Hi all,
I found this transcript of an interview with Ellen Ullman that I thought was worth taking a look at once you’re done The Bug. It’s also worth noting the digital animation on the side of the screen, which seems to be an animated rendering of the interview.
Anyway, if you have time, here it is:
http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_11_24_archive.php
Alan Liu spoke last Friday in McKeldin about the ELO’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination Initiative (PAD) and the Transliteracies project at the University of California.
The in medias res structure of the discourse about handling electronic work born digitally fascinates me. Liu, like everyone else, has to face diverse audiences from different professions and address detailed/complex issues of theory and practice that go to the heart of the scholarly enterprise.
The novice rhetorican in me was fascinated by his having to face simultaneously the tasks of advocating the position of ELO (an organization of early adopters who want their work preserved) as well as the demand to speak of detailed technical standards of other disciplines (METS, RDF, OWL, and OAIS). Discussion of the preservation of electronic records has a history of over thirty years among a small professional group of archivists, a history of ten to fifteen years from some of ELO’s number, and both groups are working dilligently to lower the boom of intellectucal and physical control over dynamic objects no more stable than ephemera in many circumstances. These dual(+) demands on the rhetor are like the dual demands on receptive media and interpreters’ schemas to allow for two-way communication visually and textually (IF you can separate them). Inscriptions are by definition (deeply?) coded performances producing a schismogenesis: the rhetor must be singly focused in dynamically diverse landscapes.
The rhetorical challenges of digital humanities scholars was certainly not his purpose for speaking. He addressed “smart” and “dumb” constraints of the current matrix of tools to achieve scholarly control of “texts”. One constraint is that the meta data standards above do not adequately describe the behaviors of texts produced in Flash or XHTML, for example.
The focus on description as a path toward control (better control) has me thinking. One must begin somewhere, certainly. In my archives experience, the nexus of arrangement, description, preservation, and access as a simultaneous process applied to relatively more stable objects has limited application here. The different parts of each of those areas are in different stages of development. Hopefully, those who can will build test libraries, special collections, and archives (NOT the same thing!) and conduct longitudinal studies that will begin to speak to the scope/scale of future inscriptions.
I guess Transcriptions will have to be another post! [I hope to post on Jospeh Tabbi’s remarks as well, btw.]
The Electronic Literature Organization and its Directory.
My boyfriend came back from the war.
Heavy Industries (”Dakota” and others).
Although this is normally outside of what I would usually do, I have to share with you all a dream I had last night. I dreamt I became one of Shelley Jackson’s words! I got the word tattooed on the inside of my wrist, but….I could not read what the word was. I do not know the alphabet in which it was written.
Towards the end of the dream, the word began to fade: I had been tricked. The tattoo artist used some new, special disappearing ink.
That’s about it. I hope you all get a little laugh out of it. Enjoy the upcoming weekend.
This small notice was published in Archival Outlook, the Society of American Archivists (http://www.archivists.org/) newsletter to members.
Harvard to Develop Global Digital Format Registry
The Harvard University Library has received a grant of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of a registry of authoritative information about digital formats. The two-year project will result in a new Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), which will become a key international infrastructure component for the digital preservation programs of libraries, archives, and other institutions with the responsibility for keeping digital resources viable over time. For current information and updates on GDFR, visit http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr.
Hey Everyone,
I mentioned in class yesterday about USB drives that were made to be jewelry and other things. I’ve posted the links to the relevant articles below:
“USB on an earring starts a new trend” by the Inquirer
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30384
“The top 10 weirdest USB drives ever” by Fosfor Gadgets
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-drives-ever/
PNY’s Executive Attaché
http://www.pny.com/products/flash/execattache.asp
Will
Hi all,
Back when we discussed machinima, I mentioned the open-source digital animation program, Blender. I thought it might be of interest to know that for the first time Blender has been used to create a short film that is being released “traditionally” as opposed to solely on the Internet. You can learn more about the project, etc., at Orange, which is the name of the film. I thought particularly with the themes of access and demystification returning to discussion tonight, I should get this link up while it was in my mind.
Also, I found out that the genre of video that I was talking about — that scary maze example — is what is known as prank flash or a screamer. The first of its kind is thought to be a quick clip from Tawain titled Kikia. Apparently people make these fairly regularly now and on many sites you are required to label a link as a screamer if it is one. Still, I’m not sure what to make of the newest trend of making videos of people watching prank flash and then posting the footage on the Internet.
Topics with Theoretical Implications
One topic which we never got to last night is Kittler’s reception and influence, which Dan had looked into some (see the quotations on his handout or his posting below). I’m wondering whether we might think of Kittler’s contribution as not historiography or even narrative (as I called it), but rather as a model (an idea inspired by Johanna Drucker’s remarks about digital humanities and modeling yesterday).
Willard McCarty defines model as follows:
By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models; a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new. . . . a model is by nature a simplified and therefore fictional or idealized representation, often taking quite a rough-and-ready form: hence the term “tinker toy” model from physics, accurately suggesting play, relative crudity and heuristic purpose (Cartwright 1983: 158). . . . [T]he model of exists to tell us that we do not know, the model for to give us what we do not yet have. Models realize.
Is Kittler’s avowed “post-hermeneutic” criticism a form of theoretical modeling? Not discourse networks but discourse models?
Sorry I couldn’t make it last night; my inconvenient stomach bug turns out not to be a 24-hour one. Stay out of the bullpen, guys; I hear other people are having unpleasant symptoms.
Anyway, first, this is a little late but I just got around to reading this article on Edison’s filmmaking from Smithsonian magazine. It includes the following notes on “The Great Train Robbery”:
All of these are interesting, but none of them is art: creatively speaking, the movies were still a toy. Then, in late 1903, came The Great Train Robbery, the American cinema’s first defining masterpiece. Directed by Edwin S. Porter, this 12-minute epic is an archetype for the western (despite its central New Jersey locations). The story could not be simpler—bad guys hold up a train, escape and frolic for a while with their ill-gotten gains, and are finally caught and killed—but a new bond was forged between filmmaker and viewer; stationary vignette gave way to active storytelling. At the end, one of the actors, Justus Barnes, points his pistol at the audience and fires it in our faces. The effect on 1903 filmgoers, who had never seen anything like it, was phenomenal; people were widely reported to have screamed and ducked and then laughed when it was over, with the same happy terror that aficionados find on roller coasters.
The main argument here is that Edison is a failure on the artistic side of filmmaking; essentially, he is a technician and a businessman. I’m wondering how much that would really matter to, say, Kittler.
Also, in light of the new link to alternate keyboard models, I just have to point people to the DX1 (if that wasn’t gone over in class). Talk about altering machine specifications to fit human needs, and eliding the boundaries between typist and typewriter…