(updated 9/27 with link to webslides)
Take a look at The Wilderness Downtown. (Oh, and use Google Chrome.)
What would you call it? “An interactive short film”? Internet art? Interactive drama? (If you said, Electronic Literature, give yourself five extra points. It’s not unlike at least this piece.)
So now, if you were to study it, its medium, what would you study? The videos that flash on the screen? The pop-up windows? The text box where you can fill in your address? All of this?
(The Wilderness Downtown set to Folsom County Correctional.)
According to the note at the bottom of the screen, this piece, created by Chris Milk, was “made with some friends from Google” to showcase Google Chrome (and its support of HTML5).
Wait, I thought this was built to showcase Arcade Fire? Or Chris Milk? Or birds? The music is striking. The videos are moody and absorbing. They compel us. But what’s the punctum, as Barthes would say? What do people comment on when they see the video?
So to study this as one might any cultural object, what should you do? Screen shots? Video screen capture? Maybe. How about “View Source”?
Continue reading ‘Medium Specificity’
Critical Code Studies 2009-2010
5 Comments Published by Mark Marino October 9th, 2009 in Features, CCS.Critical Code Studies, the critical interpretation of computer source code, was born on this blog (here and here). Several years, presentations, debates, annexations, blogs, and new allies later, I am back to announce that I’m turning up the heat on (& giving more bandwidth to) Critical Code Studies.
One of the crucial developments has been the parallel growth of Software Studies. Without speaking to the academic hierarchy of Critical Code Studies and, um, Software Studies, I would say that what’s good for Software Studies is good for Critical Code Studies. In San Diego last year, Lev Manovich, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and WRT’s own Jeremy Douglass put on quite the tech studies smorgasbord, complete with Kate Hayles, some more GTxA-ers, Ian Bogost, and other notables.
Leaving that session, I was convinced Software Studies was materializing, and Matt Kirschenbaum’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sealed the deal.
More Developments:
Continue reading ‘Critical Code Studies 2009-2010′
Critical Code Studies 2009-2010
4 Comments Published by Mark Marino October 9th, 2009 in Features, CCS.Critical Code Studies, the critical interpretation of computer source code, was born on this blog (here and here). Several years, presentations, debates, annexations, blogs, and new allies later, I am back to announce that I’m turning up the heat on (& giving more bandwidth to) Critical Code Studies.
One of the crucial developments has been the parallel growth of Software Studies. Without speaking to the academic hierarchy of Critical Code Studies and, um, Software Studies, I would say that what’s good for Software Studies is good for Critical Code Studies. In San Diego last year, Lev Manovich, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and WRT’s own Jeremy Douglass put on quite the tech studies smorgasbord, complete with Kate Hayles, some more GTxA-ers, Ian Bogost, and other notables.
Leaving that session, I was convinced Software Studies was materializing, and Matt Kirschenbaum’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sealed the deal.
More Developments:
Continue reading ‘Critical Code Studies 2009-2010′
Revving up Your RSS (Re-post)
0 Comments Published by Mark Marino September 16th, 2009 in Features, Off Topic, Criticism, Software.Ah, the Internet. Gregory Zobel ran this wonderful interview about managing your RSS feeds with WRT-amigo David Parry (of Academic Hack) on the now-defunct “Adjunct Advice.” Unfortunately, that “long tail” can sometimes be severed, so to help it grow back, we are reposting that interview here. This marks the second in our continuing attempts to unseat The Wayback Machine as THE place to go for your golden oldies.
Revving Up Your RSS Feeds with David Parry
Once again, Dr. David Parry has agreed to share his tech wisdom with Adjunct Advice. Rather than going for a broad sense of technology, this interview focuses exclusively on the effective and efficient use of RSS feeds. As this interview demonstrates, RSS is much easier to use and more powerful when you organize your feeds. In addition to this interview, I suggest you read David’s own article about RSS feeds here.
Dr. David Parry is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas in Dallas.
RSS feeds seem like a great tool, but I find myself never having enough time to read them. I suspect I have sloppy RSS habits. Can you offer any secrets to effective RSS feed management (just like file management)?
Continue reading ‘Revving up Your RSS (Re-post)’
SOS Classroom: Crowdsourcing Education
1 Comment Published by Mark Marino July 18th, 2009 in Features, Off Topic, Social.
At the end of the school year, LAUSD, the second largest school district in the U.S., canceled summer school for K-8 students. Reports estimate 225,000 students affected, but surely this is an understatement because every child is affected when children in their class have not received the instruction they need. This summer, my students at the University of Southern California have been tackling this problem using social bookmarking tools, namely Diigo and Delicious. The project aims to crowsource education.
What would it mean to crowdsource education? Send all of LA’s students to New Delhi? (No, that would be outsourcing.) To crowdsource education is to take something very time consuming, like tagging free online educational sites buy viagra buy cialis buy cialis professional buy viagra professional, and to distribute the labor across the playbor factories of Internet users. Nana and Granddad can find sites along with the teacher of room 24 and the average person on the street.
That last term, playbor, came up in a heated IDC discussion that Trebor Scholtz began when he started the thread: The Internet as Playground and Factory.
