At the risk of creating a needless echo of a conversation already sounding forth, I need to point out something I just learned about image manipulation and blogging when I tried to post this message as a comment in a conversation taking place at the if:book blog. The discussion there centers around Image Culture, a piece written by Christine Rosen in which Rosen worries about the dangers of "moving from an era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image." Rosen's article mostly plows already-furrowed ground--images can be easily manipulated, print is under threat and its demise might spell bad things for intellect and culture. No doubt these are concerns worth weighing, but my reading boils the fears down to little more than familiar nostalgia and/or subservience to the written word.

Now I'm realizing the extent to which our communication is still shaped in large part by alphabetic text. I took a couple of images from one of the Fark photoshop contests discussed by Rosen, resized and stacked them for easy display, took a screen shot of the layers in photoshop, and then tried to integrate them into the comment I wanted to add to the conversation. Once previewed or posted, however, the blog software stripped out any reference to the images I had written into the posting. I see why one might not want any random commenter splashing images over a blog, but given the topic of discussion it seems incredibly telling that the written text made it through the filter while the fark-based images did not. Perhaps Rosen has less to fear than I had first supposed. Below is my original posting with the images included.

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Just thought I'd add this observation I had when I first read this post last week. It is telling, I think, that on the same day a photoshop contest was taking place on Fark under the topic "If advertising were 100% honest." Over time, most of the images there will likely disappear, but ones like the hummer or the Wal-Mart manipulation clearly invoke satire that would stand with what Rosen sees as "the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey." Bah. I think Rosen has it backwards in thinking that we lose respect when we manipulate things. Instead, we manipulate the things we no longer respect.

But more to the point here is the fact that Farkers and other manipulators are exchanging ideas visually. The photoshop contests stand out because they are taking place in a discussion forum where we've grown so used to the give and take of alphabetic text. I guess at some level Rosen, and countless others, would acknowledge that the real fear is the new presence of image creation as a mode of communication, a communication in which creators filter, layer, crop, nudge, mask, clone, and perform any number of other sophisticated compositional moves. Couching the fear in terms of truth or respect--as most everyone here has pointed out--really just ignores the more radical transformation underlying the concern. The fear is the loss of the power of the word.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 11:04 PM
Taged as >> alphabetic image words manipulate visual culture | Permalink

The podcast posted here is the second segment representing a transcript of a conversation with Bob Stein. Bob is currently running the Institute for the Future of the Book. In this segment of the conversation, we focus primarily on changes in publishing models. A good deal of our earlier discussion centered on blogs, so the general sense of what is being said continues to touch on blog publishing, but our discussion broadens to look generally at electronic dissemination of information and changes in the publishing world for academics.

We touch on the ways that traditional publishers have struggled to monetize electronic work created by academics. We also speak about the difficulties for scholars working with electronic media when familiar publishing mechanisms are not relevant to their work. And, we think about institutional changes and tools that might help address some of these challenges.

The conversation is recorded in this podcast about blogs, electronic scholarship, publishing, and the academy. You can hear about more of the economic issues related to blogs and electronic publishin in the first podcast covering our conversation.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 11:32 PM
Taged as >> publish electronic scholarship transform institutions | Permalink

On November 4th some colleagues and I held a conversation about blogs with Bob Stein. Bob is the founder of the Voyager media books company and Nightkitchen software and is currently heading up the Institute for the Future of the Book. The conversation covered many topics, but the early discussion centered around blogs, journalism, economics, and the academy. I took away from the conversation a feel, perhaps angst, that the blogosphere by virtue of its Internet base and journalistic ties is struggling to deal with commercial and economic interests. (For what is, to my mind, a scary primer on the commercialization of blogging, see J. D. Lasica's "Influence Peddling in the Blogosphere".)

One tension in our discussion centered around the ways that blogging can be configured as a professional activity. As blogging moves from a personal to a professional writing mode, what models can be put in place to support it? How might free market or commercial models such as advertising-supported funding alter the spirit of blogging? How do folksonomies and attention economies alter familiar commercial models? How can or should the academy subsidize professional blogging? Are there alternative models such as cooperatives that might sustain and extend blogging?

A good bit of our discussion also focused on tensions wrought by blogging that might be felt particularly by academics. We worried about losing proven models of editorial control but noted the evolving self correcting nature of blogging and its communities of knowledge. We wondered about the impact of the severely compressed time to production for blog writing. And we thought about the concerns raised by the forms of blog writing and about aspects of academic culture that determine how knowledge is created and counted.

I have compiled some of the conversation into a podcast covering blogs, economics, and the academy. The segments of the discussion included in the podcast treat some of the concerns sketched out above. It shouldn't be too surprising upon listening to the podcast to learn that our conversation touched on these issues, but served less to provide solid answers and more to open questions.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:30 PM
Taged as >> academic economic blog writing models | Permalink

On the morning drive yesterday I heard a song from The Streets called "Dry Your Eyes Mate." I liked the song and then later in the day poked around on iTunes and the Web and discovered that the album the song is taken from raises questions about music, and even composition. Here is the blurb from the iTunes music store:

“Concept album” may be too pretentious a name for Brit hip-hopper Mike Skinner’s off-handedly brilliant sophomore effort A Grand Don’t Come for Free. But these 11 tracks have a narrative flow all the more irresistible because it’s so mundane. Loserish stoner “Mike” gets girl, loses girl, misplaces 1000 pounds, then finds it again, amid everyday minutiae like broken appliances, bad drug experiences, and a blown football bet. Backed by simple and mechanical DIY beats, Skinner’s Brummie/Cockney-laced rhymes stutter along high and sometimes awkward in the mix, closer to old-fashioned storytelling than what we think of as rap.

The description captures the flavor of the collection and the essential feel of the songs. The overall structure of the album can be sampled from iTunes. Key narrative moments play out in

"Could Well be in"
"Get Out of My House"
"Dry Your Eyes Mate"
"Empty Cans"

At The Streets Web site, you can view the video of "Blinded by the Lights" in Real or Windows Media Player format.

The concept album is nothing new, but considering some of the comparisons that can be drawn between Skinner's collection and other well known concept albums offers some ways of thinking about transformations in music playing out today. Perhaps the buzz around A Grand Don't Come for Free relates to the narrative feel that comes from the rap that coheres around a sequence of events. Unlike the lyrical and metaphorical feel of something like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, the songs in A Grand Don't Come for Free explicitly describe the details of daily existence with a much more personal and bloglike feel. There is also something to be said about the Do it Yourself production of the collection, which lends a single voice feel and an underlying sense of authenticity to the songs. Describing the way he made the album, Skinner explains, "it was just me, the computer, and the four walls." The combination of the rap lyrics and the DIY production presents Mike Skinner as the main character in a life story laid out in the progression of the tracks.

The collection, however, feels more episodic than the full-side LP weavings of progressive rock bands like Pink Floyd or the Beatles. Still, there is a sort of narrative glue that holds together the pieces in Skinner's tale of a failed relationship and a rotten day. The 1000 pounds that make up the title frame the story with loss and eventual recovery. The characters come and go throughout the songs and the rising and falling action creates a poetic feel that brings tension and eventual resolution. So, the collection does work as a kind of concept album, and it seems fair to say that more so than other collections it has a narrative feel with a protagonist and plot.

What I'd like to think about more in terms of A Grand Don't Come for Free is the way we compile songs into collections. Have Napster and iTunes killed the album? No doubt songs are shared much more discretely, swapped as files pulled from their original contexts in published collections. At the same time, the emergence of the playlist enables all listeners to create collections built around an idea or theme. Skinner's collection asks us to reconsider these trends. In the interview on the album, Skinner claims that he just "like[s] the idea of [songs] bouncing off of each other, and feeding each other, and setting each other up." There is some question as to whether a listener deciding how to sequence songs in a playlist has the same level or authority or influence as the artist creating the same collection. There is also work to be done thinking about the sonic narrative--the aural weavings and movements in the collection.

The question for me, though, is how does cobbling together such collections invite us to think about composition. The narrative interpretation we can apply to A Grand Don't Come for Free seems a fantastic lens for looking at how we compile music. But other lenses might be useful as well--could a playlist create an argument? Could we compile an informational collection of songs? Can we stitch together a list that evokes a feeling? How might creating such collections influence our writing--could we simply offer the collection, or do we still need to explain the connections through prose?

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 04:46 PM
Taged as >> song composition concept album story | Permalink

Just a few comments on a piece in Wired News on Video and Podcasting: Wired wonders if the advent of the video ipod will relegate podcasts to the low tech basement of the social net. Despite the allure of the latest technologies, though, it looks like video casts are not yet taking over:

Apple's early-October debut of the new iPod and its video-capable iTunes 6.0 hasn't had nearly the same effect [as the integration of podcasts into iTunes]. One podcast directory, PodcastPickle, had 27 videocasts at that launch and, four weeks later, has added just six.

Wired goes on to note that slow movement toward video casting is happening, mostly by podcasters turning cameras upon themselves to add a talking head to the audio mix.

The piece does a good job of questioning the value of that kind of podcaster gazing, but does not really look at the shifts in composition likely to emerge if videocasting acheives a ubiquity similar to that of podcasts. On one level, the simple mixed media nature of even the simplest iMovie blends the aural with the visual. Digital videos can also display text, albeit not as well as pages of prose. Still, bringing image, text, and audio together is a different ball of wax. Add to that composition the social engine enabled by casting videos from person to person and you have a great space for new media authors.

Perhaps my biggest question, though, about contrasting podcasts and video casts is the way we seem to treat them as discreet media. I guess this has to do with sharing them as objects. At the same time, opportunities for writers are likely to really expand when the video casts can load images or the podcasts load video casts and so on. Through iTunes, it seems like enhanced podcasts already allow this kind of functionality. So the real question or problem, and the Wired piece mentions this, is the format issues that arise when moving to video. Video casts go nicely in the writing quiver, but as long as they are disparate objects to be shot through the social net, they won't likely radically transform the already shifting processes of digital composition.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 04:07 PM
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I'm right now thinking through possible image selections for some visual rhetoric teaching materials. For the project we need to secure rights to twenty-five or so images that can be used to discuss visual rhetoric. You'd think with Flickr and similar image sharing social software sites that we might expect some quick shifts in the canon of visual images discussed in writing and communications courses. Clearly tectonic shifts in what it means to own, share, read, and use images play out daily as groups post and sift through quickly growing databases of personal, but also public photographs and works of art. The simple act of weaving a rotating set of images into a badge to place on a blog embodies radical conceptions of composition and of knowledge creation. Handed tools for generating image collections and snippets of code, authors integrate freely available images filtered through software and dynamically layered into their pages regularly by a machine. Foundational changes call us to rethink and retool approaches to teaching with images.

But the images making it into academic projects and published teaching materials don't yet reflect these shiftings in the soil of visual rhetoric. Perhaps the most striking example is the canonical Migrant Mother series of photographs by Dorthea Lange. Visual readers, writing guides, CD-ROMs, most any recent textbook we thumb is likely to open upon the now familiar despondent face of the displaced mother and child. Many works, have now even amplified the presence of photograph by providing others in the series of images to demonstrate contexts. The image made it into my last two projects; the photographs in the series were even developed into a screencast exploring how to read the image.

One might suggest that in some part the image gets used because it's in the public domain. This explanation, I think, is in many ways true. Rising to the top of any list of possible images for a project, are pieces one can secure permission to use. Images from 9-11 archives, government funded photographs, and archival posters can be generally acquired and reused for publications.

But I'm also not convinced that such a cynical reading of this growing canon of images tells the whole story. Many of the decisions about using these pieces, for instance, flow from worries about the logistics of securing permissions. Photo researchers gravitate toward what is freely available or toward pieces sold through licensing agencies, because it makes completing projects possible. As sites like Flickr make it easier to identify images and secure permissions paths with similar levels of resistance may broaden what makes it into published works.

Further, no doubt some of these pieces are selected based on the shared experience that has been developed around them. Here we must grant for image canonicity the benefits we might find in those texts that have been regularly circulated through the study of literature. Without suggesting concerns of canonicity are anything but conflicted, we can consider what these share points of reference have offered and might continue to offer to visual rhetoric.

We also need to weigh the messages and rhetorical techniques playing through the pieces that regularly make it into our visual learning landscape. Similarly, we must ask how pieces not readily familiar deliver ideas and display composition. Knowing when an image works (whether thinking about when a canonical image might need to go or how an unknown image might belong) requires that we ask about its techniques, its creator, its contexts, its messages.

And now for the big but: doesn't this rhetorical decision making question relying on a Flickr-generated image set as a mode of composing? Does one choose to add to the page a series of images selected by software? Or must one identify deliberately the images to be place in our compositions? Or, perhaps another question: What do we make of a writing space in which one is free to do both?

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:19 AM
Taged as >> visual rhetoric image canon publishing | Permalink

The local news today posted a brief item about the Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Teen Content Creators and Consumers that resonates with recent discussions I've been having about revamping writing programs to address the media turn in culture and communication. The Pew report has some interesting facts:

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation.

The report offers some expected and unexpected results. Teens surpass adults when it comes to blogging. 19% of teens have created blogs and 38% read them, as compared to 7% and 27% of adults. Also of interest is the way that many of these teens, 19%, are content remixers with the "ability to gather, chop, blend, and re-blend content to create new expressive materials."

Writing courses might leverage these media activites, layering these skills into the experience of incoming college students in first year writing courses. If these communication and composition activities are familiar to students, they might serve as a bridge while students move into academic communities in college. Implementing curricula that feature these social and media technologies can act as a jump start.

Of course, before going forward we might want to think about additional questions worth exploring with these emerging writers. Questions like

How do you see these activites in relation to your life at school?

Where did you develop these skills?--who helped you?--what strategies did you use?

What decisions matter to you as you create and share content online?

What writing processes can you talk about in terms of remixing media?

There are no doubt other questions that might help writing teachers think about just what to do with trends like these cited in the report, but there is little question that we have much to learn from these teen creators.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:13 PM
Taged as >> Internet literacy remix writing | Permalink

Following up on a couple of postings on Steve Krause's Blog, I thought I'd compose a few thoughts on the role of audio in providing feedback to writers. First, it seems clear to me that things are shifting, at least in the computers and writing community, so that working with sound files is becoming a mainstream academic activity. Steve references a Kairos piece written by Jack Wilson that discusses the use of audio files for providing feedback on written papers, but on e-mail discussions and in blogs it is becoming much more common to hear of scholars moving toward recording lectures, podcasting observations about topics, or making audio files for course materials. It feels as if another evolutionary step in composition is playing out as we move toward not only thinking about sound, but practicing composing with audio

So what can be said about audio feedback for students papers? First, there is the longstanding problem to note of expertise and activity differentials between students and instructors. The one thing that stands out to me is that these audio files are being created by instructors to discuss student papers. The service ethic that so permeates writing programs and the need to see students creating academic discourse still holds so that students are often consuming rather than producing these new media commentaries. Of course, deciding what students need to be writing and how those projects are shifting or may change is a large topic, but it's worth observing.

Perhaps more fruitful for consideration, though, is the differential in modes that one finds with writers producing one form and readers creating another. For me the question is not as much, What comes across differently for readers in audio instead of print? but more how do we read and respond differently when we compose through audio or print? Do audio comments create a more conversational writer/responder dynamic? Or, might written comments bring the reader more in line with the original author, composing thoughts in text about the topic under study?

On a related note, I think audio allure might be dangerous or enabling depending on how well it facilitates the kinds of writer and reader relationships one wishes to acheive. A recent exercise conducted in one of my classes asked readers to act as co-writers or the papers they were reviewing. The comment feature in MS word served as the technical engine for opening the paper to other voices and readers were forbidden to hunt for surface errors, and instead called to write their own thoughts out about the topic under discussion and the issues raised by the paper. The assignment sought to enable the kind of conversational ideal envisioned by Richard Straub in his writings about providing feedback. This podcast on the process of conducting conversational peer review allowed me to reflect on the activities.

So, there is much to be thought about and practiced when it comes to bringing audio into the writer and reader relationship. Audio files alone, won't create an ideal review environment and in fact might hinder the process. Or, they might be the next logical step in creating activities in which writers and readers converse about topics in a realistic and engaging way.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:50 AM
Taged as >> audio teaching peer review podcast | Permalink