Week 12: Guest Lecture

This week I have the great pleasure of introducing Kate Pullinger.

Here is Professor Sue Thomas (left), Kate Pullinger (next to Sue) and moi. We were being very transliterate with our Nintendo DS game playing.

A bit about Kate:

Kate Pullinger’s most recent book, The Mistress of Nothing, won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, and was long-listed for the Giller Prize. Her digital fiction project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes, reaching online audiences around the world. She is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University where she co-founded TRG, the Transliteracy Research Group, and she also offers private 1-1 mentoring for emerging writers in both print and new media.
Kate Pullinger is currently working on a new novel that builds on themes developed in her collaborative digital fiction project, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel. You can also read Kate on My Secret Blog.

Read more on Kate's site: http://www.katepullinger.com/

Kate's Guest Lecture:


‘Inanimate Alice’ and Her Other Lives: a mini-case study


Kate Pullinger


I came across this a couple of weeks ago and was amazed by it: it's a fictional

podcast in the style of a radio interview. In it, Alice, the character we created for our online episodic multimedia digital novel (gasp) 'Inanimate Alice',
is interviewed by the host of a show called 'The Daily Dose' about a 'giga pet' she's created, 'the Brad Bud'.


It's just over three minutes long but I'm amazed by it on many levels, but mainly on the level of 'wow'. These students have taken the Alice stories far beyond what exists online, developed Alice's character into young adulthood, created a business for Alice that includes a piece of tech kit that Alice has designed herself, the ‘Brad bud’. Then they've gone one step further and created a talk show for Alice to appear in, with its own host, and they've recorded the talk show interview, and broadcast it, along with the transcript, online.


There's very little information on the podcast webpage itself, but I can see from the url that it comes out of 'pitt.edu' which is the University of Pittsburgh in the US. A few tweets later, I'd figured out that these students are working with Jamie Skye Bianco, who is Professor of Digital Media at Pittsburgh (also known online as @spikenlilli). Jamie teaches both 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths' to students on her 'Narrative & Technology' class; her students wrote a series of interesting blogposts about Alice and FP earlier this year.


It's been nearly two years since new episodes of Inanimate Alice, created by readers, first started appearing online, and these new episodes continue to proliferate. The pedagogical community around the project continues to grow; if you are interested in having a look at it, a good place to start is the Facebook Inanimate Alice group page. Recent developments include a Scottish teacher, Hilery Williams, who has written a series of wonderful blog posts about using 'Inanimate Alice' with dyslexic teenaged readers; the post linked to here is number four in a series on Alice.


As well as that, another Scottish teacher, Kenny Pieper, has been using Alice in his secondary school classroom and, again, blogging about it in a way that I've found both useful and inspiring. Both groups of students are working on their own episodes of Alice, and Mr Pieper’s class has started posting these online at the class ‘Inanimate Alice’ blog - https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/sl/InanimateAliceBlog/


For writers who work in the genre of science fiction, this kind of reader-story interaction is fairly commonplace via 'fanfic', or fan fiction. But for a writer like me, working in both the genre of literary fiction, and with new forms of digital fiction, having readers talk back to my story in this way is an extraordinary experience. Every time I see a new episode, or a new blog post from people working with 'Inanimate Alice' I feel absolutely amazed. To me it seems a very meaningful form of interactivity and I'm thrilled that these stories are being used by students and teachers around the world to find new ways of talking and thinking about storytelling in the 21st Century.


I was interviewed recently for an article called 'Are Midlist Authors An Endangered Species?' that appeared in the Globe & Mail newspaper yesterday - somehow I've become one of the go-to-girls for journalists who want to talk about the future of the book and the future of stories. My conversation with the journalist was, of course, vastly reduced in the context of the article, and I ended up being quoted in the final paragraph, given this as a not-very-bright-sounding last word: “Writers will make a living in a lot of different ways, only some of which are writing,” Uh-huh. I was described in the article as a writer who "publishes both conventionally and online, where she posts fiction for free." While, strictly speaking, when it comes to 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths', this is true - these works are available online for free - to see the vast interactive community project that Alice in particular has become reduced to 'fiction for free' is infuriating. This is not to fault the journalist; my point here is that at the moment the argument about the future of publishing seems to be focussing on self-publishers vs real publishers, on 'free' versus 'paid' content. To me this feels like I'm watching a couple of mice argue over a tiny piece of cheese while around the corner a big fat cat (representing the vast potential for multimedia, interactivity, mobile delivery, etc etc etc that digital platforms offer to writers) sits calmly licking her paw.


I’d be interested to hear from you all about what you think about this kind of thing. What are your thoughts about how writing and publishing are changing? Have any of you been in touch with writers you admire via social media? Would you feel able or inclined to contact a writer you like through their website, or their twitter feed or facebook page, for example?

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.

Guest Lecture: Professor Sue Thomas

Transliteracy: what is it and how can we measure it?

Hello everyone, it’s a pleasure to work with you this week. I’m writing from the heart of England, where I live in a small cottage about 15 miles from the city of Leicester. Spring is about to start here, so the first flowers are starting to appear and the days are getting longer. It’s great that the internet allows us to communicate so easily across the world and I’m very much looking forward to talking about transliteracy with you this week!

Transliteracy is 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. To put it another way, being transliterate involves being open to difference and prioritising what unites us rather than what divides us.

From your point of view, transliteracy is especially important in terms of your learning experiences. A recent UK article said this about my research at De Montfort University:

The media's teenage stereotype is that of a girl watching Hollyoaks on television while simultaneously discussing its plot lines on the social networking site Facebook, listening to music on MySpace and texting her friend to discuss home study. Sue Thomas is exploring the impact that transliteracy is having on higher education and pedagogy. In transliterate terms, many academics are in essence illiterate, which matters if their teaching relationship with hyper-transliterate students is breaking down because of an inability to communicate fully with each other. If academics cannot show themselves to be transliterate, will they lose the respect of their students?

It continues:

Meanwhile, a committee looking at the impact of the "Google generation" on HE (Higher Education) has found that 95% of students are members of an online social network and that more than 50% have a blog or website. These transliterate students arrive at university with a set of assumptions about how they will use these skills in their education, and have difficulty if such assumptions are questioned.

Should tutors be expecting, even demanding, that students communicate with each other electronically? Communication tools such as Second Life, the web-based virtual world, involve creating alternative identities. Should students be expected or required to generate these for themselves? Professor Thomas believes that as transliteracy travels up the HE agenda, academics will be obliged to add new forms of communication to their portfolio of teaching methods. There is a debate to be had with applicants. The evidence is that students still want face-to-face contact, and value that. Some do not see new technology as the core of learning, even though they may spend two or three hours a day on the web. What do they expect? What do they want? What are they prepared for? A transliterate study style incorporates a range of learning modes, combining traditional face-to-face lectures, seminars and tutorials with online classes via the web and mobile media. [ from ‘Getting In Getting On! A Guide to getting into Higher Education’ by Rob Brown & Mike Chant 2010)

Do you agree with their conclusion that young people of today are transliterate? Do you consider yourself to be transliterate? This week I’d like to look at various different approaches to transliteracy and invite you think about how you might measure transliteracy in yourself and others.

I have some reading for you, some videos, and a task. I advise you do them in the following order but feel free to pick and mix if that suits you better.

Reading and Watching

1.     Watch my Transliteracy lecture  http://vimeo.com/2831405

2.     Dip into the Transliteracy Research Group blog http://www.transliteracy.com

3.     Librarians are very excited about transliteracy. Find out why from Bobbi Newman’s slideshow Libraries and Transliteracy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk4Cw8vrDuM

4.     Bobbi’s work inspired librarian Brian Hulsey to make an amusing video about making a blueberry smoothie the transliterate way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h06FZryyQM4

5.     Transliteracy also inspired one of my former students, Mary King, an English journalist living in Japan, to make this very meditative film: Transliteracy - The Spirit of Kanji  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7srRPi5R2Gw

6.     This journal article sums up much of what I say in the video lecture: Transliteracy: Crossing Divides by Sue Thomas, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger, First Monday, Volume 12 Number 12 - 3 December 2007 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2060/1908

7.     And you should check out the #transliteracy tag on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/saved-search/transliteracy

Task

Imagine that you have been asked to measure the transliteracy levels of students and teachers at your school. How would you do this? Post your suggestions and we’ll discuss them. I look forward to seeing your ideas.

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