Darren: March 2008 Archives
Rise of the miniblog
You'll notice a new addition to the page over there on the right. I've added a miniblog to the site. There's often a page or an article that I read that I think is interesting, but I have no further comment on. I don't want to clog the blog up with links, since I've limited the front page to a single post, but I do sometimes want to share something.
So for now, it'll go in the microblog over there. I've experimented with this format in the past, and it's never quite stuck. Maybe this time will be different?
The company you keep
Part of my MA thesis deals with community, and how the community you associate with works to define your electronic identity. Nothing could illustrate this better than the site I just came across:
Metafilter comments vs. Youtube comments.
The page grabs random comments from both Metafilter and Youtube and displays them side by side.
What I've been reading lately
Now that I'm done my MA, and my evenings are woefully free with Kirsten being in NS, I've started catching up on my reading. Here's what I've most recently read.
Kill Whitey
Ken Harvill, 2005Amazon summary: In Butchers Harbor, two mob families fight for control of the sick city's criminal trade. The upstart Borisova syndicate-a self-styled Eastern-bloc version of the Godfather film family-has been decimating the leading Irish Lynch gang in cruel, inventive ways: from mason jars filled with hornets to exploding pimps embalmed with nitroglycerin. Now it's time for the Lynches to strike back, and family patriarch Increase Lynch believes that only his estranged albino son Whitey can do it. Friendless and isolated, Whitey spends his time selling adrenaline boosters, memory erasers, dream amplifiers, and zombie potions. Desperate to reconnect with the world, he accepts his family's offer. But how far over the line is Whitey prepared to go? Armed with a stash of potions and goofballs, he must contend with the mayhem of his family and his world, taking this mystery into darkly comic, acid-noir territory and over-the-top violence.
Kill Whitey is Harvill's first novel, written in a style he refers to as 'acid noir'. It was a fun read. Whitey is an outsider in the book, struggling to find his place not only in Butcher's Harbour, but within his family as well. Harvill does a great job of illustrating this alienation, and also creating some great comedic moments in what is otherwise a story of the mob. The book wasn't the least bit predictable, and there's some palpable character development there. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of black humour.
The Wasties
Frederick Reuss, 2003Washintonian review: In DC writer Reuss’s highly original third novel, narrator Michael “Caruso” Taylor announces he has the wasties, “a disease of the soul.” Externally, it costs him the ability to work, speak, and act as an adult; internally, it gives him a strangely acute and delightful perspective on the world around him—in this case, New York’s Upper West Side.
The Wasties was a really interesting read. It's a challenge to write a book that has no real dialogue in it. Caruso's (a name that has later meaning in the book) utterances are carried out through a notepad, an IBM ThinkPad, and a label maker. This actually gives the book some of its charm, since Reuss uses different typography for Caruso's outward communication (a handwritten font for his notepad, and white-on-black labels later in the book). We also get a lot of Caruso's internal commentary.
Reuss does an interesting thing with the composition of the book, in that Caruso's internal commentary starts degrading as he does. What starts out as a coherent story with some whimsical episodes (Caruso often interacts with literary and historical figures in his daily life) starts breaking down. As his condition progresses, so does the decoherence of the story. Instead of a linear narrative, Reuss starts jumping around in the story. We're never quite sure if the order of events in Caruso's life in the latter part of the novel. I don't want to give away the end, but Reuss closes the circle neatly; the ending has a nice symmetry to it that leaves things nicely.
The Gum Thief
Douglas Coupland, 2007.Wikipedia: The Gum Thief is Canadian author Douglas Coupland's twelfth novel. It was published on September 25, 2007 (2007-09-25), by Random House Canada in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the United States.An epistolary novel, The Gum Thief is written as a collection of journal entries, notes, and letters written by various characters. Among these are regular installments of the character Roger's novella, called Glove Pond.
I have to confess, I think I've burned myself out on Douglas Coupland. It's not that he's not a great writer; it's more that I read too much Coupland all in a row (jPod, Eleanor Rigby, Hey Nostradamus, and The Gum Thief). Coupland seems to try something new in every book, but there's an undeniable "Douglas Coupland" quality to everything he touches. In small doses, it's refreshing. When you read 4 books of his all in a row, it becomes a little predictable. This is what happened for me in The Gum Thief. "Great," I thought, "another book about workers in jobs they don't really like, pontificating on life, the universe, and everything."
That being said, The Gum Thief was still a fun read. Coupland tries a new method of plot delivery in this book, by making it a series of journal entries (this isn't a new device for fiction, as John Mills tried it in 1978 in his book Skevington's Daughter, and there's a rich history of epistolary novels to draw from. It is new for Coupland, and he does some very interesting things with it (the ending, although abrupt, was pleasantly unexpected). The conceit does fall apart a little, though -- the book starts out in a single journal, but starts to add letters into the mix. I generally enjoy Coupland's plots though, even when I'm distracted by his structure, and The Gum Thief is no exception. It was an enjoyable read made better by the way it was delivered.
coda & ecto
One of the things about having a new platform is getting to try a bunch of new tools. I've tried a few different tools over the last day, and I imagine I'll be trying a few more in the weeks to come. Today I played around with coda and ecto.
coda
One of the tools tried was Coda, a web development tool developed by Panic software. When I first saw Coda, I thought it was a bit gimmicky. I'm wary of 'all in one' tools, and Coda seemed very much along those lines. I'm pretty impressed with it, though. I may even have to lay out the cash to get a licensed copy.
Coda makes editing files on a remote site really, really easy. Coda works around the idea of 'sites', you set up the site to connect via FTP, SFTP(ssh), FTP with SSL extensions, and WebDAV. You can also set up a terminal profile, which configures SSH connection information specific for that profile. Panic understands that sometimes you just have to get onto the server; it's nice that they've included an embedded shell that lets you do just that.
ecto
Another tool I have heard about recently is ecto, a blog editor. The tool is meant as a client-side editor for blogging that interfaces with several blogging applications like Blogger and Movable Type. Again, seems a bit gimmicky, but worth checking out (not the least because I'm a scholar of blogging, so it's kinda within my research interests to look at the tool).
I'm using it right now, and I'm not entirely sure the real benefit of it. I can see it being useful for writing posts when offline, say in an airport or (as I plan on using it tomorrow) sitting in a garage. But offline editing is only so useful. After all, if you're like me, you're hitting the web while you're writing your post.
I have the bestest people ever.
A new computer came into existence in our house yesterday. Kirsten got together with her family and our friend Aida to raise funds for a Macbook for me (Thank you again, Carol, John, Nat, Del, and Aida!). I've spent the day yesterday getting files off of my Windows box and onto this computer, as I expect it to become my primary machine. I've named it "Eames" in honour of its genesis, the completion of my thesis. It'll also help me to keep in mind one of the reasons I wanted a laptop in the first place -- to do more writing.
Not a moment too soon
As it turns out, the Macbook couldn't have come a moment too soon. Part of the impetus for getting me this computer was the frustration I was expressing with Windows. On Friday, I started having problems with my Windows computer, luckyfrog. It started out simple enough - stuttery performance. But it started getting a little weirder; suddenly it was looping into a failed installation of the Logitech Setpoint software. It didn't matter that I was trying to install a completely different program - it insisted on trying to install Setpoint. And, of course, Setpoint failed during installation because it was trying to install itself to 2E:\. That's not a typo (at least on my part); it really did want to install itself to the drive 2E:.
After I got the files I needed off of the Windows computer, I decided that it was probably time to reinstall Windows. And this is where things started getting much, much worse. First, it wouldn't write the the drive (I was going to just do an 'upgrade' to XP SP2, using a slipstreamed CD). I tried formatting the drive, and it failed about 40% through.
Things went downhill from there. Now, the computer started rebooting shortly after starting off the CD. Thinking that maybe the CD had become scratched, etc, I pulled out the Linux CDs. It started rebooting there too; it would start scanning hardware and reboot during that scan.
Think I know the problem though.
At this point, I'm thinking the motherboard has gone. It's really the only thing that might be causing the problem. I'll have to get a new motherboard on Monday, and replace the one that's in there now.
A metaphor for the blogosphere
This is the introduction to my MA thesis. Since it doesn't really get into much depth about the concepts I'll be talking about in Finland, I think it's okay to post for now. I've edited it slightly for presentation on the web and taken out a section on the history of the blog. I'm interested in your thoughts.
The effect of adding a zero: the blog and identity
This study looks at the blog as a medium for exploring identity. However, rather than looking at the blogger’s identity as a writer, it will contextualize the blogger within a context where a separate, electronic identity is built for her, by her, and around her.To provide a useful perspective on the blogging process and its effect on identity, I will frame this work using Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film, Powers of 10. The film starts with a 1 meter square, first zooming out by multiples of 10 every 10 seconds. As the image pulls out, more is revealed, until finally we reach 100,000,000 light years and start our journey inwards to the level of the proton.
The identity of the blogger is the same; to get a full understanding of how identity works within the blog one needs to take a journey through the bloggerʹs experience in the same way as the Eamesʹ film, zooming in and out, contextualizing not only the blogger within the blogosphere, but the software within the blog as well; itʹs the effect of adding a zero, even within what seems like a simple universe.
What is compelling about Powers of 10 is how similar both ends of the spectrum are; they might very well be connected, creating a loop. At each level, a new understanding of how connected things are is reached: the protons within the molecule, the molecule within the chromosome, the tissue within the man, the man within the city, and so on. At the surface, 101, the blogger is simply writing a genre, be it a personal journal, a linkblog, or a political commentary.
We need to explore the different powers of ten; when we pull out, we see the blogger situated within layers of community: the comments on her own site, the communities she joins, and the blogosphere itself. Each of these has an influence, but it is not until one pulls back that one starts seeing them. Likewise, when we start moving inwards from the blogger, we see new levels of influence: the interface, the blog software itself, and finally the data structures imposed by the database software and physical storage. These too influence the identity of the blogger, for it is by these data structures, programming decisions, and interface designs that her journey in the blog is guided. Yet, if one does not look at each of these levels, one does not see the influence they exert. In this thesis, I look at the blog from near and far in an attempt to better understand its mechanisms and how it affects the identity of the blogger.
Continue reading A metaphor for the blogosphere.The Blog and Identity
As you may be aware, I successfully defended my MA back in January. I said at the time that I'd be putting a copy of the thesis here shortly after I'd finished working on the revisions. Well, the revisions came and went, but I obviously haven't posted the thesis here yet.
OK, but why not?
Here's why. I submitted, with K, a proposal to the 2008 Digital Humanities conference in Oulu, Finland that is in part based on one of my chapters. Since then, I've been waiting to hear whether or not the proposal was accepted or not. Now, as open as I may be towards releasing research, I recognize that others may not be quite so open (danah boyd and Harvard's efforts notwithstanding). Frankly, I didn't want to jeopardize the Digital Humanities proposal by "publishing" work ahead of the conference.
A couple of weeks ago, we heard back from the conference, and we were accepted. K and I will be heading to Finland in late June to give a paper there. I'm both excited and terrified (I am GAWDAWFUL when presenting work; I by far prefer more informal Q&A or unstructured talk) to be going to the conference. I'm really looking forward to seeing the other papers, not only in our own panel, but in the conference itself.
For those who aren't aware, Digital Humanities (DH) is the largest conference in my field; it's roughly equivalent to the MLA or the ACCUTE Congress. DH is the combined conference of SDH/SEMI, ACH, and ALLC, and it alternates between Europe and North America. Last year it was in Chicago. K will also be presenting another paper there with our friend and colleague, Dr. Stan Ruecker, on the e-book.
But back to the open publishing of the thesis. It'll come. I'll post the thesis in its entirety on this site, but likely not until July. Until then, if you're interested in reading it, please let me know and I'll be happy to email you a copy.
Why do you care?
The fact of the matter is that I haven't completely ruled out further academic work. I'm not planning on starting a PhD any time soon; but I don't want to close any doors. I'm going to work to publish within my field, even though I don't have any current plans for doctoral work, because I think I may want to revisit the idea in a few years.
One should also keep in mind that I'm currently working within an academic environment, and even though my job doesn't require publication, it's certainly something that I should explore and engage in when I can.
And frankly, I think it's the right time to be working with blogs and other social media, especially in the digital humanities field. I think that the digital - text analysis and visualization - have been too much of a focus within digital humanities, and it's time for a healthy dose of the humanities.
Reboot
You know I couldn't stay away for long. Funny thing; even though I had no feeling of inspiration left for the site, as soon as it was gone I felt as though a piece of me was missing, and like I had things to say but nowhere to say them. (I wanted to comment on a couple of things danah boyd had written on, but the time's passed, things like that).So I'm back, but in a bit of a reboot. This new speakeasy isn't connected to the old speakeasy. There's no 'back' button from this entry forward. I'm curious to know what you, the reader, would like to see in this space.
Do you want me to start writing more about my research area? I'm giving a paper with Kirsten in June that expands on the themes that emerged in my thesis, so I'll definitely be thinking about it. I'm also thinking more about other social media outside of blogs, and how identity works within them. But I'm not sure that's of interest to anyone here.
I've kept personal posts off this site for the most part, having been burnt in the past by upset family members, so it's not likely that I'll get into too much personal here.
Another possible direction for the blog is to rediscover writing fiction. I've had an itch to get back into it (it's been awhile), but I'm not sure if I want to make my stilted progress there public.
I guess I'll figure it out. But if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment (they're working now, I swear).