Week 11: Guest Lecture

Here is the guest lecture from Bobbi Newman:

If transliteracy is the future of literacy, what happens to publishing and how does the role of libraries change?

Hello everyone! I’m writing from an apartment filled with moving boxes, I’ve just relocated from Georgia for a position at a public library system in Columbia South Carolina. I’ll be responsible for staff learning and development, I will be helping library staff assist patrons in a transliterate world.

We are in the midst of exciting and challenging time for both libraries and publishers.  Advances in technology have allowed society to re-examine (and perhaps redefine) what exactly is a book. Ebooks or electronic books have been around for years, but it’s only recently with the increase in popularity of devices like the the Kindle and the Nook that use among the general population has taken off. It is worth noting that despite the attention and time given to the issue of ebooks that they still account for a small portion of sales. 1

The ebook landscape is still evolving so while we generally have an idea of ebooks that we agree upon, there are file format differences between vendors, not to mention DRM (Digital Rights Management). DRM is technology used by publishers, and others, to control and limit access to digital content. Both the lack of an industry standard for a file format and the demands of DRM create a burden for libraries. DRM places additional limitations and requirements for the download process that makes accessing and using library ebooks a less than elegant process.

Note: Image from: http://bradcolbow.com/archive/view/the_brads_why_drm_doesnt_work/?p=205


With the announcement of the iPad in April of 2010 a new twist was introduced to electronic books. The interactive ability of the iPad allowed a whole new dimension to books the embedding or linking to additional content. As Rinzler notes these interactive books are actually apps that must be purchased from the app store not the iBooks store. Which might beg the question: are they books? Or what IS a book?

YouTube video review of Cat in the Hat App





Because the ebook landscape is still evolving the lending/leasing/buying model between publishers and libraries is still evolving too. Recent HarperCollins decided that ebooks leased by libraries will only be good for 26 check-outs, after that they expire and libraries will be forced to pay for the title again. This creates additional budgetary problems for libraries as well as concerns on how to manage the title affected.

As the world is changing around us so is the role of libraries. It is now necessary for library staff to understand the different file formats and able to explain these to our patrons.  The general public does not understand the difference between an epub vs pdf ebook file and the need to explain the differences in file format often comes in to play while assisting with ebooks. Staff may need to explain why the popular Amazon Kindle does not work with library ebooks, and they need to do so in a way that is free from jargon and techno-speak. Staff need to be able to pick up on an reader they may have never seen before and assist a patron with its usage. This can be especially hard because of the variety of ebook devices or ereaders on the market. Many libraries can not afford to purchase all of these devices for staff learning.

The emerging ebook eco-system is just one reason that library staff need to be transliterate. The needs of patrons in the 21st Century require a commitment to life long learning and exploration.

How do you define a book?  How do you see the evolution of books in the next 2-5 years? How do you think the coming changes in the capability of books will affect new generations? How will it change the education system?


1. According to Association of American Publishers data, in 2008 ebook sales accounted for approximately 0.5% of all U.S. book sales; a year later, they accounted for 1.3%. Survey of Ebook Penetration and Use in U.S. Public Libraries, Library Journal 2010



Additional reading, watching:

Libraries and Transliteracy – the video version

The Digital Divide Does Not Discriminate

Transliterate Divide – Working Definition

Week 10: Guest Lecture

Ximena Alarcon presenting at Visiones Sonoras organised by the CMMAS in Morelia – México. Image from the Sounding Underground blog.

This week Ximena Alarcon will be sharing her expertise with us. Ximena has prepared an interview for a community radio station in Devon (England) with Ariane Delaunois. It's a very detailed explanation of Ximena's Sounding Underground project.

Abstract of Sounding Underground:

Sounding Underground

year of production: 2009

used technology (software etc): Flash CS4 Actionscript 3.0

required plug-ins: Flash Player 9 or 10

http://soundingunderground.org

Short work description

Sounding Underground is a virtual environment that invites users to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process. These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro distributed into: Entrance, Tickets, Corridors, Platform, and Carriage, correspond to the identifiable spaces recognised by any commuter, as well as some shared sonic spaces: Amplified Voice, Steps, Doors, Trains Arriving. Each metro has a unique space: Paris (air sounds), Mexico (street vendors), and London (announcements). This environment allows commuters, through interactive options, to experience a process of listening and remembering, provoking the expression of an aural urban collective memory, through the narrative of an underground journey.

Interactivity

Each category contains a sequence of sounds that can be triggered by the user. S/he is invited to interact at his/her own rhythm and to feel free to navigate the spaces. In the interaction, sounds overlap both within categories and spaces, creating a sonic texture derived from the humans’ and the machines’ counterpoint of daily life.

In the graphic interface, each category contains a sequence of images. Although they change each time the user triggers a sound, they may not be directly associated with the sounds. They are close-up pictures of the textures from the metro spaces. Most are abstract images allowing one to focus attention on the sounds, which resembles the activity of wandering (as if lost in thought). The graphic spaces overlap to create the feeling of being in a common space that changes because of the movement of sound in space and not because of its graphic structure: the latter is fixed, and serves both as a score and as a user interface.

Sounding Underground also invites you to write memories in text, produced by listening. These memories are being published randomly in the "Listening and Remembering" page.

Sounding Underground is the result of a practice-led research project studied commuter’s perceptions towards their daily life soundscape in underground public transport systems, taking the case studies of Paris and México City as counterparts of the London Underground. Sixteen commuters in Mexico, and sixteen in Paris, contributed to the creation of the environment, and their experiences were linked to the original project in London, in which twenty-four volunteers participated.

Linking urban soundscapes through commuters’ memories invites us to acknowledge symbolic, social, economic and political issues of mobility in contemporary cities, from their perspective. This approach strives to make commuters contributors in the creation of these environments, and furthermore performers (as non-musicians) and narrators of their commuting experience. 

Before listening to the interview, "play" with Sounding Underground.

NOTE: the audio files are available in BlackBoard, there's a link from the home page.

The questions that are covered:

1. From start to now (and future project). How did the art piece

(materially) took form?

2. How is the experience on the ethnographic aspect? on the

interdisciplinary aspect?

3. As a sound artist has the experience changed you and your sound

awareness/consciousness?

4. How was it as a sound specialist?

5. How was your artistic journey? Are you happy of the form it took

and what further development do you want the project to take?

6. How did you choose the cities you located the project?

7. How do the locations link to your life?

8. How was your own experience of sound when you travelled?

9. How rich was the inter relation between participants and you?

10. What interested you in collective memory, interactivity, in the

link between people and technology?

11. What have you understood of the reflective potential of

respondents? Are you satisfied of the experience representation of

your participants?

12. Are you reworking on your installations?

13. What will be your next direction/step after this research?

Please post any questions to Ximena here as she'll be checking back and will add her responses in the comments.

Week 9: Transliteracy

“The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”

The word “transliteracy” is derived from the verb “to transliterate,” meaning to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language. 

The idea of transliteracy is really about promoting a unifying ecology. As Thomas explains, 

“The concept of transliteracy calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital, and a move instead towards a unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture, both past and present.

 It is an opportunity to cross some hitherto quite difficult divides.” 

Transliteracy asks key questions about communication:

1. How were people remembering and communicating for the thousands of years before writing?
2. Where are the similarities with the way we communicate today?
3. Has our addiction to print made us forget skills we had before?
4. Can digital media reconnect us with those skills again?

Watch “Social Media Revolution” on YouTube:  

Literacy is not linear. ““Part of the confusion about media convergence stems from the fact that when people talk about it, they’re actually describing at least five processes” (Henry Jenkins, 2001). 

• technological
• economic
• social or organic
• cultural
• global
  

MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Another term which has become widely used about these kinds of experiences, especially by the media and gaming worlds, is “convergence.” In 2001 when Henry Jenkins noted the confusion about media convergence actually is because of the various processes that are at play (it is not one single required literacy). For Jenkins, “these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance - a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives” (Jenkins, 2001). 

Sue Thomas often refers to the Asheninka tribe as an example of a transliterate group. For them transliteracy imbues every aspect of their culture:

“Everything we use has a story. Each drawing which is passed from one generation to another is our writing; each little symbol has an immense story. As one learns a drawing, one learns its origin, who taught it, who brought it to us.”




Discussion Questions:

Q1. What is transliteracy? Give examples of how transliteracy appears in your daily life.

Q2. How does Coover’s “The End of Books” (originally written in 1992) align with a contemporary thinking of transliteracy and the development of the web into web 2.0?

Q3. According to Aarseth’s “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” “the text...entails a set of powerful metaphysics...the three most important ones are those of reading, writing and stability” (763).  Having read about and discussed the idea of transliteracy, would you suggest adding or changing any of the three elements that Aarseth notes as most important? Must “users” (readers) “learn to accept their position as agents of the text” or might they play a more decisive role (as in Andy Campbell’s works)?

Week 3: Guest Lecture from Neil Baldwin

Neil Baldwin. Image from the Creative Research Centre. 

Thanks so much to Neil Baldwin (Director of the Creative Research Center at Montclair State University) for sharing his thoughts and expertise with us here in the form of an open letter.

Students - please remember to respond in the comments.

January 23, 2011

Dear Jess: I congratulate you on the magnificence of your New Media Narratives course – all of it! -- the Syllabus, the probing and provocative questions, the required readings, the entire “culture” of the work you are doing, and the thoroughness and depth of scholarship.

I am honored to be asked to share my thoughts on transdisciplinarity and on publishing and thereby to make a simulus/contribution to the building-up and looking-forward phase of the course.

I hope you don’t mind that I am communicating as if I were writing a letter.

It’s a way for me to pretend that I am speaking to you and your students since I cannot be there in person, which would be wonderful.

You, Jess, way back when, were one of the first “appreciators” of the Creative Research Center www.montclair.edu/creativeresearch.

I won’t go into the mission and originating impetus behind the CRC, because all of that is well-spelled-out in our Mission Statement and other rhetoric pervading the site.

I would, however, like to direct you and your students to the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages of the CRC.

These have grown exponentially in the past six months, and are the two dimensions of the site of which I am proudest, even moreso than the blogs.

Let me explain why – by way of actually and yes, metaphorically addressing two of the core issues of your course.

The thoughts that follow herewith are actually the first time I have shared publicly a selection of segments of a long essay/book in progress that began gestating at the end of last year, when I finally came to terms with how much time I was spending on the Web.

For most anyone between the ages of 12-35, this is the norm.

For someone of my generation (born 1947), a “Baby Boomer,” this is a breakthrough.

That admitted, I spotlight the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages for many reasons, the primary one being pedagogical.

To me -- a lifelong teacher and learner (those two are inextricably linked), starting in the analog world and now deeply immersed in the digital -- links represent the cultivation of the ideal sensibility and habits of Mind that should be applied to the use of text on the Web. 

There is a remarkable degree of attention and sensory discrimination required to correctly, appropriately, & constructively embed a network of links into a born-digital text.

The CRC as intentionally link-laden/link-heavy.

This intention is an inherent aspect of our causal aesthetic.

If the medium is the message, then the efficacy of the medium will be judged by the degree to which the message is exploited.

I want to open up born-digital,Web-based writings and make them more permeable, reflective, and directive out into the world.

Linking breaks down the walls of the Web text that I am “on,” [as it were] – making the text into a permeable membrane.

Powerful decisions and choices are made with each link put into place: to whom, and for what reasons, are links chosen to be set into, and then to lead out of, a Key Word or term.

Links possess compositional importance.

They are not just mere elaborations, to “force” the piece wider. If the writer does that, the piece will come across as self-conscious and artificial.

Linking makes a structural statement about the way one curates and conceptualizes information and presents it - framed in a certain manner - to others.
Links open up the singular text being composed to a multiplicity of other influences and associations which make the work being written and posted become transdisciplinary on the most fundamental linguistic level. 

Flashback: Twelve years ago, at which time I was the founding Executive Director of The National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, I was invited by Microsoft Corporation to pay a visit to their Seattle headquarters.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement, however, nothing I am about to tell you and your students will violate that.

One of the reasons the Microsoft executives wanted me to talk with them was so they could show me the first prototype model of an e-book reader.

Remember, this was a dozen years ago.

The e-book was a glimmer in the eyes of the technology world.

The most vivid impression I retain from that visit was a mural I saw on the wall of a conference room. It was a kind of “evolutionary” chart with the Gutenberg press at one end, books as we knew them toward the middle, and electronic books at the right edge.

Someone waggled their index finger at me by way of a warning: “Books are dead. We have the wave of the future.”

They handed me a hand-made e-reader, cobbled together with screws. “This is where we are going,” they said. “The train has left the station.”

I have singled out the power of links because they are the most fundamental building-blocks of transdisciplinarity. Links are the most viable currency of digital communication because they permit texts to connect without disrupting original words. It was an extension of link-thinking that inspired me to make the CRC; because, in a higher education setting, where disciplines are hard-wired and immutable on an analog level, I believed the CRC would break new ground without threatening existing academic “units,” as we call them here in the USA. And now we are seeing the efflorescence of a hypertext boom in publishing allowing us to carry around thousands of books unencumbered.

I remember saying to myself a few short months ago that I enjoyed expressing my thoughts and observations on the exponential growth and expansion of media technology; but I also harbor no illusions that my opinions – well-considered and interesting though they may be – are going to in any way effect the pace of change.

All the best, & please keep in touch. Yrs., Neil Baldwin creative@mail.montclair.edu      

Interesting Project: Human Library

Perhaps extra interesting for Week 3 and our discussions on the history of books, print culture and technology.

Read more: http://humanlibrary.org/the-concept-of-the-living-library.html

Transdisciplinarity - collaboration through new media TKB

In this new media environment transdiciplinarity entails the sharing of knowledge within different disciplines. Today's technologies facilitate this sharing of knowledge through relative ease. Perhaps this ease also results in collaboration between disciplines, which without the use of technology would find it very difficult to exchange concepts and techniques. The technology serves as a bridge.

Transdisciplinarity brings to light the question – who becomes the subject matter expert? When teachers, educators, critics, artists and curators are all collaborating on a particular project or initiative, is the expertise then based on the collective wisdom of all the people involved or do we still have clear cut answers as to who holds the knowledge in relation to a particular concept or technique? Maybe we are now living in a world in which subject matter expert is closely linked to who can best use technology to become the expert on a particular topic. New media affords us access to a great deal of knowledge. It remains to be seen whether we take that knowledge and we simply become more knowledgeable or do we then create so called experts, with all of us knowing a little bit about everything but very little about something.

The collaboration within transdisciplinarity requires a solid understanding and appreciation of the various disciplines that are present-their values, standards and means in which they conduct their work. This is also the same within publishing. When all of these disciplines are sharing knowledge, there needs to be a valid and efficient way in which this knowledge is compiled, shared and archived.

Week 1 - New Media & Transdisciplinarity - Sunil A.

Transdisciplinarity in this new media environment is a research method that crosses different disciplines. With traditional media meshing with communication technology, the internet opens up more nodes and networks to interact with. This interaction is critical to information sharing and knowledge production for any field.

With the amount of information available increasing because of the web, researchers have to be open to engaging with other disciplines. Tools that allow for tagging digital documents and media opens up the possibility of tapping into a new field that may support an individuals or groups knowledge production.

Combining so many areas of expertise (ex. Teachers, designers, etc) will present challenges when publishing information. Each discipline has its own history and standards of publishing. If knowledge can be produced among different people from different areas, a common approach to publishing has to be established. Not to say that one has to trump that other. Perhaps new methods and standards of publishing altogether can be developed to reflect a transdisciplinary research approach.

Important things to consider when publishing would be the history of each discipline and how it has published articles in the past. What journals tend to publish their work and what standards are in place. New media also has the capabilities of further manipulation. For example, digital media can be personalized and re-coded in the background to reflect what the user wants and/or needs.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons