Nick Doty @ CET

A Small Fix

2005-11-26T16:50:00.000-05:00

At some point this fall, Google made a small change to the GMaps API, admittedly not a public part of it. This broke the AGMM's use of custom tiles (so that it showed images of Amherst rather than maps of New York City). But now it's fixed, thanks to a small code change detailed on the Mapki.

Hopefully more work to follow. I'm trying to get some younger Amherst students to take over this project and finish it.

A Proof of Concept

2005-08-12T15:40:00.000-04:00

I've been calling this web app a "proof of concept" ever since I actually got a Google Map interface to work. But now the term seems more appropriate as I've not just created a proof of the concept of zooming a map farther than intended, or of posting media to a map, or any of the other individual features. Rather, this should prove the larger concept of a web application that can provide an immersive, interesting experience of a location. I hope that I have shown some compelling reasons to try to implement this at Amherst College and at any college campus.

Note that the link has changed. The imagery proved to be too large for my account, so I've had to move it over to the ARC (Amherst Recording Council) account.

Amherst Geographic Meta-Medium Proof of Concept

It's been fun. I am surprisingly pleased with this result, or at least what this has the potential to be.

Hours and Item Types (and Lines, Oh My!)

2005-08-10T22:52:00.000-04:00

Today's progress was remarkably slow (or at least is so visibly), despite putting in many, many hours. There are some changes worth mentioning though. I've made simple icons for the different types of items, so that from a zoomed out view, one can tell more easily what each item will be. These may change in the future (they are based on the Google pushpins, which are cute and all, but take up a lot more room than is necessary, I think), but this should demonstrate the idea, anyway.

And I've also added a new item type Hours_of_Operation, which administrators can use to attach the hours each building is open to that building. Going through this process also let me write up documentation (still on paper or I would link to it here) on how to add a new item type -- I'm hoping that future developers (me or any others) will want to do this a lot, because I think there are lots of distinctions worth making and lots of media worth adding (just off the top of my head: audio, video, links to forum threads, announcements, plans/blogs), and hopefully this documentation, and the effort I've put into making the code very generalized, will ease this process considerably.

As I'm rapidly running out of time, I think it may be worth modifying the goals for this project for the end of the week (that is, all the stuff I can't finish tomorrow). So I think I'll set aside the issue of handling lots of items (whether it be done by grouping, or on-the-fly spacing of icons to prevent overlap, or by showing only new or popular content) which looks to be complex, unsatisfying and perhaps even unrelated to the questions of media, and instead try to obtain at least conceptual versions of other features. For example, I'd really like to add Connections between items, so that I can refer to a certain location in my plan file, and then users can see a line from my dorm room to that location when they're looking through the map, or reading my text. I think that would have more serious implications for our discussions of media and the like.

Take a look at the most recent version (the link remains the same):
Amherst Geographic Meta-Medium
(Yep, still looking for names. Why is this so hard?)

Technobiography 2

2005-08-10T02:45:00.000-04:00

In the first entry on this topic, I wrote about the advance of technology (and my, personal, chronological advance) and the shift from increased functionality toward increased usability. This month has surely been a reinforcement of those ideas -- I think the CET and this whole group of students feels (or at least acts upon; correct me anyone if you think I'm misrepresenting you) that same difference. The study of new or digital media (and the inevitable comparisons to "old" media) requires such a focus, I think.

But for the past week or two, I've been thinking about technology rather differently, and maybe that reflects something different about technology in my life, as well, that I hadn't previously realized.

Things like the EPIC video, our discussion of social software (and the thoughts I had had about it beforehand), talking about and using RSS, some of my thoughts concerning this geoWriting program, maybe even the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game that I've been reading a little of are making me think about the potential negatives of technology.

Perhaps I'll look back on this a few years down the road and realize the ridiculous naivete of my views -- in fact, just that possibility encourages me to continue writing this. [If there is any that I've become confident of, it is in the pleasures of remembering things.]

The efficiency of technology is generally considered its greatest advantage. It allows for a "purity" of information. Many of Manovich's characteristics of new media describe ways to personalize content to the viewer (variability, programmability, etc.). RSS, Google News, del.icio.us and other aggregators of content filter the content, which is certainly necessary given the enormous amounts of it that technological advances have given us access to. But that filtering and specialization leads to some of the narrowing problems that EPIC described. I admit that it may be my lack of familiarity with it, but I'm not particularly comfortable reading my news through an RSS reader, or some other aggregator service. I prefer going to the New York Times website and see the editors' presentation of the day's news, rather than seeing a list of the most popular stories averaged across every news organization that Google can find.

More broadly, computers often, in general, lead us to be not broad enough. Consider our spending all our time in the living room staring at our individual laptops, even after we've spent all day in front of computers. I've made similar analogies with the googlemaps project: technology (amongst other things, I suppose) has allowed us to break down barriers like location, but though location can be a harmful barrier in some cases, it's also a real characteristic that it's negative to disregard entirely. Hesse is ironic (parodic, maybe) in the Glass Bead Game when describing the Castalian's absolute devotion to the Mind, free from the distractions of the world outside the Order. It's not an irony that everyone picks up on right away (I think there are some pretty interesting positive points even read completely seriously), but a point that is most certainly being made -- its subtlety is a reflection of the unobviousness of the problem.

Perhaps this reflects something that has happened (or will happen) in my use and relation to technology. I've become in recent years more interested in exploring forms of technology to keep up with what's out there, without getting completely lost in them (like games, or even serious programming). And perhaps our discussions here, all the good things I've been given to think about, will lead me to choose better uses of technology rather than worse ones, or perhaps simply to see the error of my thinking here.

Some More Progress

2005-08-09T03:35:00.000-04:00

So here's today's trick (and today's solution): when zooming in to the map, fewer items will be showing, and these items should be bigger: the user becomes immersed in the closer location, able to really see the images, read significant amounts of text, etc.

Thanks to the finally-arrived JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, I've learned quite a bit more about objects in JavaScript and put that knowledge to good use for, so far, pictures on the map. Instances of each NItem are made for each label on the map, and handle changing the image at different zoom levels. This is where it gets difficult: changing from one image to another on a user-clicked zoom creates a long pause before the new image shows up. Even though these images aren't that big, the time gap is distracting enough to significantly detract from the experience.

The solution, of course, is to pre-load the images. This is a fairly simple, well-known technique (people use this for mouseovers a lot), though it may prove slightly more complicated here. I've chosen to always pre-load just the next zoom level. And the images are stored in the NItem object, so that pre-loading shouldn't be repeated accidentally (perhaps that coudln't happen anyway, I'm really not sure). Documentation available upon request.

So please take a look at the progress so far and let me know what you think of it so far:
AGM

A Little Progress

2005-08-08T04:25:00.000-04:00

Update, 2:56 PM: The page now works in Safari. A missing quotation mark and a very minor difference in handling of selected options made me think that Safari handled onLoad differently than other browsers. But actually it's perfectly normal and I just spent hours and hours doing research so that I could find a missing quotation mark. One useful result, though, is that I looked into better JavaScript/DOM developer tools for Safari, and found out how to enable the Debug Menu on Safari, which includes a JavaScript console, some basic DOM stuff (not quite as useful to me as the Firefox one, but still nice to have) and various other features. Check out this hint for an explanation of how to enable it on your computer (and ask me for help if you don't understand those instructions). Also potentially useful are the Safari WebDevAdditions.

I haven't made nearly as much progress as I had hoped to this weekend, but there is at least something to see:

Amherst Geographic Medium Proof of Concept

That page will let you see all the images so far posted on the map, and will let you add images to the map (click on Add an item to bring up the form, click the place on the map to place the image, then change the type of to Picture, select a file and hit submit). Unfortunately, images don't show up in Safari (which also has problems with the textarea in the initial form -- I've been investigating how it may handle onload() differently than the other browsers, but am still confused), and really all I've tested it in is Firefox, so I don't know how it will work in IE either.

Features that will be my focus for the next few days (besides browser compatibility, which has a ways to go apparently, and obviously filling out similar functionality for text):

Changing the size of images when the user zooms in (thumbnails are already generated for this, they just need to be used)
Handling many, many items on a page at once, either through grouping, or some method of selective display (or determining that this doesn't really matter at the moment)
Updating with the new image data (which will hopefully be available Monday -- I'd like to know how many levels of zoom will actually be feasible)

Oh, and of course I'd like to add some nice functionality for playing sound and video from within the interface, probably using Flash. So I'll be busy for the next week, at least.

Please leave comments on how it looks on your browser, what ideas you have concerning my list of features/improvements here, and insights concerning the Safari browser and onLoad(). Thanks.

Progress; Zooming

2005-08-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

Note that the title is not "Progress: Zooming!" nor "Progress, Zooming" as both of those might be misinterpreted as meaning that my progress is itself zooming. The semi-colon is used here to mark a list, not an ellipsed copula. Make no mistake: progress is not zooming.

I did not lay out an explicit plan of intended progress last week (see Another idea, call it "geoWriting") as I was in the middle of determining what project path I would actually follow, rather than at the intended point where the direction of the path was already determined and steps along that path were being laid down. I suppose that implicitly my goals were to choose a path, and in that sense I have succeeded. The long post below on geoWriting (still need other potential names for this), and work over the past two days confirming the technical feasibility, at least marginal originality, and ability to challenge and interest me of this project have convinced me that it's worth pursuing for these two weeks.

Yesterday's work was almost entirely research, for which I have to show a large list of links in a post below (On Google Maps), and, today, a growing list in a new section at right ("relevant project links"). I have come to the conclusion that Google Maps will be a particularly good base for this work. It lacks the 3D immersion and control that Google Earth or a powerful GIS application would provide, but has fluent web access (particularly important in a program that seeks to be used widely, frequently, and briefly) and an open, simple API (in fact, the whole JavaScript source is technically available -- though heavily obfuscated -- as it must be for a JS application). These characteristics should help enable, respectively, the success of a finished implementation, and the feasibility of completing such an implementation.

I've also begun a detailed list of features that I'd like to implement as I move along (the scope), and questions that will need to be answered (answers that will affect scope, structure and skeleton). Those may one day soon find themselves in this electronic forum, but I will spare you them for now, at least.

As for zooming, this is the basis of my major need for the coming week. It has become clear from my investigations into how the Google Maps interface works and what I will want from my finished project, that I would very much like the ability to zoom in farther than Google's zoom level 0. Google's Zoom 0 displays approximately 1920 linear pixels per linear mile (see Continuing to Map the MBTA, a project of an Amherst alumnus). A little calculation shows this to be about 63 inches per pixel. Now, this number may not be right (for example, I think cars at maximum zoom tend to be about two pixels wide, which suggests fewer inches per pixel) -- perhaps Google has updated its service to show off higher resolution (it has all of Massachusetts at 2 foot resolution) with more zoom -- but in any case at least the order of magnitude of that resolution is confirmed. For the purposes of my program, I'd like to be considerably more zoomed in than that -- in part because I want to show more detail (more on that in a second) but also because for purposes of geographic localization (see end of More geoWriting), I'd like users to be looking at only a single part of the campus at any one time while still showing quite a bit of information. Zoomed out the way Google Maps is by default, one can see almost the entire campus at once with a fairly large browser window. I could limit the size of the map box if I wanted to, but I'd rather not do that, particularly given the increased realism that the extra detail of higher resolution could show.

So anyway, I'm trying to increase the zoom past Google's limit Zoom 0. This requires (1) making larger map tiles (preferably from a more detailed image, not just pixelated blowups of the current versions) and (2) changing various parts of the code to show less geographic area, but the same number of pixels, as Google Maps does currently. The first requires a higher resolution image, but I've been in email contact with Andy Anderson, who leads GIS efforts at Amherst, and am confident that I'll be able to get an image of 6 inch resolution over the next few days.

As for the second requirement: that is not so easily solved, but it must be solved if I am to continue. Because the JavaScript behind Google Maps (currently maps.15.js, but it changes not infrequently) is so extraordinarily complex (a weak attempt at dissection is linked to in the sidebar, but that is far from complete, and is only for version 5 anyway), I'd rather not have to change significant parts of that code to ask for different sizes (in geographic space) of tiles. So instead I am considering instead zooming the entire world, and having a tile server return a smaller geographic area at higher resolution (the two changes canceling each other out leaving an image of the same dimensions). I spent a long time on that late this afternoon (the whiteboard in the Mac lab is currently covered with my notes on that) and I think it is probably the right solution.

What if I just returned larger tiles with my server? I would meet the (private) API continuity commitments of returning a tile between the two lat/lon points, but could still show more pixels. I don't know if this would work or not -- I'm not sure what parts of GMaps depend on a fixed tile size.

Name possibilities:

The Amherst Geographic Medium (AGM)
The Amherst College Augmented Geography Project (ACAGP)
Project To Combine Text, Audio, Photography and Video In Geographic Form (PtCTAPViGF)
Video, Audio, Photography & Text Combined on a Map (VAPTCoaM)

Learning Objects

2005-08-01T20:30:00.000-04:00

I've been asked a couple of times for the link to the Kanji Quiz and Kana Quiz that I showed briefly on Friday afternoon, so I'll finally post it here. We've been working on this for a couple of summers now, and it seems to have been fairly successful (the kana quiz has been used signficantly by beginning students, and we expect that the kanji quiz will be very useful for more advanced students). Sound is actually implemented fairly well, despite that being a very difficult thing to do in DHTML (I think all somewhat modern browsers except for IE/Mac support it fully). So, please feel free to take a look, practice your Japanese, or see how this sort of flashcard system might be used elsewhere:

Amherst College Kana Quiz
Amherst College Kanji Quiz

Programmatically they're pretty interesting projects as well. We did some bizarre things with innerHTML and JavaScript: PHP writes out a long HTML page based on the type of quiz you want, this page includes inline JavaScript which itself includes a long array of cards, whose entries are HTML, and get switched in and out to mimic flashcards without all the mess of reloading pages. The Kanji Quiz has much cleaner code in every respect, so if you're interested in code, I strongly recommend that you look at that one.

Our Curricular Computing Services group has students work on similar projects every summer, so there are others I could perhaps show you if you're interested (just let me know). Many of those students just get used for slide-scanning or faculty website development, so there aren't as many as I'd like, but nonetheless. I think it's a pretty interesting use of technology: it's really exciting for me, anyway, to see technology implemented such that it really helps the learning process (which has not always been the case in the past).

On Google Maps

2005-08-01T16:15:00.000-04:00

So I've spent the morning researching Google Maps. There is, of course, a lot on it, as people get pretty excited when they can add usable functionality to their own pages, when they can associate themselves with Google, and when they can make maps of things, and particularly excited when they can do all three.

So, a few sites. Note that much of the work that has been done on Google Maps has been made obselete by the public API having been released. So some of these links may be pragmatically useless, but they're interesting nonetheless. Recreating Google Maps on your own server has also been done (and might be good for my project) and that may require the reverse engineering stuff that people worked on before the API.

How Google Maps' path-drawing works
Drawing arbitrary GIS data on Google Maps
GoogleMapki
Chicago Crime
so you want to create filled polygons, custom icons, and more?
TLabel, a Google Maps API extension: small, nice labels

Google Maps API Documentation
Google-Maps-API Group

Related links that aren't specifically about Google Maps (yes, there are organizations besides Google!):
GPSVisualizer
MSN Virtual Earth (and the unofficial developer site)
ESRI ArcWeb Services, free, online ESRI stuff (but not as nice as Google Maps, I think)

Also, my Google Maps API key (which it seems isn't bad to make public, as it can only be used for this one directory, and can be viewed by anyone who looks at the source of a page that uses it):
Thank you for signing up for a Google Maps API key. Your key is:

ABQIAAAAz2M5cuqrh1bI4SbYWGBT4xTOOPrZ5Xxw1CXLv691am9S5hsqCxRasNX4PO_5yyLlTDlx7s5Q9frTIA

This key is good for all URLs in this directory:

http://www.amherst.edu/~npdoty/gmaps/

More geoWriting

2005-07-29T07:34:00.000-04:00

More thoughts on geoWriting (a name I tire of already). I was really looking forward to attaching every Amherst user's plan (their blog sort of thing, see planWorld entry below) to their dorm room, but it is becoming fairly clear to me that people won't be comfortable with that. I cynically assume that anything that someone can associate with the word "stalking" will never be allowed by the public, even if it does not reveal any information that wasn't already available. This will make for a good rant later, but more to the point I have some further thoughts below suggesting that the project might still be worthwhile. Whether all this is a sound contemplation on many of the topics discussed in our program so far, or just late-night induced overoptimism, will be determined by the light of day, and by your comments.

--

Add photos of your favorite places and attach them to those places. Add little text notes about your favorite nooks on campus and attach them to those very nooks. Keep a weblog and a gallery of recent photos attached to your dorm room. Attach diatribes against the football team to the gym, complaints to the President on the President's House, suggestions for the IT department on the Computer Center building. Write a hint for great places to read on the Library steps or a party invitation on the Quad. Attach bird song to the bird sanctuary, concert audio to the music building, a recorded sermon to the chapel.

--

Then: glide over your favorite parts of the campus to see what people say and think and see about them. Find out what parties are going on in a part of campus on a given night. Read the writing of people who live in a totally different part of the campus then you, and see how similar or different they really are.

--

Prospective students can see, read and hear our physical campus. Alumni can see what current students think of their old haunts, and pass on their own thoughts about any given place. Current students can get a better feel for the diversity of the campus.

--

Encourage a sense of community on the campus. These are, after all, the people that you're living with. Read what your neighbors are thinking about.

--

I think this comes from an article that I read and dismissed some time ago. It talked about how the internet had removed the barriers of location, how that had been a nice thing and all, but how now it was doing the exact opposite, and how really great that was. I think the idea was that content was determined by your location, but I think it also mentioned the idea of locating content by geographic location, like pinning your photo to your own front door.

The Internet was so great because it let us ignore characteristics like location. You could find people that were just like you, and not have to interact with the very different people you were stuck with next door. So perhaps the beauty of this system is that it's, in a way, unfiltered, uncustomized. You see what everyone thinks, and the commonality is the place, not the demographics.

It may not be the case that this glorious melting pot will remain forever -- I quite expect that if this is used significantly, communities will pop up such that certain geographic sections are de facto bordered off for non-geographic communities. But I am hopeful that organization in this way will be different enough to break those closed communities a bit, and let them re-form, slightly changed, all the stronger and better.

Photoshop & JavaScript

2005-07-28T04:15:00.000-04:00

You might have thought I would have had enough of JavaScript by now, what with working on it every night, but oh no, it can be used for Photoshop as well.

This site has a long, fairly useful tutorial, complete with examples:
kirupa.com Photoshop Scripting

Those examples -- at least the ones that I used -- didn't work, of course. But it didn't take very many coding changes to get them to work (for the most part). Both that I tried crashed at one point, but did a lot of interesting stuff first. Being able to automate this is pretty cool: you can take dynamic input and create cool images, on the fly maybe, for simple stuff. Also, images with lots of repetitive details could be done with JavaScript.

Anyway, check out the two .png's in this directory: photoshop stuff. The _modified.js files are the scripts that created the images.

[For the most part, though, ignore this post, except perhaps for the theoretical possibility and a quick look at the images, and read the several long posts below which have no comments and for which I would really enjoy feedback.]

Another idea, call it "geoWriting"

2005-07-27T20:10:00.000-04:00

So having been considering audio searching, database narration and the rest for a while, I have of course now thought about something else that might be worth doing.

I think I may have read about this being implemented somewhere, or maybe it's just an idyllic idea that my father (a cartographer) mentioned to me. It would be neat if we could attach writing and other media to geographic locations. So, looking at a 3d map of Amherst College, users can attach pieces of writing to buildings, trees, quads, etc. I described earlier today how each student has a "plan", or small text file, so those can obviously be attached to each person's dorm room. But then we can also attach comments about our favorite spots in the area, photographs of beautiful campus scenes to the geographic coordinates of that scene, audio of lectures to the building where they took place, party announcements at the party locations, etc. Move around the map from the administration buildings to read about campus policies, etc. to the dorms to read student plans to the academic buildings to see whatever they're up to.

Anyway, there are a couple of questions I still have about this idea:
First of all, is this worthwhile? Is it useful to organize information in this way? Would you gain some understanding by attaching a place to a piece of text or audio? In some cases this must be valuable (in applications where the location is very important: perhaps in certain scientific contexts, or in sociological viewings of a place and how it is used), but is in most cases, as in the college campus example, examples where the content is pieces of media?

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is, of course, a large field of implementation of attaching information to geographic location. It is extraordinarily valuable in scientific contexts, there is no question of that. I remember someone in Bangkok using a GIS system and a series of data about air currents to track and predict the movement of mosquitos and disease. Whether useful, interesting, creative applications can be made of this by knowing, organizing, or viewing media (text, pictures, audio, video) through geographic location seems to me an open question.

Secondly, is this feasible? Theoretically all the information is there; there are extensive GIS systems in place for attaching information to location; there are satellite and 3d maps of Amherst College, or practically any location I want to use. But I'm not sure where I would start in actually programming the thing (whereas with search I could start some of the coding tomorrow if I wanted to). There are a lot of Google Maps Hacks out there, and though I don't know exactly how they work, it seems that it wouldn't be too difficult to do (there's even a Public API for putting Google Maps in your webpages, though I would probably want to do more than that). I would prefer to have a 3d interface on it if possible (why not have the ability to climb hills, etc. if this really is about getting a sense of the place and the media) about it: should I be looking at Google Earth (does not run on Mac or Linux) or more traditional ArcGIS (something I have had some formal training in, but which is extraordinarily complex -- and I'd rather not make users use ArcReader).

Anyway, any thoughts on this idea compared to others (searching audio, database narratives, etc.)? Comments (technical, creative, whatever) would be most appreciated.

planWorld

2005-07-27T14:14:00.000-04:00

It is remarkable that I've lasted this long without telling all of you about planWorld. If you are at all interested, I am personally obsessed and would love to talk you about it. In the meantime, this about file is really pretty interesting, I think, and it explains the relevant, interesting history.

About planWorld (a famous text file used to introduce people to our online community):

Written by jlodom on vax2.amherst.edu
13-MAR-2001

Welcome to planworld! If you are to live here, you should know a little history. Not a lot, because I have bored more patient folks than yourself with the full epic of planworld. But enough to get by. If you want to know more you can always e-mail me at jlodom00@alumni.amherst.edu or contact the friendly Planworld Development Team

Planworld History

Writing plans began in the days when computers were big and costly enough that they had to be shared by many people, usually scientists, academics, or the military. Every user on a mainframe was given an account with a couple of kilobytes of disk space. Because computing power was limited, users needed to know something about one another in order to figure out how best to share the system. A "plan" file was a small text file that a user wrote to explain their current projects. Other users could read the plan by "fingering" the user.

In the early 1980s, Amherst College purchased a state-of-the-art VAX computer. VAX was actually the name of the processor (and eventually it used the ALPHA processor instead) and the operating system was called VMS. But everyone called it the VAX anyway. It had a whopping 30MB of hard disk space for roughly 2000 users. It also had tons of cool features like word processing and spreadsheets. And, if they knew what they were doing students could also write plans on it. Two of those students were jwmanly (John Manly '85) and jhwelch (Jonathan Welch '84). This pair became so proficient in the administration and programming of the system that they were employed to run it after their graduation.

As time went on, the VAX became more powerful and more students used it to write term papers and send e-mail. They discovered that by writing plans they could keep each other company during all-nighters--writing back and forth between bouts of wrestling with essays. Some adventurous souls even kept plans on the college's new UNIX machine.

Jwmanly heard about this activity and started to read plans again. But he found that he could never keep track of who had written a new plan, and so he would often reread plans that hadn't been changed for weeks. He solved this problem one night in the early nineties by using the DCL programming language to hack up the program that would make him famous: Planwatch.

Students used planwatch to keep track of when their friends' plans changed. It could also be used to read a bunch of plans at once. It was with this program that "planworld" was really born. But there was an element missing; plans only worked one way. You could read someone's plan, but you could not know who read yours, and thus you could not know to read theirs. Jhwelch solved this problem in 1999 when he stepped down as VAX administrator. SNITCH was his final gift to the students of Amherst College. It allowed users to see who had fingered them--but only if they in turn were willing to be visible to those whose plans they fingered.

The VAX was a great system, but after a while, students stopped wanting to explore it. It became arcane and difficult to maintain. Amherst hackers were interested only in newer UNIX-based systems, and new users wanted the friendlier world of the World Wide Web. The VAX was slated to be turned off. For some time it seemed as if planworld would die with it. If so, then the world would fade away at the height of its glory.

In the end it was saved by the diverse efforts of many individuals, including anhochron (Alex Hochron '02), snfitzsimmon (Seth Fitzsimmons '02), and others who worked hard to port it to the web at Amherst and beyond. Here is one rendition, translated but intact, for the graphical Internet.

Planworld Philosophy

This little text file, labeled "about," is supposed to tell you what planworld is. The problem, though, is that the moment I tell you what planworld is, I have destroyed it. Planworld began accidentally, is littered with accidents, and if it is to continue it will continue accidentally.

I can tell you what planworld is not. It is not a chat room, or a message board, or a clique--although it may encompass all of these things. Nor is it a place for anonymity. Indeed, many of its inhabitants feel free enough here to write down the conversations they only have in their own heads. This is a place where the things of the self and the oustide-self mingle and the private and public lose their identities. Most paradoxically, no matter how active you are within it, it not a place that you are, but a place you have been.

The best way to know what planworld means is to read plans. Plans of people you know. Plans of people they know. Plans of people who cannot possibly exist. And then you write a plan of your own. Write what you want to write, whether it is yours alone, or a response to someone else, or stolen.

One thing I must warn you: planworld is about words. It began as text, and text is its life and soul. Pictures and colors and hyperlinks are all well and good, but they are outsiders. They are artifice and facade. When all else ends the text will remain, stuck in your head and the heads of those who read you. Write. Write what you will, but put it down honestly.

Let me close by saying "welcome." This is a special place, one of the last enclaves of what "cyberspace" used to be when the command line was everything. I came late here, only in 1998, but even since then there have been planworld field trips, planworld romances, planworld breakups, even planworld proposals. And on one memorable occasion not so long ago, someone was mistakenly declared dead. Which is to say, this is a real world. It is full of human beings.

And that's about it.

Book of Waste

2005-07-27T00:09:00.000-04:00

Bryan sent me to the Dreaming Methods site to take a look at one of their projects of "digital fiction". You are welcome to follow along with the one that I went through and will comment on here. "Book of Waste" is currently the top left project on the main page, though perhaps there is a more permanent link. I wouldn't really recommend going through the entire thing, as I didn't really enjoy it very much, but you can take a look at any one of the Flash videos inside "Book fo Waste" to get an idea of most of what I'll discuss here.

I'll just focus on a couple of themes here, as they exist throughout the work. The first, and I think the most important, is the method of navigation. Each episode in "Book of Waste" handles this slightly differently, but they have much in common. The one thing in common for all is that the top left hand corner has a box to exit the current episode and return to the main page. In the top right, almost all episodes have a series of unlabeled boxes to move between different pages. These are assorted in various ways, usually to suggest some purpose about the flow of the story.

The big difference here from traditional media or traditional stories is that there isn't any set way of moving through the story. A handful of the stories move linearly -- you click on a box at the end of each stanza/page and it brings you the "next" page (in quotes as this isn't always the next chronologically, or the next logically in the pattern of the navigation corner -- but it is certainly next as the author has made a clear choice to take you there -- I assume that it isn't random). But in the non-linear cases, the user chooses which box to click on next, and even given the directed path, the user can often choose to jump around. This is interesting because it's not really something we're presented with in traditional media -- when you read a book you're forced to read the pages in exactly the way that the author set them out for you, if you want to understand the text at all. That being said, the element of 'control' or 'reader interaction' here is extremely limited, I think. The user, in almost every case that I can think of, "chooses" randomly. This is considerably less interactive than a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and merely requires that the stanzas be self-contained enough and the story be mysterious enough to function in some sense in a variety of random orders.

This is no doubt a real difference (I do not mean to dismiss that claim) from traditional media. And it certainly fits the spooky, disturbing, confusing mood that the "Book of Waste" is trying to set. But I would be loath to conclude from this (as one might be tempted to do at first) that the work is interactive, personal or responsive. I feel that I have not added any more to the experience of this piece of art than I do when I interpret any work.

Another commonality in many of the episodes of "Book of Waste" (and, apparently, in quite a lot of the content that Dreaming Methods has) is that the Flash interface makes it difficult, at times, to read the text. Content is shown, shaking, in brief spurts, alternatively with other text, etc. The way that Flash is used to handle text can at times be very interesting. In the "findings" episode, for example, the ends of sentences are occasionally changed as the text sits in front of you: some pair of words fade out, and others fade in, or words move out of the way so that others can fade in. This has some nice, meaningful touches behind it: interchangeable words, objects in a large assortment, etc. are rotated cleverly underlining their logical place; alternate endings to sentences and paragraphs are tried out, the reader can determine what the difference is; in one case the words "new and improved" are inserted after the fact before a brand name, cutely emulating the smarmy advertising technique.

But I find these methods very different from the more prevalent methods for distraction. These distractions are no doubt purposeful (and have this very purpose):

Digital Fiction as a reading experience offers a purposely, almost naturally, fragmented narrative; sentences, happenings, cut off as though erased .... [from the concept page]

I don't find this effect particularly compelling. I suppose it contributes to the confusion, mystery, and ominous tone of "Book of Waste" but I think it simply distracts me from the text, hinders my suspension of disbelief (which you would expect Flash to achieve with relative ease), reminds me of the form, at the expense of the content. Perhaps the authors of digital fiction would object here that this digital fiction is not purely about the textual content (which is neither particularly extensive, nor impressive), but the (interrupted) feeling of the form. [I'm not sure what to conclude here yet; the below may make my thoughts clearer.]

An interesting difference between old and new media is that one knows how old media works. The form is extremely well understood. Their is a structure, a syntax, determined over the centuries, set by convention, studied in literature classes that the artist may/must work within. The reader knows how much of the book is left at any given time, is sure about the static nature of the text, has expectations (almost universally fulfilled) about the grammar, punctuation and style. There is no set form here -- I am constantly on edge and surprised by the Flash created digital fiction. The rules are extremely limited: I know that the file is limited to the box in the window in front of me, that there are certain limitations on its video capabilities -- though this can be overcome to the point where I know only that the fiction is limited to the computer screen and speakers and cannot reach out and touch me. I have no conception of what its length will be, what format it will use for presentation (text, video, audio?), what the rules of interface are (though I am reasonably sure that I will move my mouse and click to get around). Much of art (this is a theory of mine that may not be accepted in the community at large, but I think it probably is) works by breaking pre-set rules -- these are particularly easy times for the reader to be aware of the choices that the author is making -- and Flash and digital fiction have very few. In order to make some statements about navigation and linearity (and the lack of either), for example, "Book of Waste" must first create a consistent, ordered system of navigation: these boxes in the upper right corner. This gives the medium extraordinary advantages and disadvantages -- on the one hand it can easily break from all of the conventions that readers expect in standard narrative media (it seems kind of like a movie, but, ah, it does this and that differently; the text is like a book, but, ah, it differs here and here for some reason), but on the other having no conventions it is limited, must make conventions in order to break them, must struggle to have anything notable but its form.

I think I am somewhat critical above of this lack of form and convention and the necessary limitations, but to its credit, Dreaming Methods makes no claim to be fixed or well-defined:

Digital Fiction doesn't claim to know what it is exactly. It tries to be appealing and entertaining, compulsive and, at least in some ways, literary. Above all, it tries to be a celebration of an evolving state of artistic affairs, an opportunity to imaginatively explore (sometimes its own) lack of identity, appeal, even meaning. [ibid.]

This digital fiction is experiment, and for that I cannot fault it. The forms that it tests may help us better understand other forms, and the potential forms of digital media. The stories in the meantime, though, are, to me, uncompelling, and experimental form alone does not encourage me to delve in any further here.

[For those readers who have read Wittgenstein On Certainty, I find the explanation of "hinge propositions" relevant here. Something must be kept fixed.

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are, as it were, hinges on which those turn.

where 'making questions' is art.]

Project Idea: Search

2005-07-25T16:37:00.000-04:00

So as I talk about rather a lot, I created this group on my campus to record audio of various events: the Amherst Recording Council. We've created a large collection of audio (29 events worth of audio online, and at least 30, probably more, waiting to be edited and uploaded) that we make available to the world. And that's a lot of information, about various obscure scholarly topics, that you can get if you sit and listen to all of our audio.

But a big problem, obviously, is that you don't know what all information is there in the audio format until you listen to all of it (all 30 hours of it), and no one is willing to do that to maybe get the information they want. So I'd like to add the ability, to make this resource more than a list of recent events and a place to look up your favorite intellectual speakers (and that is a good thing to have, no doubt, but I'd like it to be more), to search the text of all that audio content. This would let people who come to the site find what it is they're looking for, and would let the world (via Google, Yahoo, or what-have-you) find the ARC site as a source of the information that they're looking for.

Whether or not this will work as a project to take up over 2 weeks (but not to be a lifetime's work) is unclear. I think it's probably too small and disconnected, but perhaps it would work. I don't know. Comments are appreciated. Just so it's clear, I've been creating a series of transcripts (made by student slaves), so I think the search will have to work with that.

A Ridiculous Hypothetical with New Media

2005-07-20T02:20:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I'm letting my Philosophy major out too much, but I was thinking today about Manovich's principles, and whether the principles were necessary or sufficient conditions for new media.

For example: we took My Yahoo to be a quintessential example today of all six principles (numerical, programmable, modular, automated, variable, transcoded). Would similar media with only five of those conditions count? Please forgive the extensive hypothetical to follow; I am still a Philosophy major. Let's say we ASTP students started a business where for a nominal fee any professor could hire us to walk into their classroom and write on the blackboard a variety of content -- the current weather, news headlines, stock quotes, etc. We would offer the content based on the stated preferences of the customer (when they called us on the phone, say). Each student could have a particular specialty (Nick will handle weather; Rob, news headlines; Sara, stock quotes) and only the requested students will go to any particular job (Professor Mittell doesn't care about stock quotes, so only Nick and Rob go to his office and write info on his board). Our group will have a stated, strictly-followed business plan where we respond at once to every telephone call. The information we write in chalk clearly varies based on the customer or time. Our personal thoughts, the English language, etc. will be important parts of our work. The product then, as stated in the previous five sentences, fulfills the 2nd through 6th requirements of new media. Does it count?

I find the hypothetical interesting just because I'm not sure what the answer is. Usually I come up with a ridiculous hypothetical like this as a reductio ad absurdum, a logical extension of a principle to clearly unacceptable results. But in this case, I'm not sure if the result is ridiculous after all. And I'm not sure what to conclude from that. I came at the idea because I was unimpressed with the numerical (or as Professor Mittell preferred, digital) requirement for new media. There doesn't seem to me anything inherent in these types of media that they are in some way reducible to numbers -- numbers don't seem like an important part of it to me at all. And I've had a lot of experience recently with the idea that there isn't anything magical about people -- we are largely simple machines, and will one day fully be emulated by what we now consider the very distinct group of computers. It would seem silly to me if we determined that New Media had to depend on some inner layer of electromagnetic binary numbers, but were otherwise (and this might even be indistinguishable to an untrained eye) the same as Old Media. If this were in fact the case, we would have no reason to worry about the name "New Media" -- all we would really mean would be "Media Which Depends Upon Electromagnetic Binary Numbers".

On the other hand, I am uncomfortable calling our blackboard business New Media. This suggests either that I do have some numerical/digital requirement in mind somewhere, or that I think the other principles are not sufficient.

Maybe this hypothetical isn't *so* ridiculous. It's not so hard to believe that there could become a trend in the future where busy people hire other people to filter information for them (this sounds like something that may happen in the present even), based on their preferences. My ridiculous hypothetical is really just a group of highly organized research assistants.

QuirksMode

2005-07-19T23:45:00.000-04:00

I'll leave my contribution to the CSS links before I head out to a late dinner. I don't think anyone's mentioned this site yet, and it's been my absolute savior on a number of occasions, and would have saved me a lot of time if I had known about it when I started learning about CSS and the Document Object Model.

QuirksMode

The name, of course, refers to the "quirks mode" and "strict mode" that designers can tell browsers to use when interpreting the X/HTML and CSS. The site (and many others, and perhaps class lecture tomorrow) can describe this better than I can, but roughly authors wanted a way to tell browsers to continue using the old, non-standard ways of doing things even as standards support improved.

The site goes far beyond this distinction though, with extensive compatibility tables for many browsers on various CSS and JavaScript techniques, and a number of articles on best practices for CSS and DOM scripting.

Media Analysis of IMDb

2005-07-19T14:52:00.000-04:00

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

I expect we've all used this site to look up anything about any movie. It is the de facto standard source for that information.

And so IMDb obviously makes significant reference to cinema, as this is its entire focus. The navigation banner across the top uses a border that looks like a film reel. New content in the main portion of the page is listed as "Coming Attractions", the standard cinematic slogan. Interestingly though, I think many of the connections end there.

IMDb is largely just like any other searchable online database. A minimalist search box in the top left hand corner is almost always the mode of navigation (of course, this could be more extensive -- why not have advanced search options on the main page, as that's what everyone is interested in?). Links to recent content, popular content, related content cover the sidebars. Some paragraphs of text and cover images fill the center area.

The media content is largely the information in the database. Likely the reason that IMDb is so popular is that it has such an extensive database of information, and that its search capability is extensive and successful. Certainly the grammar and environment are also important (the standards, institutionalized or cultural, determine much of the site navigation and content of links). Banner ads (not on the main page, but extensive in all other pages) are an important factor resulting from the economic restrictions of the website.

Technobiography

2005-07-18T20:01:00.000-04:00

My first experiences were with technology as a creative device. I was excited as a child by computers in the same way that I was excited by woodworking.
[Note: there are a lot of good analogies here! A rough wooden table and a rough website have much in common -- powerful functionality given the time and skill input. A smooth website and a smooth carving are similar: limited functionality, but well-done, comfortable to handle, and so on]

I learned about computers largely from my father, who is not much of a computer person, but dealt with them (and their powerful future capabilities) in his work as a cartographer. I met with a local librarian at his suggestion and learned to use Gopher, and we spent considerable time and money trying to get our old Performa onto the World Wide Web. I was exhilarated to write very simple programs in QBASIC that could handle multiplication and division, and then calculator programs to do my algebra. But I was always learning from others here -- the basics of one language or another, one factoid or another about how the internet works underneath, or how computers work, and so on.

...

Technology is the unexploited, today. This is, of course, the view of any evangelist about any field, concept, etc., but technology is mine, given my personal, extensive background. I spend my time thinking about how technology could and should be used, but isn't, or isn't well -- whether it's at Amherst College with a disturbingly small computer science department, deployment of technology in the curriculum, or respect for computers in the student body, or in the broader world, where my granddad has very significant trouble using a web browser, despite being a skilled electrician. I think something many in our field have come across recently is that technology has advanced to a point now that it is very developed (functionality has been increasing at a breakneck pace for decades now) but that the ease of use has not increased at the same time.

And what about me personally?
As I've gotten better at this computer stuff, and as I've faced a community of those inexperienced, wary or outright hostile with regard to computers, I've had to deal with a different set of issues than learning the latest language, or adding capabilities to my technical skillset. I am constantly forced to defend technology to its opponents, and attempt to improve technology where their complaints are valid.

I've worked two summers now with the Curricular Computing section of the IT department at Amherst College. This group hires students over the summer to implement technology projects for any faculty that are at all interested. This is largely about user-friendliness, because if the faculty members, almost never with any computing training, can't use the software and show it to their students, it won't actually be used in practice. And another large part of this is maintenance and documentation -- interns spend much of their time converting existing websites (often created by past summer interns) to more easily maintainable versions -- computer-savvy interns commonly implement interesting designs and then graduate, leaving faculty members in trouble.

I would say that that change is parallel between my biography and that of computer technology in general. Perhaps I am just overly self-aware, but I think many in the field are thinking about it -- about how all of this technological capability and extraordinary power can be harnessed. One would think that technology itself would make this easier.