MEDIA ABC Blog

I came across this article from the website of "The Detroit News" chronicling the dramatic changes in newspaper format that are on the horizon. Apparently, "The Detroit News" and "The Detroit Free Press" will be experimenting with e-reader editions throughout the year. In addition, free copies of yesterday's edition of "The Detroit News" were handed out at stores and on street corners in the city to garner public interest and awareness of their format and delivery changes. It will be interesting to see if the e-reader experiment will change the landscape of daily newspapers in Detroit, and if this will set a precedent for change in other national publications in the near future.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090331/BIZ/903310328/News+to+try+out+e-reader+device

per our discussion of the term "e-book" and Siracusa's analogy of the car vs. horse debate....

(from nextnature.net)

This remarkable proposal for a steam powered street locomotive was invented by Mathewson in 1876. According to the inventor the goal was to make a machine resembling a horse in form, so as not to frighten the horses on the streets. I may be wrong, but I think it would be a pretty dim horse that would be fooled by this biomimicmarketing avant la lettre. Perhaps another purpose was to make the steam powered carriage more acceptable to people.

Surely, this steam horse illustrates the notion that new media (steam powered carriages in this case) often try to mimic an older medium in order to become accepted more easily. Yet over time, the older medium is superseded and transformed into a cultural relic (horse powered carriages in this case). Other examples of this principle are the electric candle light, electronic mail, and the record collection on your mp3-player.

an interesting post about screen reading and slowness of books...

http://aworkinglibrary.com/library/archives/on_feeding/

David Scott's entry about the possible future of books got me thinking about online magazines. Here is one that I read regularly. It's got the look of a printed magazine, with the seamless navigation of a web page. Although this (and other similar publications) seem stuck somewhere in the gap between blogs and printed magazines, I like the compromise that they represent. Top-notch graphic design (it looks like it was meant to be read, not "screen-read," and free and easy digital access.

http://www.nextautos.com/Winding-Road-Magazine/

Our time map for Dryden's The Assignation: or, Love in a Nunnery can be found here:
http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/eaves/timeline/polan/TimeMap_Lab.html

Our timemap of William Congreve's "The Way of the World" is here.

I just read an article in the International Herald Tribune about a new movie by the makers of _Helvetica_. This one is _Objectified_, about product design. Sounded like something I'd definitely want to see. From the web:

Objectified: Gary's New Film - Objectified is the next film from director Gary Hustwit. It's about industrial design, and the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It's about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them. Visit the website for more info!

Per our discussion yesterday of DIY, crafting, making things, etc.


Mark Frauenfelder & Carla Sinclair
Authors, journalists, webloggers, new media magnates; Mark co-founded Boing Boing & Make magazine; Carla is ?Net Chick,? & edits Craft magazine

Presents:
?The Happy Mutant?s Guide to the Modern Maker Movement.?
When: Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 8:00 p.m.
Where: Webb Auditorium
(James E. Booth Memorial Building - 7A)
Workshop (jointly with the RIT Make Club)
When: Friday, March 27, 2009 at 9:00a.m.-12:00p.m.
Where: Carlson Auditorium
(Building 76, Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science)

http://courses.ats.rochester.edu/eaves/timeline/harmand/stavlasharmand3.html

Considering our turn toward images, here's an interesting-sounding presentation this Thursday:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:15:22 -0400
From: Shirley Wersinger
Subject: Lecture at the Memorial Art Gallery

LECTURE AT THE MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

Thursday, March 26 at 7 pm at the Memorial Art Gallery, David G. Stork
speaks on "When Computers Look at Art: Image Analysis in Humanistic Studies
of the Visual Arts." Stork is chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations and
consulting professor of statistics at Stanford University. His lecture, for
non-scientists, examines works by such masters as Jackson Pollock, Vincent
van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Lorenzo Lotto.

Cosponsored by the Memorial Art Gallery and the RIT Department of Computer
Science and included in Gallery admission.

MAG ON THE WEB:

This video was created for an assignment to create a new interpretation of "Little Red Riding Hood." Pretty cool. I like the emphasis put on tiny details, which stands in amusing contrast to the simple nature of nursery rhymes and children's stories like this.

http://vimeo.com/3514904

From http://www.theawesomer.com

The projects are coming along nicely but I've come accross a small fix that I think most of you will benefit from. The timeline code is set up in intervals of months on the top and years on the bottom. If your data points (dates) are far apart (and most of them are) you can change the top interval to years or even decades- just replace Timeline.DateTime.MONTH with Timeline.DateTime.YEAR or imeline.DateTime.DECADE. Then change the next band Timeline.DateTime.YEAR to Timeline.DateTime.DECADE or Timeline.DateTime.CENTURY.

You can change the colors by changing this part of the code:

this.ether = {
backgroundColors: [
"#B27",
"#367",
"#CCC",
"#AAA"
],

#B27 is that purple and #367 is the turquoise. Feel free to change them- here is a website with colorcodes: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_colornames.asp

I'll be in my office from 9-12 tomorrow to help with the TimeMap projects. Email me if you'd like me to look at yours and see if I can help.

Nora

You need to use escaped html to add images to your bubbles in the timeline project- The CDATA tag doesn't seem to work -here is a little tool that will write them for you:

<a href="http://www.reconn.us/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,62/">http://www.reconn.us/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,62/</href>

so you put <img src=?image.jpg?/> in the box and it will write the escaped html for you- just paste it into the description either before or after your description text (with a space of course) and it should add your pic as long as it is in the root folder of your webserver.

Just to indicate that people really do get together to talk about this stuff:


SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE BOOK
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
16-18 October 2009
http://book-conference.com

We are particularly excited about holding this year's Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The beautiful and historic city of Edinburgh has long served as a center of learning and the arts. It is the home of the world's largest book festival and oldest literary award. Edinburgh's important role in literature was recognized in 2004 when it was named the first UNESCO City of Literature. The Book Conference venue, the University of Edinburgh, has contributed significantly to the city's, and the nation's achievements. Since its founding in 1582 it has made vital contributions to learning and scholarship. We expect that the Seventh International Conference on the Book will make contributions of its own, in the spirit of this impressive tradition.

The Book Conference serves as an inclusive forum for examining the past, current and future role of the book. It proceeds from recognition that although the book is an old medium of expression, it embodies thousands of years' experience of recording knowledge. The pervasive influence of this experience continues to shape newer forms of information technology, while at the same time providing a reference point for innovation.

The Book Conference not only considers the book and other information technologies as artefacts or discrete objects, it also examines other key aspects of the information society, including publishing, libraries, information systems, literacy, and education. Broadly speaking, the Conference engages the interrelation between changes in thought, creation, production and distribution, and the role and meaning of the book and other information technologies. The Book Conference welcomes a wide range of participants from the world of books including authors, publishers, printers, librarians, IT specialists, book retailers, editors, literacy educators, and academic researchers and scholars from all disciplinary traditions.

The Conference includes plenary presentations by accomplished researchers, scholars and practitioners, as well as numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of the Book. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic Journal.

Whether you are a virtual or in-person presenter at this Conference, we also encourage you to present on the Conference YouTube Channel. Please select the Online Sessions link on the Conference website for further details.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 16 April 2009. Future deadlines will be announced on the Forum website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the Conference website - http://book-conference.com

We look forward to receiving your proposals and hope you will be able to join us in Edinburgh, Scotland in October 2009.

Yours sincerely,

Garett Gietzen
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
For the Advisory Board, International Conference on the Book and International Journal of the Book

Karel, Tim and I chose Dryden's The Assignation: or, Love in a Nunnery.

just came across this bit on wired about early scientific photography...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/microphotograph.html

this is making its way around the blogs: someone published 2 years worth of tweets in a hardcover book (using lulu, another online self-publishing service).

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2009/03/james_bridle_pu.php

Chris Stavlas and Ian Harmand have selected John Dryden's play, "The Indian Emperour" (1667), for their timemap project.

If you had a timemap webpage from the lab that wasn't working don't dispair- I've fixed everyone's Google Maps Keys and did a little code cleanup so everyone is starting Friday's lab with a working webpage. I've got office hours tommorrow from 2-4 if you need any help with anything project-wise.

Nora (ndimmock@library.rochester.edu)

Thomas Kinkade, the artist we were talking about it class (from wikipedia):
***
Thomas Kinkade (born January 19, 1958 in Sacramento, California) is an American painter of realistic, bucolic, and idyllic subjects. He is notable for the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products via The Thomas Kinkade Company. He is self described as "Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light" (a trademarked phrase), and as "America's most-collected living artist". It is estimated that 1 in 20 homes in the U.S. feature some form of Thomas Kinkade?s art, according to Media Arts, the publicly-traded company that licenses and sells his products. He has received criticism for the extent to which he has commercialized his art -- for example, selling his prints on the QVC home shopping network. Others have written that his paintings are merely kitsch, without substance, and described it as chocolate box art.
***
Hm, I'm not sure if his *originals* ever had an "aura"...

Andrea Miller of the Rochester JCC previewed an upcoming talk by award-winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. at the RIT Ingle Auditorium.

Tickets are $15 for all students, $20 for JCC Members and $25 for the general public and are available by calling (585) 461-2000 x-235 or, in person, at the JCC Main Desk/ Arts Department.

Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his Holocaust narrative MAUS which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. He also worked for the Topps company for several years where he designed the Wacky Packs and Garbage Pail Kids card sets.

He also has drawn several covers for The New Yorker magazine.

Interesting mention of the library's mistrust of "ephemeral" security technologies...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/17/british-library-books-mein-kampf

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1885421,00.html?cnn=yes

Bryan, Matt and John's group hereby select Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum: or A Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries for their timemap.

The Small Press Book fair is lots of fun - I would encourage everyone to check it out! Lots of handmade books, zines, and comics. This year, they're adding workshops on bookmaking - all free & open to the public.

***
The Buffalo Small Press Book Fair is a regional one day event that brings booksellers, authors, bookmakers, zinesters, small presses, artists, poets, and other cultural workers (and enthusiasts) together in a venue where they can share ideas, showcase their art, and peddle their wares. Poetry readings, performances, discussions, and related lectures are also scheduled to go on throughout the day.

We?ll be holding 3 workshops related to bookmaking. The topics are yet to be worked out in full, but all of the workshops will be free and open to the public.

The 3rd Annual Buffalo Small Press Book Fair will be held on March 21, 2009 at Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY.

Remember this event is FREE and open to the public!

In 2008 we had over 80 vendors and almost 2000 participants!

Along with the noise and unforeseen problems and costs of idea transmission, there are applications of this term to other processes as well. In mechanical and financial processes this idea is referred to as Friction.

"Friction costs
Costs, both implied and direct, associated with a transaction. Such costs include time, effort, money, and associated tax effects of gathering information and making a transaction."*

The more abstract movement of ideas can be legitimately compared with more tangible things such as money, stocks, and even a car through an assembly line. All of these things are not completely transparent and have unseen costs and problems associated with their creation and usage. Nothing is perfectly efficient.

*http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Friction+costs

Lessig is one of the founders of the Creative Commons, which releases those licenses you may have seen around the web. Two recent blog posts relate to copyright, sharing work, and intellectual property.

One announces the launch of FairShare. "Identify your Creative Commons content to FairShare, a project of Attributor, and the service will track and report how content is being used on the web."

The other discusses the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which restrict access to government grant-funded research. Lessig's overview of the controversial legislation highlights key components of our reading and discussions: authors (scientists), proprietary publishers, publishing models, the dissemination of knowledge, and access.

Maybe worth noticing how the little machine is attached to a marketing method (based on the iTunes paradigm) that can be attached to other little machines so that they can tap the same market, funnel products (in this case e-books) to *those* machines, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/technology/04kindle.html

Ironically related to Kernan and St. Clair's views on copyrights:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/books/04google.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=google&st=cse

(Sorry for the late notice)

The Undergraduate English Council would like to invite all English majors and other interested students to a discussion of the graduate student experience featuring a panel of five current UR MA and PhD students. The panel will discuss and respond to questions about topics including the application process, degree requirements, and post-graduation plans. This event will take place on Tuesday, March 3, 7:00-8:30 pm, in Morey 525. Pizza will be provided.

I'll spend a LOT of time in my office this week if you'd like some one-on-one help with the timeline/timemap project. T,W,TH 2-5 and Friday 9-11 am. Feel free to contact me about meeting other times- I'm pretty flexible THIS week- gone next week but will return for Friday's lab.

From this morning's @Rochester. May be of interest, since we're going to be transcribing letters by Douglass later this semester:

Harvard Professor to Examine Legacy of Douglass, Lincoln
John Stauffer, professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University, will give a talk titled "Douglass and Lincoln: From Dred Scott to Obama" on Friday, March 6, in the Hawkins-Carlson Room in Rush Rhees Library. The talk, which will be followed by a reception, begins at 4:30 p.m. Read more...