic work, are going to cost me the respect of serious scholars…now I really sound neurotic!
Anyway, I think that by and large it’s worth the risk. The pleasure of scholarly work is so much greater when combined with friendship, for example and/or ethical conviction is so much greater than simple intellectual interest, that the chance of increasing my chances of having more of it far outweighs any anxiety.
I’m experimenting with having a daily post of my new Del.icio.us links; we’ll see how that goes; it’s in beta right now… Ok, apparently it didn’t work… maybe I’ll just do the link roll for now.
Last spring I decided to start researching how institutions that study, produce, and/or teach new/digital/cyber/hyper/whatever media organize themselves. At first I just wanted to see what other places were doing so that as we worked on our new center we would have some sense of possibilities and pitfalls. Pretty quickly I realized that certain choices made by these organizations seemed to really change their character, audiences, etc. Looking for research, I also saw that there wasn’t too much, and most was sort of fragmentary–only about one institution or span of time, one locale, one project, etc. And I started to get really interested in how the philosophy of the institution seemed to shape it’s decisions about who to work with, what the goals were, what counted as success; at the same time funding sources had a powerful effect on these as well, and often created tension.
At first I planned to survey institutions all over as the opportunity arose, but in the US they are so spread out and work in such different contexts that it seemed hard to figure out a coherent approach that would allow comparisons. At the same time, I already was going to the Netherlands for about two weeks during June-July 2007, so I thought I’d interview people there,at first just with the idea of identifying best practices. –There are numerous very well-known institutions in the NL and I figured it would be helpful to hear how they did things.
Those interviews were revelatory because besides being informative about individual institutions, they provided numerous unique perspectives on the cultural scene in the NL. And I suddenly realized that there was so much to say about how knowledge was being created and dispersed, and I was so interested; I should write a book. But I couldn’t figure out how the structure should work or how to include everything, without spending 10 years on it–and I really only want to spend 3-5! Just recently it occurred to me that rather than trying to go all over the US, Europe, Asia, etc. I should start by just looking at the Netherlands because the countries small size yet high concentration of these institutions make them great for comparison. There all kinds of institutions that differ from each other in many ways, but they are all dealing with the same national-level funding scheme, and many of them work together on projects. So certain variables would be reduced or eliminated.
I also just started reading some things about Dispositifs and I think it could be a key notion in my study. Different theorists use it quite differently so I need to get a firmer grip on who has said what, and when, before figuring out how I think it can be applied in my study. One good starting point is some notes Frank Kessler has online at his website. Thanks to Mirko for the connection to Kessler and dispositif.
Now I just have figure out how to say all of this in a really compelling way so I can get a grant or fellowship to go to the Netherlands a bunch more times.
So I was saying last week (or maybe two weeks ago) that I hadn’t really found any art that really moved me emotionally, but lo an behold, this week it falls into my lap. Or rather, inbox. Out of the blue I got a message from Joseph Nechvatal about a new Viral Symphony he has posted over at UbuWeb. We hadn’t met, but we’re both on Nettime-L and I guess he thought I might like it, which I did. But, since of course I then had to google Jospeph (because I am one of those who will virtually stalk someone via their online appearances if I find them interesting) I found his website and blog, both of which have links to some of his digital paintings.
I have to say I just love these. The paintings are really disturbing (in a good way) and also just cool as they are consumed by the virii, and I really connected to the music because in some way it really works with the blazing heat and profusion of growth we get in this part of the central valley during the summer. When you combine irrigation with constant sun, you get not only amazingly fruitful farms and orchards, but also weeds, molds, ants…all kinds of living things that seem poised to take over.
In addition to how much I enjoy the way these works express some sort of fecundity, also, reading some of Joseph’s own texts and some texts about his work, I finally feel like I have a grip (however slippery) on some theoretical concepts I’ve been struggling with, so that was an unexpected pleasure.
Joseph has also been nice enough to answer my questions via email and pointed me to this video that shows the consumption of a digital painting:
And, if you like that, you can see more at his YouTube page.
–so cool to meet an artist who will answer emails even when they contain questions that are probably really basic.
One challenge to developing programs or projects in digital media is determining whether there are any prospective students, or any interest from local communities. This really struck me when I went to the county fair. Though CSU Stanislaus is an “urban campus” and the population of Turlock is about 70,000 (and growing rapidly) still, local identity seems to still really be based on agriculture, as is obvious in this picture.
Of course this element will be highlighted at the fair, but what really got my attention is the way it’s highlighted in spite of, for example, the 4H club having programs in science and engineering, communications, and metal-work. There wee no exhibits of that work, just the agricultural group’s petting zoo of farm animals.
I think there’s a lot of nostalgia shaping local identity, and a real reluctance to connect with the “other” California of Silicon Valley and the high tech industry. Lately several residents who have been here a long time have commented to me on how closed a city this is. I’m starting to wonder if ICT’s much vaunted ability to connect people has been completely misunderstood. When I think of the regions I know that are very connected online, they are also very connected with public transit, while those that are not well-connected online also don’t have much public transit.
Has anyone ever studied a possible connection? Something else to track down…
