Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Digital Storytelling

Published on January 29, 2010 in Digital Storytelling. 6 Comments

First, I’m already happy with my theme, so I probably won’t change it too much, but I messed with my index page and with the help of the CSS-literate I was able to turn it into a garishly-colored title page featuring bees! I’m still working on it. The fact that I can’t get the jar to be in the center irks me greatly. And I wish so much I was patient enough to learn javascript, and could afford flash. ’cause some really freaking neat things could be done if I had time and money. Oh well, sometime later I guess. The entire theme may change depending on what goes on my website later, anyway. I have some plans for this space I have purchased.

Sowieso, when I first heard of this class my mind went to webcomics. They are one of the most popular ways to tell a story on the internet. Everyone and their brother has an idea for a comic, and places like comicgenesis.com allow almost anyone to publish one with no knowledge of code, no need to buy a domain at all. I have an idea for a webcomic. >.> This class may or may not see it revealed.
So, some of my favorite examples of this medium are

Girl Genius
Order of the Stick
Gunnerkrigg Court
xkcd
Questionable Content
Sinfest

There are countless others that I sometimes remember to check, but these are the ones I never forget.

The second thing that sprang to my mind was John Dies At The End, I’m not sure how true an example this is. It was a full horror novel released as a series on David Wong’s website from 2000 to 2006 (I think, he took that information off his website too.) It’s no longer available for free online as it was when I first read it, but it was professionally published late last year and is available on Amazon.

So then I thought about Lonelygirl15, something I haven’t watched myself but I have read about. It started as a series of video blogs featuring a girl introduced as Bree and her best friend Daniel. It turned out to be not a series of blogs, but a youtube TV show. I hear the plot gets outlandish later on.

This is all assuming that by “digital storytelling” we’re talking fiction. These are stories told on the internet, but perhaps with the exception of lonelygirl15, they’re not stories told with the internet. And they are not the story of someone’s real-life experiences, which I get the feeling is what I’m supposed to be looking for.
You can find a lot of neat stories in youtube serials and fake twitter accounts. Or real twitter accounts I suppose. Mine tells the story of someone who doesn’t like twitter but is just enough of an attention whore to use it daily now that she’s got one.

Of course, this blog right here is an excellent example of digital storytelling. :P Truly, the author is a genius. Or insane.

Themes, eh?

Published on January 27, 2010 in Digital Storytelling and Uncategorized. 3 Comments Tags: .

I’ve never had a wordpress blog. That’s a lie, I had to make one for German 393 sophomore year. I’ve never kept up with a wordpress blog, because I dislike the default theme so much. It just reeks of a lack of individuality, and I hate that. I mean, I knew I could change it to a different theme, but there’s a part of me that thought at some point I’ll learn CSS and HTML and I’ll be able to create my own theme, for my own website, with some real customization madness. This, along with an inability to decide on a good name for a blog, kept me from ever starting one. Then I needed one for this class. Having decided on a domain name, I already had the name of my blog, and once over that rather silly hurdle I had to get over my lack of coding knowledge and find a suitable theme.

So I chose this one, which is called Snag. I liked the color scheme. I was delighted to find that I could change the title of the blog to an image and then replace the image with a logo of some sort, something that would have to be bee related. The process of doing so went like this (and may only work for this theme, but it might be somewhat helpful)

Blog > Dashboard > Appearance > Snag Options > Display type: Image

Create a logo or whatever you want in the header of your blahg. Save it “logo.png”

Then go into Cpanel > File manager > public_html > Blog > wp-content > themes >snag (or I suppose the name of your theme)> images

Upload your image there, overwrite the current “logo.png” file in the folder, and it should work.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the name of my blog (and you’re probably not) I’ve made an “about” page. It explains very little.

Augmenting Human Intelligence

Published on January 25, 2010 in Digital Storytelling. 1 Comment

Holy cow, what an essay to get through.

So the computer is a tool for augmenting intelligence. A tool for solving problems quickly. A tool that could solve all of our problems for us. I’m not sure if Engelbart could guess how much we would come to rely on these tools that can  indeed solve our most complex problems. Of course, “The power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.” A computer can only be as smart as the programmer. But, as we try to make it easier and easier to solve our problems…

It’s just a bit farther until skynet takes over and we’re all doomed.

Reflections on Gardner Campbell

Published on January 19, 2010 in Digital Storytelling. 4 Comments

No Digital Facelifts emphasizes the role of the internet and networking and the personal cyber infrastructure in education. I agree on most fronts. My education has been purely transactional, I haven’t been encouraged to be creative or taught to be creative. That hasn’t stopped me from being creative, but it’s kept me from enjoying school.

Digital identity is an important topic to me. I am a person who lives mostly on the internet. I have a facebook which I check all too regularly. I’ve been a regular contributing member of a forum for two years, I greatly enjoy the community there and have made some excellent friends. “The connection between a personal cyber infrastructure and creativity and the realization of self in communication with others is VERY strong, and CRUCIAL.” I agree, and I’m very pleased to have a domain of my own.
I definitely agree about importance of identity markers, mentioned in No Digital Facelifts. It is impossible to feel like an individual on the internet without them. I feel much more like an individual interacting with people on the internet from my persona there than I do interacting on Blackboard with people I have actually met.

The theme of creativity occurs in both lectures. When Campbell spoke to our class he introduced a quote of Kay’s: “A computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.” He emphasized the fact that technology is not stuff. It’s not ipods or cell phones. It is a means for living. And people don’t understand that, and it is “crucial that we explore and understand how networks or communication work and constitute the self.”

I noticed that Campbell also mentions in both lectures that language is a technology. In Digital Facelifts it’s that the alphabet is as much a disruptive technology as the printing press, and then later mentions that the definition of cyber infrastructure could certainly be used to describe an alphabet. And he did rage to us about language being technology that occurred before the babyboomers, when that video claimed otherwise.

I really enjoyed both of these lectures, Gardner Campbell is a great and engaging speaker.

This is a test.

Published on January 19, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Hm.