Week 13: Review and Conclusions

Week 13: Review and Conclusions

Narratives can be published in various online ways: 

• Voicethreads
• Skype
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social Bookmarks/Folksonomy
• Diigo
• Evernote
• Flickr
• Netvibes
• Twitter
• E-mail
• Google Pages
• Facebook

Anyone Can Publish

A timely example of how even the youngest learners can demonstrate transliteracy (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3-little-pigs/id357980333?mt=8). Henry Dewey created his own illustrations to interpret “The Three Little Pigs” and then with the assistance of his father, created an iPhone app for people to read his version of the story, which includes Henry’s narration of the tale.

Henry Dewey is a typical 8-year-old. He loves to build with Legos and annoy his little sister, hoping to someday own a reptile to terrorize her with.

The first-grader at Trinity Episcopal School in Rollingwood is also doing some nontraditional things: Henry just released his first iPhone application, an e-book version of the folk tale “The Three Little Pigs.”

Using pen and ink, Henry spent the entire fall semester creating the illustrations for his book during an after-school art program at Trinity.

“I like being creative, making bobbleheads on paper,” Henry said.

Early in the process, he decided he wanted to transform his project into an iPhone application to provide more options on the gadget for children.

He told his father, Mark Dewey — himself an iPhone application developer — about his idea. When Henry finished the illustrations, the drawings were converted into a digital format. Then his dad helped turn the project into the application, rewriting the story and having Henry narrate it.

“At a young age to know you can be a creator, in the mainstream of American culture, that can be powerful,” said Mark Dewey, whose digital media company, Geoki, published the app. “We hope that carries on through his growing and his life.”

Week 9: Transliteracy

During this week you will want to refer to Professor Sue Thomas's guest lecture.

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

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

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

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

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

Transliteracy asks key questions about communication:

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

Watch “Social Media Revolution” on YouTube:  

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

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

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

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

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




Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

Week 9: Born Digital Fictions

UPDATE: It seems that A Million Penguins (the wiki novel), one of our required readings for this week, has been taken offline...


How are web platforms leveraged for the telling of compelling narratives? Jeremy Ettinghausen wonders what will happen to the novel: “is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise.”

Some key ideas to consider this week:

Real time
twitter stories
flickr stories
rss feeds and narrative
Inanimate Alice
episodic fiction
how to maintain readerly interest

This Week: Blog question and answer with digital creator Chris Joseph!

"You will see--very, very soon--authors become publishers. You will see publishers become booksellers. You will see booksellers become publishers, and you will see authors become booksellers." ~ Stephen Riggio

According to Kate Pullinger, there are seven aspects that we (readers, writers and creators of new media texts) MUST acknowledge:

1. Writers need to talk about money
2. Writers, publishers and teachers need to get their heads out of the sand: the digital future is already here
3. E-books are boring.
4. We better keep talking about e-books.
5. Be afraid of e-books.
6. Always remember that human culture is highly visual.
7. Good writing.

Read Pullinger’s entire manifesto here: http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/04/seven-paranoid-provocations-on.html.

We'll also be exploring the wiki-novel A Million Penguins.

Bruce Mason says this about the project:

"The final product itself, now frozen in time, is more akin to something produced by the wild, untrammelled creativity of the folk imagination. The contributors to ―A Million Penguins, like the ordinary folk of Bakhtin‘s carnivals, have produced something excessive. It is rude, chaotic, grotesque, sporadically brilliant, anti-authoritarian and, in places, devastatingly funny. As a cultural text it is unique, and it demonstrates the tremendous potential of this form to provide a stimulating social setting for writing, editing and publishing. The contributors may not have written one single novel but they did create something quite remarkable, an outstanding body of work that can be found both in the main sections as well as through the dramas and conversations lacing the ―backstage pages. And they had a damned good time while doing so. As the user Crtrue writes.

Hi hi hi hi hi! Seriously. This is going to fail horribly. It's still fun."

Read the Million Penguins' Report here.


Discussion Questions:
Q1. Although publishing might seem easier in some senses, what about copyright issues? Think of Apple’s DRM movement.
Q2. Read “A Million Penguins.” How different from a traditional book is this wikinovel? How would you describe it (is it really a “novel”)?
Q3. Digital publishing is in a constant state of evolution. In August 2010, Oxford University Press has decided to relaunch the online version of the OED. They have chosen iFactory as the online
publishing platform. What changes in functionality, access and personalisation do you think might occur from such a shift (offline & static to online & evolving)? Read and article on the change here:
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/OxfordUniversity-Press-ChoosesPubFactory-to-Develop-OxfordEnglishDictionary-1299800.htm

Exploring A Million Penguins

View more presentations from Bruce Mason

E-Books?

Give our recent discussion with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods, I thought this article from The Guardian Book Blog would be of interest:

Are books and the internet about to merge?

The difference between ebooks and the internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing closer and closer

Book and internet: can you see the join? Illustration: Images.com/Corbis

Damien Walter

guardian.co.uk, Wed 15 Feb 2012 16.00 GMT

Comment

Blogpost

It's easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the world wide web, it was with the idea of making academic papers and other documents widely available. To this end he devised a simple way of laying out text and images on a page, inventing what we now call Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.

Early HTML could define pages and paragraphs, bold and italicise text, embed images and lay out tables. A little more than 20 years later, HTML 5 includes media playback and animation, and the web has now become so ubiquitous that for most users it is indistinguishable from the underlying framework of the internet itself, but at its core the technology of the web remains little changed. Every web page, however sophisticated it may seem, is basically a digital book that we read on our computer through our web browser.

So when Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks and LibriVox, stated today that the book and the internet will merge, he was in one sense simply reiterating what is already the case. But from the perspective of people without the technical knowledge to see how closely entwined the book and the internet already are, it has the whiff of yet another doom-monger proclaiming the death of the book as we know it.

McGuire's argument hinges on the recent emergence of ebooks as a serious contender to the print book as the dominant artefact of the publishing industry, with some suggesting that ebooks will make up 50% of the book market by 2015 thanks to the Kindle, iPad and smartphones. Ebooks are deliberately packaged and marketed to appear as much like traditional print books as possible, so many readers will be surprised to discover that ebooks are built around much the same HTML structure that powers the web. Every ebook, no matter how much like a print book it may seem, is a web page that we read on the simplified browser embedded in our e-reader of choice.

The distinction between the ebook/webpage, webpage/ebook is not a material one. In technological terms they are exactly the same thing. But when McGuire first mooted his argument on Twitter in April last year my response likely mirrors the response of many book readers, "Books are researched, written, edited, published, marketed … and hence paid for. The internet is ego noise, hence free." The distinction many of us draw between a book and a webpage is one of quality and hence of value. The real question raised by McGuire's argument is whether we continue to value ebooks as books, or as webpages. Books are something we pay for. Webpages are things we read for free. Which model will win out?

Unless you are one of the very small number of people whose fortunes rest upon the outdated business model of publishing, you should hope that the latter wins. Because this is about a much bigger issue than how writers and editors get paid for the valuable work they do. For hundreds of years we've been slowly expanding the reach of human knowledge, both in terms of what we know and how many of us know it. Today we take a resource like Wikipedia for granted – but compare it with the situation of only a few decades ago, when the majority of the population had lacked easy access to such knowledge. The benefits of expanding access to knowledge, both social and economic, are incalculable.

Now we stand at the threshold of possibly the most revolutionary advances in human history. The combined technologies of the internet – HTML webpages, ebooks, search technology, social media and many more – are very close to making all human knowledge accessible to all people for free. Even the short-term consequences of this advance are hard to envisage, and in the long term it has the potential to improve our future as much as the invention of the printing press improved our past and present.

Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none too pleased about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but we'd never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act, and even more draconian legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they lose.

For centuries the book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably linked with our concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the other. But for human knowledge to reach its full potential, we may have to let go of the book-as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different definition of what a book is.

Week 6: Guest Lecture

This week we have the pleasure of welcoming Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods. Andy has written a guest lecture to introduce us to the work of Dreaming Methods and the writing/creating/publishing process. His lecture fits in well with the lecture discussions we've already had about transliteracy and born digital fictions as well as posts like that of Judith's, discussing the *narratives* of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Please, as usual, add your comments and questions here, to this post as Andy will be checking in regularly throughout this week to respond.

FICTION OF DREAMS

What is Dreaming Methods?

Dreaming Methods (http://www.dreamingmethods.com/) is a website which showcases what I call digital fiction: stories designed from the outset to be read (and/or experienced) only on a computer or other device. It has no print counterpart. It's not tied into a movie, a book, an advertising agency or a TV series; all of the work is original and free to view. The site has been online for over 11 years now.

Dreaming Methods is a project of the charity I work for, One to One Development Trust (http://www.onetoonedevelopment.org). As a day job, I create websites, film graphics and print designs for clients in the national and international arts/voluntary sectors. Dreaming Methods therefore is not entirely without financial backing, but it is still largely a pursuit of passion – with most of the work having been created on very little or no budget at all, and almost entirely in spare time.