tychoish, now without a net

It’s another week, again. It’s funny how these things happen. I once again don’t have a great deal of Station Keeping news to relate to you. Last week was somewhat frightful in terms of school. I’m graduating in about two weeks, my final grades are due in a week and a half, and the vast majority of my work will be completed by the middle of this week. Because last week was so intense (on top of the sinus infection episode) there isn’t a lot of work left, but I have more than enough on my plate to keep me busy, so while I will have entries for your consumption and edification this week, I can’t make a lot of big promises about overall productivity this week. But I have some things to talk about now, and that’s all that matters, right?

News of TealArt

I have two more essays for the hypertext series after this week’s piece, but I do feel as if it’s wrapping up, and similarly the knitting series, I think will see a bit of a summer transformation as I have basically completed what I set out to do. I think we’ll see more content concerning what I’m actually working on, and some of the things that I’ve already made, and of course coverage of knitting camp. I’m playing around with the idea of starting a slightly more academic series to follow up the hypertext, that might be a fun summer project to work on in addition to all of the other summer things that I have planned.

Thoughts on Station Keeping

One of my intentions with SK is to provide an outlet for short form (science) fiction. I think there’s a lot of focus and prestige given to The Novel, in the genre, and it’s certainly earned. The Novel allows authors to write extensive stories that make it possible to put the reader into another world/perspective. But there’s another sense that shorter form fiction allows writers to pose specific questions, handle language very precisely, and practically distribute his/her work easily¹. SK is also not exactly short fiction as it has serial elements, plot arcs, and an ensemble of regular and recurring characters, but I think from a writing perspective, there will be stylistic and structural similarities between short fiction and SK installments. In the group setting, this makes particular sense: we can all create desecrate individual stories, participate in the planning of a larger story without anyone person needing to feel obligated to maintaining an entire project solely on their own. I think there are possibilities.

Anyway, stay tuned, it looks like it’s going to be a pretty interesting week around here.

best, tycho

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tagged: TealArt

I think wiki’s are really awesome. I just wanted to get it out there ahead of time. The wiki is a really nifty concept, and I think that the wiki is an example, of an “digital” textual form, like the one that I’m trying to think about. Having said that I think there are are some constraints to this form that are worth discussing as part of this project on digital text.

What are Wiki’s?

I could provide a lengthy and informative history of the development of the wiki concept, but I’ll spare you. It’s an interesting history if you’re into that kind of thing. In any case, most people know wikis via Wikipdeia, and this is a good example of what a wiki is, but I think because of this influence many people tend to associate wiki projects with encyclopedias, which is interesting, because wikis are by no means limited to such encyclopedic projects¹.

Basically a wiki is a collaborative editing environment, that creates a non-linear hypertext document, generally in a situation where new “pages” are easily created and edited (but not necessarily). The key in my mind is the non-linear aspect in combination with the (potential) shortened distance between the reader and the editor. Because of the organization of the Wikipedia and the wiki’s that have been inspired by that site, I think a lot of people tend to think that wiki means “open editing,” I think group editing is more apt description.

The Strengths:

Wikis are great for distributing editing responsibility amongst a group of people, and for exploring and cataloging information that can be organized as an interconnecting “network,” rather than a branching tree. The software used for wikis also remove a lot of the burden associated with site maintenance, and in a lot of ways I’m tempted to suggest that while wiki software, is a really great tool for website management, particularly when you want to create a collaboratively constructed document. There are a number of typically wiki based features that have contributed to the kind of publishing model that Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the MediaCommons folks have adopted: history functions being the most obvious. That allow us to understand documents as changing

The Weaknesses:

The problem is that wiki’s aren’t good for all sorts of projects. They seem to work best when there is a limited linearity, and great deal of interconnectedness. When you don’t have this kind of document, or when you have a contributor pool that is too small and/or not organized enough, wiki’s seem to stop being unique, and while they may contain valuable material, the format seems to just stop working. Or it the hyper/digital element seems to imposed and detrimental to the feel of the document as a whole.

For instance, Wikimedia, the folks behind Wikipedia, have a project called wikibooks, and while I think that this idea is really nifty, I’m not sure how well it works in creating “good” books, in the way that wikipedia can really be brilliant. At the same time, I’m not sure that one of the “wikibooks” are particularly unique documents as a result of their beginnings as wiki.

Just some thoughts on the forms. I don’t want to come off as a perpetual critic, I think that what I seem to be trumpeting: new forms, new ideas, and new models of reading/writing/publishing are being used and deployed, we just haven’t explored and questioned them enough. I think we’ll let this edition run a little short this week, but I’ll be back next week on monday with a post on Station Keeping.

Enjoy you’re weekend, and reading! tycho

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tagged: academia • hypertext • TealArt

I intended to post this yesterday, but I fear I was hit by a time warp and somehow my day disappeared. Enjoy this piece, it is one of my favorites. –ty

As some of you may know, this (particular) series of missives and polemics about the knitting craft are part of a project that I’m currently working on as part of my last semester as an undergraduate. Another aspect of this project (which I’m using to address an interest in a larger sense of a knitting community) is a weekly knitting group that I’ve been responsible for on campus. We meet on mondays and we’ve had tons of people come in. I bill it as a knitting workshop, rather than an SnB, or a group, and people come in to knit, to ask questions, or learn from scratch.

In the beginning, I thought that what I really wanted to do was work on helping people move on to more complicated shapes, because I take the opinion, that once you know how to knit and purl, the only difference between making a scarf and making a simple sweater (or a hat) is dedication and commitment, and it’s my sense that that many knitters are reticent to make that leap. While I still think this is mostly true, knitters are surprisingly aware of this. Interestingly, what I think has been the most helpful lesson that I’ve been able impart, deal with some of the most fundamental parts of knitting, the very minute details of how stitches are supposed to look and feel on the needle. I’ve taken to thinking of this as string theory, but I try and keep that to myself.

What I think I’m teaching is something that many knitters figure out eventually, but that people tend to refer to in a number of different ways. I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard it called “knitting in your head,” also “watching your knitting,” or being able to “eyeball patterns,” and so forth but the core of all these skills is pretty much the same. You want to be able to observe your knitting and be able to understand how the stitches are formed and interact, basically, what causes a stitch to twist and what causes a knit stitch to become a purl stitch. This sounds like a really uninteresting skill, and perhaps it is, but I’ve realized that many people receive lessons to knit in a really structured way so that they’ll be able to follow patterns easily. Teachers start out with something, say knitting, or casting on, and they say, “this is casting on, here’s what you do.” People can pick this up, but it’s difficult, because the name is largely irrelevant: learning how to knit is more about learning how to make your hands and fingers do something that they’re not used to.

As a result, I’ve taken to doing a few things that might be a little atypical. (Or they might be normal and I’m just slow.) For instance, I teach casting on after a person has gotten how to knit (using a sample:) casting on is difficult, and it doesn’t really make sense outside of the context of knitting. Similarly the “difficulty” of purling seems to be an artifact of how we learn to knit: I’ve had some measure of success teaching people “one way of knitting” (knitting), and “another way of knitting” (purling) when I tell/explain the distinction after it looks like their fingers “know” how to form the stitches. Once all the basics are under control its really easy to move on to other spheres and projects. How to learn to knit shapes, garments, or whatever else the new knitter wants to knit. And that’s about it.

The last time(s) that I tried to teach knitting, I found that it was hard, and that I wasn’t incredibly adept at explaining this aspect of knitting, and was much more interested in teaching particular ways of knitting. This time around, I have people that have learned to knit from me who are knitting continental, combined, english style, you name it. Someone even took to knitting a garter stitch garment by purling every row (atypical at best,) and allowing learners to have this kind of freedom is both easier from my perspective because as long as they’re making fabric that works, and they’re enjoying it, it doesn’t matter how they tension the yarn; and once their fingers know how to form the stitches, teaching them the names of what they’re doing, is relatively simple. And then people know what to knit: what they do after this point is really out of your control as a knitting teacher until they come back to learn how to make specific things, but laying the foundation is definitely important.

I’d be interested in hearing your perspective on teaching methods, if you’ve ever taught someone how to knit. I’ll be back in a week with an article about yarn choice and knitting economy.

’til next time, tycho

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tagged: knitting

I’m not sure that I have a great deal of news regarding Station Keeping to report to you this fine morning. It warmed significantly in the last few days in Wisconsin, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more snow. Which means we’ve moved quickly from “frozen season” to “allergy season.” As a result I spent the end of the week and the weekend in a stupor. I think I hit the peak early/midday on Sunday, and I’m starting to feel better. The project that seemed to take the largest hit was SK, alas. In this stupor I did watch a great deal of television that I’d been saving up for a while, and I got some knitting done as well.

We have 3 confirmed contributors to this project, and had I been more cogent this weekend I think that I might have been able to gather a few more. I also have the first 6 weeks laid out, and I think that perhaps later in the week I’ll start writing the first of those episodes. In some ways the episode summaries that I wrote were to provide an example of what I thought an episode could “do,” not to mention inspire a stuck writer, but I’ve also thought that these were the kind of episodes that I might write, so unless people volunteer, I’ll start with some of the writing. I also had a discussion with one of the aforementioned writers regarding the longer-term plot developments that I’ve archived for the purpose of shedding some light on my thoughts regarding the longer term vision of this project.

Because I don’t have enough Station Keeping content to fill an entire entry, I think that this is about to turn into a general catchall blog post. Sooo….

In other news, I’ve spent a good deal of time these past few days working on the layout of a book that is going a children’s book. I look forward to being done with this (and also having another something for a graphic design portfolio, should I ever need to do that). I have realized as part of this, that if I want to do graphics work (which I really do pretty irregularly) I totally would need a better computer, because the ever reliable zoe was totally not up to the task. I think the postponement of the release of Leopard to October means that I’m unlikely to begin to seriously hurting for a new computer until at least then. I think that I’m particularly sensitive to this because I put in the order for Zoe almost exactly 2 years ago. I think that I’ll have to work on some sort of retrospective to honor the occasion.

I’m an/the outgoing leader, of my campus’ queer group. Since a number of us are leaving/graduating at the end of the year, we started on updating the groups constitution¹, as a way of enhancing the continuity, and recording the unspoken assumptions that have guided the leaders of the group for several years. This has incited an unprecedented level of attention from some folks with heretofore limited involvement in the operations or activities of the club. And, some decisively undemocratic tactics, which rob attention that I would like to put towards other projects including TealArt, knitting-related, and research related. I think though, to tie this back into something on topic, there’s totally going to be a SK episode where Eli or Talia will grind a council of nebbishen politicians into a very fine powder. Sigh. Take any angry twitters with a grain of salt concerning the above.

While I would like to avoid being self congratulatory, I have to say that I’m very much enjoying the progress that we’ve been able to maintain at tealart. It’s been a nice compliment to my school work, and it’s nice to have other projects to think about and consider. I think my misery during my allergies was due in part to the fact that by thursday I was really caught up with my blog writing, and didn’t have much left to do. So here’s to being able to keep it up for a while. I have some nifty essays planned and prepped for this week. I just got a rather nifty idea for another series (to follow up the hypertext series), so I think I’ll be sketching that out in the next few days. Anyway, if you’re interested in writing a wednesday essay, talk to me. In the mean time, stay tuned this week, and I hope that I have something more meaningful to share with you all about Station Keeping in a week.

see you around, tycho

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tagged: hypertext • Station Keeping • TealArt

The last time I spent any great deal of time writing and thinking about e-books, it seemed like they were the thing of the future, and that with a little bit of practice, adjustment, and technological development, the digital text would be able to replace the printed one. This was to be a great thing: with production costs greatly reduced, more people could publish their work, with less overhead, and books could be sold for substantially cheeper while still increasing profit margins. Besides all of the technological benefits (searching, indexing, tranclusion), e-books had (have?) the potential to re/democratise publishing writing and reading. While we may yet see a system that will revolutionize the digital “book,” it seems pretty safe to call the ebook a failure. Perhaps its the fault of the DRM efforts to overprotect text which limited accessibility, and perhaps it’s the fault of the hardware developers to produce an affordable, open device. In any case, we’re not there.

A few friends of mine, scoff predictably at any mention of the ebook because they “fail to understand how people read,” and while this is part of the puzzle, it also seems to me that they fail to understand how we write–if you’re reading this, I do indeed know that the distinction isn’t that large. I don’t think it’s productive to retort to the argument that people’s attention span flies out the window when they’re in-front of a screen, because I think we have a similar attention span problem with paper, the ritual of turning pages (literally) lets us “reset,” as do the blank pages and space around chapter/part breaks. It’s significantly easier to “chunk” and “chart progress” a book than it is a column of text. Writers (and editors), on some level, are aware of this, and can organize books destined for print in a way that uses these breaks to help the way that a book is consumed. Even though in the loosest sense a book is just a collection of words, the materiality of books contributes/constructs our experience of the words, and when you try and take the words of the book, and put them in a different format: it doesn’t work (as well). E-books fail because we keep trying to simply republish p-books electronically, and keep failing because they’re not structured or written in a form that would be productive.

The truth is, I think, that no one really has a clue how write the digital equivalent of a book yet, because they aren’t really books as we know them. We, both specifically at TealArt and the internet in general, tend toward shorter serializations, I think in large part because of the blog, but also because it’s hard to expect (or want) the kind of devotion to blogs that people often have for books. We read books one at a time, sometimes we’ll have our fingers in two or three, but rarely more than that; whereas we read dozens or even hundreds of websites concurrently. Digital writers need to be able to address the way that we approach digital reading, and while there’s a lot of this that has to happen on the publication end, and though I don’t have any empirical justification¹ for this it seems that there are stylistic concerns on the level of the paragraph that need to be addressed for electronic literature to “work.”

At the same time, I think there is a place for another electronic writing form that isn’t just a translation of a book into a digital format, or a sort of print-lite text, but allows authors to engage with a subject or story in a substantive and sustained way that has more depth than the short forms that have already succeeded on the web. I’m not sure what the format would be both from a technological and rhetorical perspective, but I can see some sort of easily serializable xml formating that allows for easy paragraphical numbering, and shorter paragraphs, perhaps we’ll call it the dbook. You heard it here first.

As a corollary, I suppose, this is why I’m so interested and supportive of the PDF format: its basically universal, and it allows writers and creators to reliably control the way that a text is presented. I think if we’re going to see viable electronic editions of print books, they’ll have to be in PDF[^guten] format. This isn’t the wave of the future in terms of “new media” and “new writing” but its something that needs to happen as part of a transition.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on what kind of stylistic concerns long form digital writing might entail, or your thoughts on the reading/writing experience of electronic books and literature. I’ll be back in a week with something else entirely, I’m sure.

cheers, tycho

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tagged: hypertext • writing

It’s Thursday, and it looks like I’m back with another tech-related whine.

I’m a quicksilver user, and I have to say that I adore this program more than just about any other on my computer, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m always so insistent about using my computer: it’s downright unsettling to use a computer that doesn’t have QS on it.

What’s quicksilver? It’s a nifty little application launcher that lets you interact with your computer via text inputs. Do a google search and you’ll learn way more than I could really hope to tell you here. Anyway it’s awesome, and it’s free. If you use a mac, get it now. If you don’t there are some things that are close in some of the functionality, but the truth is that so much of what makes QS so good, is the fact that it draws on all kinds of unity that already exists in the mac, and makes all that connectedness appear at your finger tips without having to futz through menus and folders and so forth.

So this got me thinking: modern computing (ie. the last 20 years) has been centered around the GUI (graphical user interface) that represents file structures via pretty pictures. So most people are used to interacting with their computers via pictures and what not. (You UNIX nerds, be quiet!) And this is really good for letting people intuitively figure out how to make a computer work. It’s the reason that most people don’t have a real problem moving between Macs and PCs these days. The down side: it’s really fracking slow for a good deal of what we do.

There are a couple other pieces of this mind puzzle that I really don’t remember the source for, and I’m sorry for that, but they added to the mileux of this whine.

The first is that I saw an article that noted how in the hands of a skilled user the address bar of Firefox can function like a rather smart command line: If you type in a collection of words, depending on your settings Firefox will take you to the first google search result (which is often what you wanted) or it will take you to the google search result for those terms. You can augment this by adding extra codes in the settings, so that prefacing a string of terms/search operators with a key (like wiki for wikipedia) will perform a certain kind of search. It’s pretty nifty, and to be honest I think it was an article in a blog that I glazed over because I’m not using firefox these days (it’s all about Camino for me!)

The second thought was that someone mentioned, again in a blog or podcast, that if you watch “power” users even if they’re not working in a command line environment don’t tend to use the mouse very much. It’s inefficient, it takes too long, it can be hard on your wrists, and it’s a lot easier to hit control/comannd+C, control/comand+V to copy and paste than it is to interact with the edit menu. The truth is that most of the commonly used features have associated commands and by just studying this, you can use the mouse a lot less frequently.

I don’t want to give up all GUI features, and go back to olde school command lines, mind you, as there are some things that just work better with mouse actions: Web browsing. Document Preparation. Graphics manipulation. Sound Editing (sometimes). And so forth. But file manipulation? Task switching? Text editing? Command lines are way better for that.

Do I have a solution? Of course not. I think something a lot like quicksilver but that had the permanency of the menu-bar in OS X would be ideal¹. I think the real challenge though is finding a way to make this kind of human-computer interaction seem as intuitive as pointing and clicking. I think with some smart technology it could be done.

do you have a whine about technology? send it in or leave a comment. I’ve written this for two weeks in a row, and I didn’t quite intend this to be another series, so if you like it, it might be up to you to continue…

best, tycho

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tagged: technology