My medievalist husband presented me for Christmas with a copy of the book of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog by Brantley L. Bryant (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), now revealed to the world as LeVostreGC himself. The spouse knew I was a great fan of the blog because I used to annoy the hell out of him by reading out all the best bits. He doesn't want to read it now because he says the rest won't be as funny, except for "Margery Kempe at the MLA", which he will read because he is rather fond of old Margery. He thinks the world has given her a tough time. Hmmm.
Somewhere in this process is embedded some profound concept about the whole changing nature of the written word, from manuscript, through printing to the continually evolving landscape of electronic publication; multimedia, e-books, websites, blogs, Facebook, Tumblr et al and Twitter. I guess we're not finished yet. What is going to be the Next Big Thing for disseminating our words?
I was a bit disappointed in the book at first because it has some introductory material that is actually serious. The blog itself is very erudite and intellectual, but definitely not serious. But while the reader is cackling away at some bit of nonsense, they can feel they are one-upping the ignorant world with knowledge of some esoteric reference. Classic academic humour.
The comments to each blog piece are not included. Perhaps there are legal issues relating to copyright here, I don't know, but the comments made the blog a collaborative experience, while reducing it to the work of a single author makes it an authoritative work, as are all printed books (even if they're not). Then (shock, horror) the author tells us he has edited the entries to remove errors and misfired jokes. So the spontaneity and muddlement of whacking something out on the keyboard and, with devil-may-care enthusiasm, thrusting on to the world with a click of the "publish" button, has been overridden by the editorial process as applied to printed works through the ages.
And the author is outed. No longer can we wonder "Who the hell is this Geoffrey Chaucer bloke?" as we giggle over his cockeyed view of the world. The author himself asserts that this is partly due to "the expectations of print publication", so the reins of past technology are still attached to the bridle. Authority, editorial correctness and identity, as opposed to spontaneity, collaboration and deliberate anonymity. Bugger. And I was hoping to publish my outrageous novel about the workings of a charity book warehouse under the nom de plume Hipster Bookfairy. But hang on, authors of the past have had nom de plumes (noms de plume, noms de plumes, whatever). What is the rule? Does it have to be a proper nom, but not a nom that already belongs to somebody else particularly if they are dead, famous, or both? It does rather spoil the fantasy of the joke.
Finally, it naturally has an end. There are postings on the blog that postdate the publication of the book, and while they may be getting sparser in quantity as the author has acquired a career and a life, they are just as good a read. And there is always the hope that there is another beauty still in the offing. Still, it is there in that ready reference, flip-the-pages form and I can have a giggle and hoot at Margery, or King Richard II's rider, or the purported lascivious doings at Kalamazoo, whenever the urge strikes. And if the entire internet suddenly goes foofoo for unexpected reasons, there will still be a reminder of what was in one little corner of it.
Returning to some of the more serious discussion, Chapter 4 of the book is an article by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen entitled "Blogging the Middle Ages", which briefly discusses the history of blogs and other internet media in medieval studies. He notes that pioneers of the internet in medieval studies did not receive the same kind of recognition for their work as those who put printed ink on paper, and many fine pioneering medieval websites have either languished or disappeared as their authors have moved to other positions or projects.
Been there, done that. When the medievalist spouse and myself were working on multimedia projects in the mid 1990s, the august university we were working from was only interested in the production of educational product that could be sold to make money for the university. Never mind about continuity, development, posterity or the minor detail that they weren't actually paying me to work on the project. That is why everything out there with my name on it flies proudly with the banner "independent scholar". An awful lot of effort and brainpower was wasted in those early days on the internet because senior academics spent their time trying to pretend it wasn't happening while the pioneers made the history books (or blogs?) but not the professorships.
The succession of internet technologies that has occurred does not need to obliterate previous work, as each type of technology serves a different purpose. Ye olde webbsitte is still the best place to build a complex and structured teaching environment. A blog makes a great journal for announcement or opinionated ranting (didja notice?), but its archiving features mean it can have relevance over an extended period. I am amazed from my blog stats that people keep reading old blog posts. Facebook is great for building networks of the like minded, and Twitter is fine for catching people's attention and pointing to more wordy publications.
I am a little intrigued by the compilation sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, which seem to churn the contents of the internet around like a washing machine without necessarily adding much in the way of content, but I guess we will find creative ways of using it in time. After all, people initially used Twitter to announce to the world what they were eating for lunch. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are some committed souls out there who are using the above to ensure that stuff released as Creative Commons gets dispersed all around and truly becomes the commons before some bureaucrat changes their mind.
What we need to do now is convince the dinosaurs that this can be real academic work. And it's got to be OK to have a laugh. Keep on bloggin' LeVostreGC.
Showing posts with label multimedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multimedia. Show all posts
Monday, December 30, 2013
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Technology Bites My Bum - Again
Back in the mid 1990s, Tillotson and Tillotson decided it would be a really good idea to produce some teaching software for medieval history using this newfangled multimedia technology. We thought we produced some pretty hot stuff for a couple of amateurs: amateurs at IT that is. Of course, we all know what happened after that; new operating systems every Thursday, the internet gets useful, then brilliant, development software companies go phut. The Medieval Writing website was the only thing rescued from the wreckage.
Of course I backed everything up. How dare you suggest otherwise. I have multiple backups on everything from ZIP disks (remember them) to the cloud (just hope it doesn't rain). Only problem is, I have only one antique computer that can run the software I used to create these masterpieces, and it takes up half my study and is showing signs of being about to die.
Now one of the very good pieces of advice I received at that stage, and dutifully passed on to everyone else, is that you should always keep a copy of the text of whatever you are doing in a simple text format so that it isn't platform dependent. Blush. I now discover that the text material in my multimedia files cannot be exported, or even cut and pasted out without displaying loads of crap code.
Part of the reason I didn't do it was because of ideas and experiments in multimedia design. IT gurus assured me that nobody these days would scroll down a page to see what was at the bottom, and that multimedia pages should be designed to fit on the screen. So the text was all broken up into little boxes, some of which popped up out of nowhere when you moused on things and dissolved away when you were finished, or appeared in separate little windows or did any number of those dinky little multimedia things which are SOOO 1990s. That also means I can't just print if off. And now everybody happily scrolls down web pages without having a nervous breakdown about it.
I once wrote a blog posting about how web pages are more like medieval manuscripts than the pages of printed books, but now I find myself regressing in a less delightful way, copy typing madly like an old fashioned office slave in a typing pool, trying to beat that sneaky red stain which is creeping into the corner of my old CRT monitor and hoping that checksum error on bootup will allow me to ignore it for a bit longer.
Of course I backed everything up. How dare you suggest otherwise. I have multiple backups on everything from ZIP disks (remember them) to the cloud (just hope it doesn't rain). Only problem is, I have only one antique computer that can run the software I used to create these masterpieces, and it takes up half my study and is showing signs of being about to die.
Now one of the very good pieces of advice I received at that stage, and dutifully passed on to everyone else, is that you should always keep a copy of the text of whatever you are doing in a simple text format so that it isn't platform dependent. Blush. I now discover that the text material in my multimedia files cannot be exported, or even cut and pasted out without displaying loads of crap code.
Part of the reason I didn't do it was because of ideas and experiments in multimedia design. IT gurus assured me that nobody these days would scroll down a page to see what was at the bottom, and that multimedia pages should be designed to fit on the screen. So the text was all broken up into little boxes, some of which popped up out of nowhere when you moused on things and dissolved away when you were finished, or appeared in separate little windows or did any number of those dinky little multimedia things which are SOOO 1990s. That also means I can't just print if off. And now everybody happily scrolls down web pages without having a nervous breakdown about it.
I once wrote a blog posting about how web pages are more like medieval manuscripts than the pages of printed books, but now I find myself regressing in a less delightful way, copy typing madly like an old fashioned office slave in a typing pool, trying to beat that sneaky red stain which is creeping into the corner of my old CRT monitor and hoping that checksum error on bootup will allow me to ignore it for a bit longer.
And there's a sample screenshot in all its glory, complete with clunky buttons, 256 colour graphics, popup subheadings on mouseover and navigation buttons all over the place, not to mention a strictly rectangular design that fits even on ye olde 800 x 600 screen (or whatever it was back then). Pity you can't hear the spasm of Gregorian chant that plays while you contemplate which button to push. Only the Glossary has so far made it to the web.
Hope you scrolled down for a look at it.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Back, or Forward, to Hieroglyphics
Many years ago when multimedia was a novelty and the world was young and innocent, twelve year old multimedia designers told us that the written word, in terms of alphabetic spelling, was going to become extinct. We were told that the more intuitive mode of communication for hypertext links and task initiation was in the use of graphic symbols; pictograms or ideograms, although young multimedia designers were unfamiliar with these terminologies. They called them graphic hot links back then.
As a middle aged fogey back then, as opposed to the geriatric fogey that I am now, I begged to differ. After all, what is so intuitive about a quasi-3D button on a 2D screen and what is so intuitive about doing everything by pressing buttons anyway? My granddaughters would not understand this now, and their opposable thumbs are developing whole new skills and functions. I compromised and wrote captions on my buttons in my alphabetic dogmatism.
Nonetheless, I fail to see what is so intuitive about a picture of a rabbit running across the bottom of the screen as a navigation symbol for the next page, or about a cartoon dog fetching items from a letterbox as an email link. Furthermore, the use of graphics shaped like electrical switches is not intuitive, it is merely utilising learned symbolic communication from older technology. Besides, I can never work out which is on or off anyway since they changed real switches from little levers that pointed up or down to rocker switches with a vertical line and a circle on them. These are ideograms in their own right, but not particularly intuitive.
I think it was because the web started off as a text based medium that restored text links to respectability, even though it is now filled with everything that whistles and sings. Drop down menus had words on them, even if menu shortcut bars had symbols on them. We went back to believing in alphabetic writing for a while.
I have noticed a recent return to graphic symbolism, but the symbols have become even more simplified and abstract. Gmail now has strange little monochrome graphics instead of headings that say "trash", "archive" or "label". I have to hover the mouse over them to make the words come up in order to know which is which. My antique Kindle (nearly a year old!) has real buttons which say "menu" and "home" and the like, while my husband's new one has buttons with strange little symbols which all look like little geometric grids, indistinguishable one from the other without a good light and reading glasses. We are going back to pictograms, but they do not have the essential characteristic of being readily distinguishable.
Intriguingly, as technologies change, the pictograms themselves are becoming increasingly abstracted. The standard graphic symbol for "save", for example, is a picture of a floppy disk, which many younger users of computers may never have even seen. The pictogram of a floppy disk has transformed into an ideogram for saving a file to whatever medium is being used. The garbage can symbol for trash is well recognised, but I always used to panic when using a Macintosh because to eject a removable medium, you had to drag it to the trash. The learning part of my brain recognised this as merely a process, while the intuitive part always panicked that I was trashing the contents of the medium and my files would all disappear. Mind you, with Windows I had a mental problem with clicking the "start" button to turn it off, but they have fixed this now as the button has no misleading captions, just that annoying little quadripartite flag, which is neither informative nor intuitive but merely an arrogant brand recognition symbol. Is this simplifying onscreen communication, or making the language of the process more complex and subtle?
On other technological gizmos, real live buttons are no longer the simple analogue for binary function that they used to be. Gadgets get smaller, so rather than fill up space with loads of buttons, a few buttons perform different functions when used in different combinations. To remember how to work these permutations and combinations we have to read the manual. Back to ye olde alphabetic writing again, and yet I remember when it was considered that operating manuals, whether for gadgets or computer software, should be quite unnecessary. The more graphic and intuitive it gets, the more we need the words.
Old books about writing put these various schemes on a timeline of increasing conceptual complexity; pictograms, ideograms then alphabetic writing. We are actually using a combination of all three today, which some would say is the death of proper writing, but I think may represent a whole new complex of mental decoding of symbolic language.
So why am I rabbiting on about this stuff right now? Well, just to keep you amused and to deflect attention from the fact that updates to Medieval Writing may be a few weeks off yet, as we are in school holidays down here and that means extensive visits from granddaughters, and besides, I am just in the process of buying a new fishing kayak.
As a middle aged fogey back then, as opposed to the geriatric fogey that I am now, I begged to differ. After all, what is so intuitive about a quasi-3D button on a 2D screen and what is so intuitive about doing everything by pressing buttons anyway? My granddaughters would not understand this now, and their opposable thumbs are developing whole new skills and functions. I compromised and wrote captions on my buttons in my alphabetic dogmatism.
Nonetheless, I fail to see what is so intuitive about a picture of a rabbit running across the bottom of the screen as a navigation symbol for the next page, or about a cartoon dog fetching items from a letterbox as an email link. Furthermore, the use of graphics shaped like electrical switches is not intuitive, it is merely utilising learned symbolic communication from older technology. Besides, I can never work out which is on or off anyway since they changed real switches from little levers that pointed up or down to rocker switches with a vertical line and a circle on them. These are ideograms in their own right, but not particularly intuitive.
I think it was because the web started off as a text based medium that restored text links to respectability, even though it is now filled with everything that whistles and sings. Drop down menus had words on them, even if menu shortcut bars had symbols on them. We went back to believing in alphabetic writing for a while.
I have noticed a recent return to graphic symbolism, but the symbols have become even more simplified and abstract. Gmail now has strange little monochrome graphics instead of headings that say "trash", "archive" or "label". I have to hover the mouse over them to make the words come up in order to know which is which. My antique Kindle (nearly a year old!) has real buttons which say "menu" and "home" and the like, while my husband's new one has buttons with strange little symbols which all look like little geometric grids, indistinguishable one from the other without a good light and reading glasses. We are going back to pictograms, but they do not have the essential characteristic of being readily distinguishable.
Intriguingly, as technologies change, the pictograms themselves are becoming increasingly abstracted. The standard graphic symbol for "save", for example, is a picture of a floppy disk, which many younger users of computers may never have even seen. The pictogram of a floppy disk has transformed into an ideogram for saving a file to whatever medium is being used. The garbage can symbol for trash is well recognised, but I always used to panic when using a Macintosh because to eject a removable medium, you had to drag it to the trash. The learning part of my brain recognised this as merely a process, while the intuitive part always panicked that I was trashing the contents of the medium and my files would all disappear. Mind you, with Windows I had a mental problem with clicking the "start" button to turn it off, but they have fixed this now as the button has no misleading captions, just that annoying little quadripartite flag, which is neither informative nor intuitive but merely an arrogant brand recognition symbol. Is this simplifying onscreen communication, or making the language of the process more complex and subtle?
On other technological gizmos, real live buttons are no longer the simple analogue for binary function that they used to be. Gadgets get smaller, so rather than fill up space with loads of buttons, a few buttons perform different functions when used in different combinations. To remember how to work these permutations and combinations we have to read the manual. Back to ye olde alphabetic writing again, and yet I remember when it was considered that operating manuals, whether for gadgets or computer software, should be quite unnecessary. The more graphic and intuitive it gets, the more we need the words.
Old books about writing put these various schemes on a timeline of increasing conceptual complexity; pictograms, ideograms then alphabetic writing. We are actually using a combination of all three today, which some would say is the death of proper writing, but I think may represent a whole new complex of mental decoding of symbolic language.
So why am I rabbiting on about this stuff right now? Well, just to keep you amused and to deflect attention from the fact that updates to Medieval Writing may be a few weeks off yet, as we are in school holidays down here and that means extensive visits from granddaughters, and besides, I am just in the process of buying a new fishing kayak.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
What's It All About?
If anybody out there is interested in the history and background to this project, there is an article in which I discuss it in the latest edition of the online journal The Heroic Age. That then links to an earlier article about the travails of my various medieval projects in this age of rapidly changing technology. (And no, I didn't have anything to do with the page design of this website!) It is wonderful to be able to do amazing things on the web. However, when your first computer used a cassette tape to save and load a couple of kilobytes of data and had a lurid green screen with monochrome graphics, there is an awful lot of material sitting as printouts in multiple little bottom drawers waiting for a complete overhaul before it can again see the light of day. Wonderful enigma, isn't it? Computers are this great aid to productivity, but steadily destroy their own products with obsolescence. We live in interesting times.
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