Research reports focus on high-priority items in “Objects for Study.” Reports are written in a standard format designed both to synopsize the topic and to offer a preliminary evaluation of the opportunities it suggests for Transliteracies’s goal of improving online reading.

Summary:The New York Times released TimesPeople on June 18, 2008 with the goal of creating a social network based on sharing content from the website. The June 18th launch, previously available only in Firefox and as a plug-in, became more widely available in September 2008 and allowed users additional features like the ability to sync their TimesPeople activity with their Facebook accounts. More recently, in February, The New York Times added the TimesPeople API to their current list of APIs to facilitate interaction with the Times outside of the website and to move one step closer to reimagining the future of the news through collaboration with developers.

While TimesPeople markets itself as a social network, its stripped down style can be likened to something more along the lines of a tool than a network. Like Twitter, rather than having “friends” on the site, users follow other users and are followed in turn. Profiles are limited to handle, location, and image. Rather than creating content like a blog post or a Facebook note, users interact with the NYTimes.com website through their actions with Times created content. This content ranges from slideshows and articles users share with others to comments, reviews and ratings of movies and restaurants.

Front Page of TimesPeople

Once a user signs up for TimesPeople (any registered user of the website may do so), they can access information from the toolbar at the top of the page (which shows the latest updates from the users one follows) or by looking at a user’s page, which lists all TimesPeople activity. The toolbar, in addition to allowing a user to access his or her own settings, activities, and profile easily, lists the most current update (only one at a time) with the handle of the user that performed the action (recommending, commenting, etc.), the relevant article, and the date. By pressing the down arrow, a user can scroll through other updates, and view the dates for each. Users can easily add or remove people they follow with a link next to the arrow and, if a user so chooses, can close the toolbar itself by clicking the “X” to the right of the bar.Clicking on one’s own username or “My Activity” allows a user to view his or her page. The page features a sidebar that allows a user to view “My Activity,” “News Feed,” “Following,” and “Followers.” The first section, “My Activity” lists all the user’s activity on TimesPeople, from recommendations to comments. “News Feed” provides a list of all updates from people a user follows while “Following” and “Followers” list the people in each category.

My Activity

Additionally, a user may follow the “TimesPeople Live Feed” on any page to see a list of updates by other users. There is also a space on the right-hand side of the page that lists what is most popular on TimesPeople based on comments and ratings.

Live Feed

Users can also sync their TimesPeople activity with their Facebook account so that Facebook friends can receive updates. Facebook users can choose to have a TimesPeople tab and / or box added to their profile and whether or not to publish TimesPeople updates to their Facebook news feed. While the TimesPeople tab lists all update activity, stories posted to the news feed allow Facebook users the opportunity to comment on an update as well as click on whether they like the posted update. Twitter users can also follow TimesPeople to view updates on which pieces of content are most commented on, recommended, and rated.The TimesPeople API allows developers the opportunity to rethink how users interact with TimesPeople. For instance, a developer created a Google gadget using the TimesPeople API that allows users to access their TimesPeople news feed from their Gmail account.

Research Context:

TimesPeople is an important stepping stone as newspapers transition from functioning in a print culture to a digital culture. By emphasizing the need to implement a social element to the newspaper, TimesPeople fundamentally reveals how digital culture has changed not only reading practices, but also how those practices are crucial to the ways in which people interact with one another. Rather than simply reading a news article, users are expected to recommend, rate, comment, and – most importantly – share these actions with others. With the proliferation of news outlets, news sources have become increasingly specialized and tools like TimesPeople help readers locate the kinds of information they seek by following the activities of other users. In doing so, users can access information from other users with similar tastes or gain access to new threads of information from users with different interests. Because tools like TimesPeople highlight the role of sharing information, reading as a social practice emerges as one of the fundamental attributes that underpins how we read in a digital culture.

Books

Technical Analysis:

TimesPeople supports most browsers, though Javascript and cookies must be enabled in order to function properly. The tool also supports the Mac OS X, Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

Evaluation of Opportunities/Limitations for the Transliteracies Topic:

TimesPeople, as a social networking tool based on reading the news, emphasizes how online reading interfaces are increasingly inseparable from social computing. In fact, part of the thinking that went into the creation of TimesPeople stemmed from the realization that in order to keep The New York Times viable in a digital culture, the Times would have to do more than simply make their content available online. The developer section of the website (http://developer.nytimes.com/docs), in addressing the need for Times APIs, explicitly hopes that in seeing what developer’s do with the APIs, the Times can see what direction the newspaper should take in the future.

In locating the future of the newspaper (and not just the Times) within the realm of social computing, TimesPeople acknowledges how reading practices have changed from solitary activities to communal practices. Moreover, by making user actions public (comments, etc.), TimesPeople also highlights how a reader’s relationship to texts has changed. Aside from commenting and recommending, these actions occur in public spaces beyond the Times website in places like Facebook and Twitter, thus underscoring the fact that actively engaging with texts carries the conversations about them outside the sphere of the newspaper. The ability to create new applications using the API further stresses this point since the goal of creating an API is to allow other developers the chance to create reading opportunities on sites all over the internet.

TimesPeople is therefore an important object of study for the Transliterates project because it simultaneously points to how we once read newspapers, how we read them now, and what the future of reading might look like. TimesPeople is an important case study because, while it focuses on the Times, it also has broader implications for newspapers in general as well as other texts. An interesting experiment with TimesPeople would be to compare it to how other newspapers create online communities and analyze what aspects of each approach are successful. Thus far, one of the main limitations of TimesPeople is that, while it incorporates ideas from other existing tools like Twitter and Digg, it still needs to think through what is unique to the Times and how this distinction can be leveraged to think outside already existing tools to create a fresh approach to reading the newspaper. Indeed, one of the strengths of the Times is the fact that, aside from being one of the most respected names in the industry, it creates the majority of its own content. Were the Times to utilize its cultural capital, an interesting route to take would be to form partnerships with other major newspapers to create a universal tool for the newspapers’ readerships such that more traffic will be driven to each newspaper and will not suffer from the limitations imposed by focusing on only one paper, as is the case with TimesPeople.

Resources for Further Study:

• TimesPeople Home Page

The Ontological Problem of Social Computing

At the UCSB’s Bluesky Social Computing Group, part of the University of California’s Transliteracies Project, we are tasked with the problem of researching the impact of social computing as a tool for collaborative research and to explore new ways in which social computing might be used in the future. We have been confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize what social computing means and what we mean when we talk about collaborative research. This issue is further exacerbated by the variety of social computing experiences; broadly considered, anything related to the internet, by definition, is a form of social computing. Recent efforts have focused on developing and applying a deeper understanding of ontological meaningfulness of concepts like a “person” and “relationships”. Most realizations of digital social networks have trivial and naive answers to these questions, a situation which fundamentally limits their usefulness. To this end, it has been suggested by Bluesky project leader and English department chair, Dr. Alan Liu, that new metaphors for social computing are needed.

The Need for a Good Metaphor

Metaphors economically map the cognitive associations and common experiences of one domain directly onto another, thereby possibly providing new and important insights. Just from reading the title of this paper, or just by saying, “social computing is jazz”, one immediately begins to make all kinds of associations and comparisons between jazz and social computing. Everyone already has some idea of what jazz is, so it is easy to come up with a list of attributes (e.g., improvised, self expressive, informal, collaborative) that might be associated, or mapped, to both jazz and social computing.

Metaphors also have the power to potentially unify disparate views and create common contexts for conversation. To clarify this idea, and demonstrate it at the same time, I’ll use a metaphor: they are a springboard with which to jump off. Metaphors have an added benefit as they seem to easily trigger further metaphorical connections, which in turn trigger other new ideas and raise more interesting questions previously not considered. There are many domains which can be metaphorically connected to jazz. This kind of association creates syllogistic metaphors: if A is a metaphor for B and B is a metaphor for C, is not A a metaphor for C? For example, language itself can be reasonably compared to jazz. In many ways, jazz is a kind of abstract musical language. Then, by syllogistic metaphorical comparison, perhaps social computing is a kind of abstract language.

However, if not careful, metaphors introduce distortion and confusion. Since no two domains are ever exactly the same, there are always implied associations where none exist. Indeed, there is a kind of metaphorical energy conservation in effect: the more clarity gained in some aspect of a domain is almost always at the expense of more confusion in another aspect of the same domain. Therefore, they should only be used as an intellectual tool, a catalyst for ideas, questions and conversation.

This essay will now explore a couple of interesting metaphorical mappings between social computing and jazz. They are not intended to be definitive explanations, nor are they necessarily exhaustive. The goal is to point out there are some fertile questions and ideas which arise when making the metaphorical comparison.

Works are Created Through Collaborations of Individual, Improvised Expressions

Traditionally, music is written as a static expression of a sole composer. The performers of such compositions have some license of expression but it is the composer who is in control of the musical content and, therefore, controls the expression. Analogously, books (or plays, essays, poems, etc.) are written by a single author (or group of authors) and exist as a singular static entities. An individual reading or speaking the words of the written work has some space for artistic license (ask any actor) but the words are essentially static and written by a sole entity.

Jazz, on other hand, focuses on dynamic and improvised musical collaboration between individuals of a group within a musical context and tradition. A context might be, for example, the melody and chord progression of a given song within a given stylistic idiom. Collectively, the performers create a piece which no individual performer or composer could have created alone.

In the context of social computing, the contributions of individuals (via comments, postings, links, etc.) within a given context (or site) create a collective work which none of the individual contributors could have created or imagined on their own. For example, on an amazon.com product page, there is a well-defined context (i.e., a product review) where individuals share their opinions in the comment section and give a product a rating. Comments, in this case, are the analog of improvisational expression.

Tradition and Etiquette Evolve Spontaneously

Jazz has a long history of evolving traditions. What defines a particular jazz idiom is its associated and usually unspecified stylistic norms. It is important that a jazz musician understands these norms and traditions (consciously or otherwise) in order to effectively contribute to a performance. For example, a musician must never interrupt and cut off another soloing musician in the middle of his or her solo. To do so is an insult and a clear sign of an amateur. As another simple example, consider “swing”. “Swing” is difficult to formally define and never actually notated in musical charts. It is a feel that is roughly characterized by a kind of long-short rhythmic pattern. The amount of swing (or the ratio of long to short) depends upon the musical context. It would complicate the notation and render it unreadable if a composer tried to exactly define the swinging rhythmic pattern. Thus, it is vital for a jazz musician to learn when and when not to “swing” a given figure in a composition and by how much.

Similarly, there is a set of unstated traditions and etiquette in social computing. These traditions can take the form of specific language and symbols, standard interfaces and layouts, or behavioral expectations. These traditions and norms are taken for granted and can be a source of frustration for people learning how to get involved in social computing for the first time. A “newbie”, for example, might think that writing in all caps socially acceptable. They are unaware that to do so is to indicate they are using a shouting or rude tone in their writing. Or, they might be totally perplexed at the extensive lexicon of acronyms and/or “emoticons” that are often used. They might not even be aware of the fact that at the bottom of the article they are reading that they are given the option to “comment” and share their opinion. The concept of tagging content for social bookmarking or photo-sharing might be as alien to them as micro-blogging via Twitter.

Though being ignorant of these socially evolved traditions does not directly harm individuals in either the case of jazz or in social computing contexts, they limit an individuals ability to progress in the social network: they make few friends, are invited to fewer social events (or in the case of jazz, gigs) and will therefore likely be frustrated.

Also, in both the case of jazz and in the case of online social networks, there are ways to learn about the traditions. An aspiring jazz musician learns from elder jazz musicians. They might attend jazz concerts or jam sessions or take private lessons. There are also many books they might read and learn from. In the case of social networking, there are websites which describe social networking etiquette.

Ability is Rewarded Based on Merit and Indicated by a Direct Feedback

During a live performance of jazz, it is a tradition that if an audience appreciates a particular soloist’s performance, they cheer and clap when the soloist finishes, even if the song is not over. The louder and more enthusiastic the clapping and cheering, the more the audience appreciates the solo. A poor performance might garner no claps or even boos. A performer who consistently garners a lot of cheers (or album sales) inevitably rises in social stature.

For most social computing contexts, this feedback between a social computing contributor (i.e., a blogger, commenter, etc) and the audience (or reader) exists in some form. For some social bookmarking or link-sharing sites (digg.com, reddit.com, etc), the audience shows their appreciation (or lack of appreciation) by using a voting system where you can give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to content. On amazon.com, the audience is asked how much a given user-submitted review was helpful. On other social computing sites, like delicious.com, appreciation is indicated by the number of people who tagged or bookmarked a particular piece of content. In all of these cases, the contributed content can be sorted according to its quality as indicated by audience approval. Though these mechanisms were invented as a means to easily find quality content, contributors who consistently provide quality content are given increasingly higher social status and rank.

Expression is Inherently informal

Though composed of numerous strong and well-established traditions, jazz is essentially informal. Unlike classical music, it developed in places such as dance clubs, speakeasies, and bars. Before the 1970s, there existed no formal institution to learn how to play jazz, nor were there any formalized statement of the “rules” or theory of jazz. In many cases, jazz broke rules of music theory and developed many practices which continue to defy musicological explanation. In the past, musicians learned jazz by being a part of the culture. The evaluation of quality was dependent solely on the assessment of audiences and other musicians – there was no authority establishment.

Social computing traditions are also informal and have developed independent of established authority. The practices of social computing have spontaneously evolved, adapting to the needs of individual communities, and are learned by practice and personal experience.

It is important to note that jazz, being an older tradition than social computing, has evolved to a state where there is indeed codified rules, theory, and established authority defining what is quality jazz. There are also countless books with theoretical explanations of how and why jazz works. For social computing, this process of theoretical deconstruction and imposed formalism is in its beginning stages.

Some Questions Which Arise From the Metaphor

Hopefully, the case has been made sufficiently to convince the reader that jazz can be a useful metaphor for social computing. As with all metaphors, it is imperfect. However, there are number of interesting questions which can be asked about social computing through considering the implications. As a demonstration of the branching inquiries that metaphors naturally and inevitably create, I’ll finish the article with a series of questions, some of which originate from my previous points while others are new. Though I could discuss these questions in much more depth in this article, I will leave them for future conversation and debate. Hopefully they will spark additional questions within the reader.

Jazz is composed of many individual genres and styles, all unified by the action of improvised personal expression. Are there similar genres in social computing? If so, what are they? And could they be unified in an analogous way?

In a jazz performance, there are specific rules and traditional roles for each member and instrument in a band. In a social computing context, are there clearly defined separate roles? What are they? What are the rules of behavior for these roles?

As previously mentioned, there has arisen in recent decades a set of codified formalism about jazz. There are now many universities with “jazz studies” degrees and there exist numerous books on jazz theory and methodology. This has resulted in widespread accessibility to learning how to play jazz. However, not all practicing jazz musicians consider this to be a favorable environment for the music. Many argue that it has contributed to the gentrification of jazz, forcing it to a less dynamic state. With clearly defined “right” and “wrong” ways of doing things, there is little room for further evolutionary development. Will there be a similar situation in the future with social computing? Will there be similar resistance to institutionalization and accessibility? What do we, as social computing researchers, want to see in the future? Is there some way to codify and formalize without causing stagnation or preventing innovation?

Jazz music is always expressed in the form of a band of musicians playing together to create a dynamic and spontaneous, collective artistic work. If the group plays together often, each musician learns each others style and, as a result develops a more cohesive musical unit, thereby creating more effective music. Can this also be true in social computing? Are there social computing “bands”? Can a social computing “band” improve the quality of the collective output? What would be the metaphorical equivalent in social computing for the jazz soloist?

Summary:  World Without Oil was an alternate reality game developed by Ken Eklund and Jane McGonigal, ITVS (Independent Television Service) Interactive and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Originally played between April 30 and June 1, 2007, World Without Oil was conceived as both an ARG and a “serious game,” in the sense of  the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 2002 Serious Games Initiative.  The game’s tag line—“Play it before you live it”—emphasized the what-if nature of the game: players were encouraged to explore what would change in their own realities in the event of a massive oil shortage.  Game makers provided rough parameters for the in-game reality (the price of oil, fuel availability) as well as character content (blogs, videos), but the game was aggressively user-driven.  The gamers’ task was to imagine the consequences of a massive oil crisis, communicate about their experience and explore creative strategies for dealing with the attendant difficulties.

Description:  After game designer Jane McGonigal dropped hints about her next project far in advance of its start date, ARG players at Unfiction.com discovered the site www.worldwithoutoil.org.  The website showed the text of a chat between eight “team members,” as well as descriptions of each of them.  Players learned the eight characters’ (known as “Eight To Save Our Country,” or 8TSOC) backstory:  they had met while stranded in a Denver airport during a blizzard, and struck up a friendship.  While at the airport they also encountered a character named Nico, who gave them reason to believe a serious oil shortage would strike the U.S. on April 30th (the game’s start date).

Given access to the characters’ screen names, players soon found their livejournals, blogs, and AIM handles, and began to make contact.  Players who communicated with the characters often found themselves pointed toward real-world, out-of-game articles and websites about energy shortages, survivalism, and oil dependence.  When the game officially started, on April 30th, the worldwithoutoil.org site went live in earnest, with links to character and player blogs, fictional in-game news stories, player-submitted videos and images, and an oil price counter.  It became apparent that the game world would run on an accelerated timeline:  one real-world day would equal a week of in-game time.

Much of the game’s content was player-produced; the website featured links to videos, stories, diary entries and images submitted by players who were countenancing, however virtually, the disruption of an energy crisis.  Players were also encouraged to come up with their own game missions, and the best ideas were awarded points in the form of carbon offsets. Adopted player missions included activities like “ped parties” (social events planned to occur within walkable/bikeable distances from homes), guerilla gardening, local food meals and finding commuting solutions for friends.

According to its own published FAQ, by the game’s end it had more than 1900 players.

Research Context:  Like most ARGs, World Without Oil forges a somewhat de-centralized network of participation, leveraging social networking sites, blogs, chat applications and image and video sharing services in order to connect its geographically diverse players.  Perhaps unlike classic ARGs, however, World Without Oil began with a conspicuously open-ended objective.  Its goal was playful; rather than the solution to a mystery or the accomplishment of a defined task, the object of WWO was to exercise imaginative power.  In contrast to some ARGs’ harnessing of collective intelligence in order to solve puzzles with pre-defined answers, players of WWO generated what the game makers called (in the game’s own FAQ) “the wisdom of crowds”:  a large collection of musings and ideas from which effective solutions could rise.  In WWO, the game was not to find what was hidden, but to imagine the virtual.

Without a concrete goal, and presented with an issue that had no absolute solution, players were free to imagine the proportions of an unmanageable crisis—and free to offer and practice micro-solutions.  The game was undertaken in a spirit of optimism, and while players were encouraged not to discount the sobering enormity of the problem it supposed, attention was focused (via character rhetoric and mission content, for example) on the creation of small strategies.  Game designer Jane McGonigal has written and spoken repeatedly in support of the idea that games and the power of play can be harnessed to address serious problems, and that perspective was clearly in evidence in WWO.  While many games that take on serious subject matter do so in order to heighten awareness of a threat or an injustice, WWO asked its players to investigate practical changes that might be effective during a debilitating oil crisis.  It is perhaps for this intersection—of serious game subject matter and ARG-like strategy—that the game is most notable.

Technical Analysis:  The technologies used by World Without Oil were largely the same as those leveraged by more traditional ARGs—blogging services, Twitter, photosharing services, etc.  Players communicated with each other and with game characters through multiple channels.  The game’s homepage—www.worldwithoutoil.org—served a more central hub than is available in many ARGs; that is, a single site that linked to almost all game content.

Evaluation of Opportunities/Limitations for the Transliteracies Topic:  World Without Oil  is notable for its divergence from traditional ARG structure and style.  Though ARG-like in its convergence of real-world and game-world realities, the game’s “serious game” credentials and lack of conventional puzzle-solving activity mark it as distinct from other ARGs. ARGs in general are player-directed to the extent that, though the general structure of the game is outlined by gamemasters, play itself is performed and made actual by the gamers themselves, and is subject to their own logic or desires; in WWO, there was perhaps even less guidance or expectation on the part of gamemasters, and more latitude given to gamers to construct their own experience(s).  Designer Ken Eklund described it this way:  “In World Without Oil, the players pretty much wrote the story collaboratively. As a result, in WWO there is no abstraction, no external reward, no comfort zone of  ‘Oh good, I found what the gamemasters wanted me to find.’ There is only the person directly inside the ‘what if?’ reality, and the journey is inward.”(1)   Put another way, ARG experience often centers on finding or uncovering points in an already-sketched (though mutable) plot, though the path through the plot-points are undecided.  WWO more closely resembled an improvisation:  players were asked to invest in a set of hypothetical circumstances and act accordingly, urged to create their own plots rather than asked to uncover those intended by the gamemasters.

ARGs conventionally ask for this sort of investiture in the game world, one that recalls Coleridge’s  willing suspension of disbelief (TINAG, an acronym for “this is not a game,” is a common watchword within the genre).  However, in WWO this engagement with the game’s premise required and empowered players to direct the game itself, rather than to do the more traditional work of uncovering a mysterious narrative. While ARG players are always both producers and consumers of game content and game experience, WWO displayed an innovative emphasis on players as cooperative producers and co-designers.  Most ARGs can be said to offer authorship to players primarily in terms of execution and performance, and only secondarily in terms of design.  In WWO, however, gamers were the ones doing the informing, reporting to gamemasters from a fictional present they themselves devised, inventing and giving account of the particulars of life inside an oil crisis.

Finally, in WWO, player action was part of a consideration of a pressing environmental, political and social issue.  “Acting accordingly,” then, provided an opportunity for changes to everyday practice more pointed than those prompted by conventional ARGs.  Part of ARGs’ appeal is their use of objects and practices that exist both in-game and out-of-game—for example, an actual poster for an upcoming movie contains a secret message or a puzzle clue for game players even as it fulfills its function as a piece of “real world” advertising.  In World Without Oil, the practices and objects splitting the in-game/out-of-game boundary were not only related to an issue of tremendous import, but involved the minutiae of everyday lives—highlighting, certainly, the problematics of oil dependence, but also allowing the game access to the intimate area of quotidian praxis.

(1) “The Future of Alternate Reality Games.” WWO Lives.  July 19, 2007.  August 28, 2008

Resources for Further Study:

World Without Oil

WWO lives:  Ken Eklund’s ongoing WWO blog

Jane McGonigal at GDC:  “Reality is Broken” (and how games can fix it)

Summary:
Between seasons two and three of the television show Lost, ABC launched “The Lost Experience,” an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to maintain viewer interest in the show. “The Lost Experience,” like many ARGs, incorporated a variety of media into its implementation. Players were encouraged to watch commercials that aired during the last episodes of season two in order to be notified of relevant websites that would provide clues to the game. In addition to websites, users watched mini-movies, read advertisements, and a tie-in novel. They were also directed towards recordings and podcasts over the course of “The Lost Experience.” While the game itself is a multi-media experience, this report will focus on the textual elements that played a crucial role in the game. (more…)

Summary:

CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book as part of their ongoing experiments with “networked books”. First instituted in 2006 as part of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1 publication, the software was developed to work with WordPress and intended to reconfigure the nature of blog discussions. CommentPress allows respondents to post comments in the margin of the text, on a paragraph-by-paragraph or “whole page” basis. This breaks down the top-down hieararchy typical of blogs whereby a main post is positioned vertically above any commentary. Instead a reader may view the text and commentary at the same time.

Version 1.0 of CommentPress was released to the general public in July 2007 and the software has been used to generate discussion around Master’s Theses, scholarly articles, and books. (more…)

Summary:
A self-inscribing wall, El Muro is an installation piece designed by Willy Sengewald and Richard The in 2004 as part of the “Sensitive Skin” project at the Berlin University of the Arts Digital Media course. The large monolith of El Muro stands alone in a darkened room, and produces graffiti on its surface that appears to write itself. The project calls for the dividing lines of urban and architectural space to be read – and re-read – as built expressions of political reality and as communications media. The walls to which El Muro refers not only include the borders of Berlin, Israel-Palestine, and US-Mexico, but also the anonymous urban walls that become advertising and graffiti canvases, as well as the wall as an abstract architectural element. In each case, the support structures of the built world become self-reflexive reading interfaces. (more…)

Summary:
Moving Canvas, a combination of technologies and installations designed by Frédéric Eyl, Gunnar Green, and Richard The, involves the placement of an LED projection device (“Parasite”) on the side of a commuter subway train. The device is enclosed in a suitcase equipped with suction cups, and its projection aligned with the subway walls. The ensuing display projects words and images on the tunnel walls, viewable through the train windows. Cinematic time and commuter time combine radically as bodies and messages literally communicate through the subway tunnels.

The project was developed in 2005 as part of a digital media class at the Berlin University of the Arts, and exhibited with the university’s “Here/There” project. Moving Canvas takes another look at the problem of here and there by asking what lies between. (more…)

Summary:
Interface ecology is a theoretical framework for the study of relationships between interfaces; its objects range from social to computer interfaces. The practice of interface ecology is characterized by three intertwined objectives: the analysis of interfaces as cultural artifacts from an ecosystems approach, the production of systems and interfaces that elevate the role of human expression, and the translation between disparate cultures and disciplines. This approach was first theorized by Andruid Kerne through his own interdisciplinary work in performance art and computer science at New York University (1997-2001). He has published on interface ecology primarily within computer science and digital art forums from this period to the present. Five years ago, Kerne established the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. (more…)

Summary:
Valence is a software program written by Ben Fry to dynamically render complex information as a visual, three-dimensional, and relational representation. It has been produced and installed in multiple versions that take various inputs. The original version, which ‘reads’ novels, was installed in 2001 at Ars Electronica in Austria and appeared in the film Minority Report. The latest version, which visualizes genetic information, was installed in 2002 at the Whitney Biennial in New York and appeared in the film Hulk. Images and quick time movies of various instantiations of Valence can be viewed at Fry’s website. (more…)

Summary:
Remembrance of Media Past engages with cultural archetypes as motivations for designing interfaces in contemporary media. I chose to take illuminated manuscripts as a central focus of my research because they were perhaps the most significant medium of complex information structures before the introduction of the mechanical reproduction beginning with the Gutenberg era. In its final articulation, the project components attempt to link these antecedent cultural interfaces to more current approaches to complex information structures. (more…)

Summary:
Peter Cho’s body of typographic experiments, collected on Typotopo, visually explore the constituent parts of language and narrative. Cho’s work presents a range of graphic design innovations that use digital technology to access forms of letters or forms of texts. The text visualizations showcased on Typotopo ask not only how technology influences typography, but also what happens to the act of reading when letters, words, and narratives are experienced in interactive, dynamic environments.

(more…)

Summary:

WordsEye is a text-to-scene conversion tool that allows users to construct a computer modeled scene through the use of simple text. Users describe an environment, objects, actions and images, and WordsEye parses and conducts a syntactic and semantic analysis of these written statements. The program assigns depictors for each semantic element and its characteristics and then assembles a three-dimensional scene that approximates the user’s written description. This scene can then be modified and rendered as a static two-dimensional image. (more…)

“It is difficult to get the news…”

Summary:
In 2003, New Radio and Performing Arts commissioned two artworks by Noah Wardrip-Fruin for their website, Turbulence.org. [1] Wardrip-Fruin produced Regime Change and News Reader, both of which he titled “Textual Instruments.” News Reader offers an interface for reading current news stories, and for what Wardrip-Fruin calls “playing” these stories or “playing” the online news environment. [2]As the user interacts with the news stories by clicking highlighted text, the stories multiply and warp in unpredictable ways. (more…)

Summary:
LibraryThing is an online knowledge base and social networking tool for bibliophiles. The website allows users to catalog their personal libraries. By entering in their own books, users can locate others with similar libraries, find suggestions for books they might like, or even get “unsuggestions” for the books that are least like their own. Users can organize their collections according to self-defined tags and also view how others have tagged the same books. (more…)

Summary:
“The Dreamlife of Letters” is a flash poem by Brian Kim Stefans. Published in 2000, the piece is based upon an appropriated poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and takes the viewer through the mobile and unstable “dreamlife” of letters. The words of DuPlessis’ poem have been grouped together according to their first letter and animated in such a way that the passive viewer can only watch as the text moves around the screen. Influenced by the traditions of concrete poetry and ambient poetics, the piece foregrounds language not only as a medium of meaning, but also as a medium of design. (more…)

Summary:

Cave Writing is an interdisciplinary artistic practice developed at Brown University for the CAVE simulator, a virtual reality environment typically used for scientific visualization. Cave Writing began in 2002 when hypertext fiction writer Robert Coover initiated a series of workshops in Brown University’s CAVE that brought together faculty, students, artists and scientists in the development of creative projects integrating text, visual imagery, narrative and sound. Several notable projects from the workshop include Screen, developed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, et al., John Cayley’s Torus and William Gillespie’s Word Museum. The release of CaveWriting 2006, a spatial hypertext authoring system designed by workshop developers, allows authors to directly manipulate text, imagery and 3D models in a graphical front-end environment. CaveWriting now expands beyond the physical limits of the CAVE simulator, making it relatively easy for anyone with a compatible personal computer to experiment and explore writing and reading in three dimensional environments. (more…)

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“Tell us: What was the most scary, funniest, unforgettable error message of your life?” So asks Giselle Beiguelman’s “esc for escape,” (2004) a multifaceted art project that solicits and archives error messages from computer users around the globe and re-expresses them in a variety of contexts and media. The project includes a public exhibition of error messages on electronic billboards in São Paulo, Brazil; a repository of selected error messages published on the web, entitled “The Book of Errors”; “The Monastery,” an archive of all error messages related to the project; a dvd of the project; a project blog; as well as several “trailers,” which offer ironic visualizations of various error messages by the artist. (Can this sentence be broken up into 2?) In addition to providing a playful space for people to express their most “unforgettable” error messages, the project offers a subtle—yet sustained and sophisticated—commentary about the relationship between computer code and natural language in relation to the digital age. (more…)

Summary:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses the term “the semantic web” as an umbrella identifier to refer to a number of initiatives that enable developers and archivists to add rich, meaningful metadata to digital resources. According to the W3C, the major reason for theses initiatives to tag information with explicit meaning is to make “it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information” [1]. The semantic web adds depth to the existing web protocols running over the application layer of the internet without involving any changes to its more basic architecture. Currently, the main feature that organizes the web is the “link”—any document (or resource) can link to any other. Additionally, each link is coupled with a method (or protocol) to present the resource to the user or application that followed that link (e.g., by clicking on it). That is, the web in one sense is completely non-hierarchical and unstructured. The only structural meaning of links between two web pages (or other resources) is simply that one of them refers to the other (and possibly vice versa); all other meanings are entirely contextual and must be interpreted by humans. The goal of the semantic web is to provide a richer structure of relationships to define formally some of the meanings that link resources. And in particular, to provide an extensible uniform structure that can be easily interpreted by search engines and other software tools. The W3C describes a number of potential practical applications that could make use of semantic web technologies, including enhanced search engines for multimedia collections, automated categorization, intelligent agents, web service discovery, and content mapping between disparate electronic resources [2]. (more…)

Summary:
Collex is a tool developed at the University of Virginia’s Applied Research in Patacriticism lab (ARP) and currently operated in conjunction with NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship). Described as an “interpretive hub,” (Nowviskie) Collex acts as an interface for nine different peer-reviewed, scholarly databases. The interface allows users to access all nine databases in one search, while results retain the unique characteristics of each individual source. Additionally, users can create exhibits for their own personal use, or they may submit exhibits to be shared with all users. As such, Collex and its relationship to data evolves as users interact with it, relying on folksonomy and user-generated relationships to construct new ways of viewing the information it contains therein. (more…)

Summary:
First launched in February of 2004, Facebook.com (initially known as Thefacebook.com) is an online networking website that allows users to create their own profiles and link to and view the profiles of others. Facebook is unique in that its online communities are based on offline university communities and membership is restricted to users with a .edu email address.

Facebook is the second fastest growing website and is particularly popular with young adults currently enrolled in or recently graduated from college. Because Facebook users are organized by college affiliation, users have a clear offline presence. The site thus offers the opportunity to investigate the relationship between offline communities and their online counterparts. (more…)

Summary:
InfoDesign: Understanding by Design, is a blog devoted to the relatively new discipline of Information Design. The blog, maintained by a small team of people, is widely touted as one of the most comprehensive views of the growing field of Information Design. New posts appear approximately weekly, compiling links to pertinent articles, people, companies, organizations, degree programs, publications, events, and job postings. Like any blog, there is little native content on InfoDesign to review, as it is primarily links to articles and websites. For the Transliteracies project, InfoDesign is relevant in two capacities: as a guide to the field of Information Design – a young academic and professional field devoted largely to improving online reading, and as an index to the most important topics within the field. Every link to a news article is categorized, and each of these categories – there are 35 currently – are browsable. These 35 categories read as a list of what’s important in information design right now, and each will be reviewed for relevance to the Transliteracies project. (more…)

Summary:
The Coh-Metrix Project is a research project concerned with predicting the readability of texts in order to facilitate textual comprehension. The underlying assumption of the project is that current “readability” tests, based upon word and sentence length, are inadequate to truly predict textual coherence. Coherence in this context is defined as a mental representation that results from an interaction between the reader’s skills and goals, and textual cohesion. The Coh-Metrix project proposes the creation of two tools that will provide a more nuanced prediction of textual cohesion than current indices allow: 1. Coh-Metrix computes the cohesion of a text based on complex cohesion metrics. 2. CohGIT locates where gaps in textual cohesion occur, facilitating textual improvement. The project relies upon an interdisciplinary approach to reading practices, drawing upon “psychology, linguistics, education, literary theory, cognitive science, mathematics, and artificial intelligence” (McNamara, Louwerse, & Graesser 5). (more…)

Elfenbein, Andrew. “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading.” PMLA 121.2 (2006) 484 – 500.

Summary:
Elfenbein uses the strategies and terms of cognitive approaches to the study of reading to analyze the varied critical response to Robert Browning’s Men and Women, published in 1855. He argues for a critical practice that joins the complexity of literary criticism with the scientific attention to microprocesses of reading. His aim is to reveal that microprocesses, although always individually inflected, are locatable in various cultures and time periods. (more…)

Summary:
The wiki is an increasingly popular content management system for organizing widely distributed collaborations over the internet. This report will describe the relevant history and evolution of the wiki, and then consider the technology, interface, and design of MediaWiki as an example of what a wiki is today. While there are literally dozens of implementations of the wiki format, MediaWiki is unique as the engine responsible for the operation of Wikipedia – currently the largest wiki—and as the software supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (more…)

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Fuzzy logic is a system of logic which applies meaning to imprecise concepts. Rather than simply labeling a statement as either “true” or “false,” as traditional binary logic does, a statement is instead mapped along a continuum of values. These mappings are interconnected with other mapped statements, ultimately yielding applicable functions and rules despite the imprecision of the concepts on which the rules were based.

Fuzzy logic was developed initially by the engineer Lotfi Zadeh in the late Sixties as a method to create control systems whose inputs were made up from imprecise data. More recently, Zadeh has conceived of a merger of natural language processing and fuzzy logic called Computing with Words, and also of an associated Computational Theory of Perception as a preliminary way of thinking about how to compute and reason with perceptual information. (more…)

Summary:
In the last decade, the critical discourse of new media studies has shifted its focus from the virtual to the physical; from an abstract, decontextualized space to the embodied experience of augmented reality. Digital media have come to pervade everyday life and new media criticism has increasingly encouraged culturally specific, materialist and multisensory approaches. Laura Marks’s formulation of haptic visuality offers one such approach. As a way of seeing and knowing which calls upon multiple senses, haptic visuality offers a method of sensory analysis which does not depend on the presence of literal touch, smell, taste or hearing. While many sensory analyses focus on the evocation of and interaction between these literal senses (for example, the study of tactile interfaces, kinesthetics and textures), Marks’s concept of haptic visuality provides an alternative framework for discussing online new media works (too often understood as “simply” visual) in relation to multiple senses, affect and embodiment. (more…)

Summary:
Desktop Theater was initiated as an alternate form of Internet chat that took place in the popular 2-D avatar-based chat room called The Palace. Started in 1997 by Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, Desktop Theater sought to extend the metaphor of chat room-as-public-space to creating a type of “street theater” through the avatars in a public chat room on The Palace’s servers. Several “actors” meet at a preset time in an agreed upon locale in The Palace, each donning a specific avatar for the performance. They perform a specific dramatic text through a cut-and-paste method that displays the text in a bubble above the avatar’s head. Other chatters enter the scene and often engage the actors, becoming part of the performance, or create their own conversations in the mise-en-scène of The Palace chat room, contextualizing the performance as an online form of street theater. (more…)

Summary:
Designed by the RED (Research in Experimental Documents) group at Xerox PARC, Tilty Tables was an experiment for the museum installation, eXperiments in the Future of Reading (XFR; Maribeth Back, Rich Gold, Anne Balsamo, Mark Chow, Matt Gorbet, Steve Harrison, Dale MacDonald, Scott Minneman, 2001), which was also exhibited for SIGGRAPH 2001 Emerging Technologies. Of the three tables developed, The Reading Table and The Tall Tale Table shall be addressed here. Each table is a three-by-three-foot-wide white square resting on a metal podium, attached in such a way as to allow it to be tilted in all directions. A high-resolution image is projected onto the table’s surface, which gives the appearance that the table is a glowing screen. When visitors tilt the table the images on its surface change in response. With The Reading Table, visitors glide across a large “map” of “napkin drawings” on the subject of future reading practices. The Tall Tale Table resembles the conception of an unlimited and cyclical universe of books from the Jorge Louis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel”; it presents an infinite plane of nonsense tall tales, constructed using a simple computer program with the input of two real fairy tales from various cultures. (more…)

Summary:
Art installation of 1999 by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv. To interact with the installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling text. Like rain or snow, the text appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The text responds to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will “land” on anything darker than a certain threshold, and “fall” whenever that obstacle is removed. If a participant accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but lines of Evan Zimroth’s poem about bodies and language, “Talk, You.” As letters from one line of the poem fall towards the ground they begin to fade, and differently colored letters from the next line replace them from above. “Reading” the poem in the Text Rain installation becomes a physical as well as a cerebral, perhaps even an impossible, endeavor[1]. (more…)

Summary:
BioMorphic Typography is Diane Gromala’s term for a family of fonts that continually morph in real-time response to a user’s changing physical states, as measured by a biofeedback device. Part of a larger initiative, Design for the Senses, the goal is to develop approaches to experiential design that focus on the senses and “the history of the body.” The first in the type-style family of this dynamic text is “Excretia,” meant for display on computer screens and wearable liquid crystal displays, upon which the user’s/writer’s autonomic states are graphically indicated—for example, the characters “throb” as one’s heart beats. (more…)

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Processing is an open source programming language and development environment initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas of the Broad Institute and UCLA Design | Media Arts, respectively. The processing language and environment strives to simplify programming for the beginner, such that someone with little or no programming experience can easily experiment and immediately see their results. While processing is capable of simple results quickly, it is robustly integrated with Java and streamlines many tasks that advanced users might expect. Processing runs on any machine with Java, is free and open source, and boasts a very active online community. (more…)

Summary:
MediaBASE is collaborative, multimedia-authoring software developed by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. The Institute envisions MediaBASE as having two basic purposes. First, the software is a communication tool comprised of three basic discourse units: compositions, media objects, and concepts (defined below). These key elements allow integrated multimedia creation within a pre-defined user group. As its name suggests, MediaBASE also functions as a dynamic database. The software offers two methods of accessing media objects: users can import individual objects or an administrator can provide an entire archive of material for a given user group in advance. (more…)

Summary:
Slated to debut in the spring of 2006, the Sony Reader marks a key example of the next generation of commercial eBooks. While previous eBooks suffered criticism for their bulky appearances, hard-to-read screens, and limited availability of downloadable works, Sony claims to have resolved these problems through its use of new technologies that include e-ink, “electronic paper,” and a “CONNECT store” from which customers can purchase various downloadable texts. At the time of this writing, the product has not yet been released, but the pre-release reviews of the Reader have been extremely positive across a variety of technology-centered forums. (more…)

Summary:
Poems that Go is an online literary journal that showcases kinetic, digital poems. The journal is motivated by the question “What makes a poem a poem?” particularly when that poem is configured in digital form. The site features an extensive collection of Flash-based poems that display poetry to be multimodal and excitingly experimental. (more…)

Summary:
Vectors is an online journal that embraces the Internet as the space for embracing and engaging critical experimentation and collaboration on topics related to and inspired by its digital environment.

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The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines bookcrossing as “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.” BookCrossing’s main principle is that the world should be a book lover’s library. After members finish reading a book and decide they want to share it, they register it for free on BookCrossing.com. This gives each book a unique ID number and an accompanying journal entry on the BookCrossing webpage where the reader can write his/her opinions about the book. The reader then affixes a BookCrossing tag to the book with pertinent information on how another owner can find out about the book’s travels. Finally, the reader “releases it into the wild” (a coffee shop, bus stop, café, etc). Each subsequent reader of a particular book can add to the book’s journal entry on the BookCrossing website, giving his/her opinions and listing where they picked up and dropped off the book. (more…)

Summary:
Rice, Ronald A., Maureen McCreadie, and Shan-Ju L. Chang, Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. This book synthesizes literature in relevant fields of information and communication studies to articulate an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the way users access and browse. Specific fields included in the study are described below. (more…)

Summary:
TextArc is a program designed to display patterns in textual data in a visually accessible format. The program displays each word in a text twice: once in a spiral that contains all the lines, as they appear, in the text and once in larger font to represent its average position within the text.

TextArc promises to convert large texts into a format that allows users to discern patterns in the text. These patterns, however, are based purely on word frequency and, to that extent, limited in what they can reveal about the text.

The designer of TextArc has been invited to use TextArc in several museum exhibitions, including the online gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. (more…)

Summary:
Television Without Pity (TwoP), first launched in 1998, is an online community that hosts recaps and forums on television shows, primarily reality shows and hour-long dramas.

This site is among the most well-known of a large number of fan websites that convert content from a non-text-based medium (television) into text. In so doing, they offer a reading format—specifically, an interactive reading format—for content that is generally viewed. Television executives and writers regularly read and react in future scripts to critiques provided in these sorts of communities. (more…)