building

I’ll be building what’s called a wordpress theme over the next month or so so this area will run pretty much as usual. The Stoning Field project is pretty much taking over at the moment but certain design features of that Flash project are influencing my thinking, so a lot of that will go into the new great lettuce head area.

Why WordPress? Until Tinderbox for Windows, control over page layout for standard html pages is key because the decision has been made to make the weblog functionality the major node.

Anyway, here I will nest for the moment. Business as usual for now.

And so. Excellent meeting yesterday with the Narratives group. We talked letters, the market, and had a nice workshop.

Thanks everyone.

new things

Soon, I’ll be moving over to a new WordPress weblogging system, host, and reconception of GLH, and playing with design there. For now there’s nothing going on at ersinghaus.combut I’ll be up and looking like something soon. Thanks to Jim for the help. And Christopher for the example.

processing words

I had a nice conversation before an esteemed committee at Tunxis recently about using Storyspace as a means of organizing college learning outcomes and other information related to assessment, which would be a big job for those close to the information, which I’m not, and for Storyspace itself. This could mean a huge expansion in the use of Storyspace as an institutional tool and more dramatic presentations to other colleges in the state of Connecticut, for the Federal Government, and to our regional accrediting agency.

The goal is to “link” course and institutional outcomes to readily available data, assessment tools and models, and to broader college learning outcomes in a space that easily makes those links clear, visual, and streamlined. The job is to explode lots of docs and to start linking in the non-linear space of the program. Of course, working in the environment calls for a rethinking of text navigation, moving beyond the word processor window and the critical element of the slidebar, to reading in terms of paths, keywords, and the fantastic invention of the “guardfield.”

This could mean more customers for Mark Bernstein, one of the chief developers of Storyspace and chief scientist at Eastgate Systems and a call for an enterprise version of Storyspace. Regardless of that, this is why I’m waiting hungrily for a new version of Storyspace that can flex it’s muscles given future demands of content, which may involve embedded video, customizable workspaces, and the involvement of different forms of narrative working inside a Storyspace environment, such as a vector graphic animation.

But this starts me thinking about broader issues related to education, because sometimes I wonder about our choice to involve the word processor alone in writing courses. Convenience or good thinking? Everything must be word processed, especially work to be turned in for evaluation. Fine, but consider the issue of an online writing instructor expecting emailed papers and something comes in in txt form or not in the safe rtf. The question is, should all students be expected to learn a writing technique in a wordprocessor? Why that model alone these days? Some people have a tough time reading Neil Gaimon’s designed art spaces, such as those in Sandman; they are otherwise fine upstanding citizens. Could problems that we attribute to lack of skill, such as organization and tight thesis, be attributed to the very space people are expected to use for development?

New media, writing, and conferences

The folks did a great job at the writers conference yesterday. Susan Gibb gave an informative and professional peek into weblogs as writing tool. She went pretty deep, providing examples of the form, genre, and the pros of portfolio writing.

Mark Anastasio was smooth with comics; Jim Keating did fine with IF, although he needs to work on visuals and examples; and Patrice Hamilton was excited about digifilm; and John Timmons was funny and energetic with illustrations from Patrice’s film.

Thanks everyone.

mathematical space

As I go deeper into actionscript, doing less and less actual work in Flash and more and more work in notebooks and Storyspace, I find that thinking about the spatial elements in terms of x, y, and z (a simulated point) points is critical to my understanding of the space I’m dealing with. In Flash MX/04, the stage can be fairly empty while much of the horsepower goes into Math.cos and array building, to name just a few methods.

But it’s more than just the math and organizing functions; it’s imagining and planning how a movie clip, say a circle or a word, will interact on a frame nested in some other clip and where they all “live” in the file. It’s fun to play with and associates to editing poetry in a lot of ways.

Which reminds me of a recent conversation in Brit Lit about the appeal of science for people like Huxley and Gosse. The immediacy of certain results can be tranformative. Better vision to bigger loads of smelted iron means impressive scales, greater human expansiveness, and mass social and cultural ill, as well as the opposite. The smaller scales that we can control gives the illusion of control on the opposite scale. As the body grows, it also reduces. The body in mathematical space.

more on circles

We know that the circles or bubbles touch and converge, partly, since we can only be in one place at a time; we live in our own space and can’t live outside of it; therefore, existence is a trap.

This is a problem that bothers a persistent character that I’ve been following sometime across several novels and in short stories. The real problem for “him,” he has a lot of names, has to do with living with what is and being able to describe such a “problem” as a problem.

Here’s an example. As a child, character x hates school and feels the approach of the monster while walking through the desert. He may hate school or he may hate that he has to fear it. Or he may hate that he can do nothing about the inevitability of the monster. He wonders why things are as they are and not some other way. Some might say that this is a foolish preoccupation but for character x it leads to interesting questions of place, role, and the choices we have to make concerning friendship and family. He has lots to do and has many journeys to work through, but in his own mind he is also a character to himself.

project work

I haven’t done a whole lot of work with this but the Stoning Field project has been going through some prep in Storyspace prior to work in Flash. The following image shows some of the possible ways of considering how a project would merge text, hypertext, and video elements:

ethical space

Jessica Lonergan asks in a comment on a prior post

If we have already completed our lives and are in heaven, does what we do NOW matter? Have our lives and fates been predetermined, already played out? Is the thought of us already being in heaven comforting or does it take away motivation? Or is that a copout?

The question goes to the “theory of heaven” having to do with mortality, change, and temporality. But it’s also a spatial question in keeping with the issues we dealt with in Blit.

We talked about conceiving of social and cultural actions and phenomenon in terms of their spatial dimension. Cultural space, as in Mexico as juxtaposed to the United States, or ethical space concerning considerations of decorum across venues or forums. I.e., talk on email calls for a different ethic than a report to the board, both being spaces where things pass audience to audience.

The answer to Jessica goes to how we “conceive” and judge the ideas we’re talking about. No matter the consequence of the “heaven theory,” we can’t confirm the idea, thus how it shapes a response is a tricky question. Does our behavior have consequences beyond the immediate? Of course. In the grand scheme, do we have cause beyond eating and sleep?

That’s where “meaning” comes in, I’d think. Duns Scotus would probably say that heaven is “beyond” us and to dig into the notion of the beyond without the aide of the spiritual will lead to dead ends. But we do it nontheless. And that’s what I find interesting.

weird law

Here’s something from the Independent Florida Alligator via Discourse

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out leftist totalitarianism by dictator professors in the classrooms of Floridas universities.

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom, as part of a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.

Bad law is often discussed on this site but this bill is a nice example of Composition’s concentration at this point of the semester on cause and effect analysis. What would happen given the passage of such a law?

Here’s more

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for public ridicule for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class would also be given the right to sue.

Some professors say, Evolution is a fact. I dont want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you dont like it, theres the door, Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

Questions:

How would a court establish degrees here? A student might always say, “You don’t respect enough.” This is classic irony. Students in general aren’t typically as up as the teacher is on the subject. How would they know, therefore, what the alternative arguments are–hence, what would form the basis of a lawsuit? “The professor didn’t want to talk about trig. He wanted to talk calc.”

In the latter example, I don’t know of any scientist who would argue that Evo is a “fact.” That reflects a misunderstanding again of method; and it’s not the issue. And why would the scientist enter into a discussion over ID given that there’s really nothing evidenciary to relate the idea to. Such a subject, perfectly fine for religion class and British Literature, would be misconduct in the biology classroom.

Dare I say that I question the competence of such lawmakers. Such a law would be totalitarian in and of itself because it doesn’t conduct freedom. It inhibits it in the spirit of cynicism. Blake would roll in his grave.

Flash, video, and story

I’ve gotten to the point in my Flash studies where it’s time to start planning how a story will express itself through text, image, animation, video clips, and interactive paths, working with interactivity through actionscript. Here’s the first part of the story (John will know this story because it’s been on the hypertext backburner for some time now). It’s called Stoning Field.

The authorities outlawed dodge ball at Ignacios school. A kid got hit in the cheek with a hard foamrubber ball and his parents complained to the school board.

Why didnt he dodge? I asked Ignacio, whos eleven years old.

He did, Ignacio said, but the wrong way.

In a lot near the school are collections of smooth, round stones, perfect for throwing, perfect for targets. I hear through whispers that the children will meet there some undisclosed day and play dodge ball the way the gods meant it to be played.

The story makes use of games, vulnerability, youth and children, and time to play out the structure. One of the things that keeps calling me back to the story is its potential for incorporating visual effects and choice in the running textual narrative, so it’s not hard to envision a timeline that would play up or play down forshadings, open opportunities for alternative reading paths, and give imagery an added complexity in a rich spatial field. But this is where the planning comes in. In Flash there are so many ways of accomplishing a goto and frame action that visualizing how a work will be experienced often leads to the buffet table problem.

Should paths be conceived as layers or in frames or as scenes or as a combination, and how? They would all work. The symbols and clips will be accessible everywhere. A small video clip can be masked, placed anywhere to play on the canvas, looped in any number of ways. They can be dragged onto the viewing space and can appear if this, then or if, else, then. The story will have to decide. Just too cool with this aggressive program.