C8: Open-Source Supported Electronic Publishing in the University
Ben McCorkle
Ben discussed using GoogleDocs to manage submissions throughout the editorial process. He also uses it for a preproduction version before moving everything into InDesign for the final version.
- GoogleDocs allows for him to provide different students different levels of access.
On the issue of open source, it is built using open source software and friendly with the open source community but the program itself is not actually open source. Hearkening back to Bolter’s talk, Ben alluded to GoogleDocs as basically open source in a metaphorical if not literal way.
Dickie Selfe
Dickie pointed out the importance of giving credit to student work. So, his question is why open source e-publishing.
Why do so?
- a commitment to a gap in the profession and institution
- the commitment and willingness of young developing undergraduate technical consultants (STCs)
Complexities
- tenuous site location
- tenuous support staff
- tenuous editorial staff
- no traditional institutional space for it
- constant need for inventive unforeseen work
Dickie also ventriloquized Scott DeWitt and talked about http://www.commonplaceuniversity.com/ . Commonplace does not use open source software because of problems with scalability at this point.
Vera Dukaj
Vera talked about Harlot. Harlot is a fledging online magazine that uses open source software (ojs). The group first sought some space at the university but found it locked down and largely inaccessible.
- One of the concerns that she identifies with open source software is that since the code is open and available potential hackers can evaluate the code for weaknesses and hack in.
- Another issue is sustainability of that software–keeping it up to date with security patches, installing updates, etc. If the university won’t do this for you, of course.
B7: New Media Scholarship Stakeholders: Departmental, Editorial, and Authorial Issues
Katie Braun
Katie reported on a case study of evaluation of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion. She first introduced the criteria used in this one department:
- originality
- lucidity (mostly relevance and understandability to outsiders)
- intellectual depth
- contribution to the field (advances the field, fill a gap)
She then invited a department member to critique several pieces of online scholarship:
- http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/DavisHardy
- technology: basically just uses hyperlinks and otherwise traditional text
- member’s critique: pedagogy-focused, doesn’t seem like it needs to be online, unoriginal
- http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/8.2/binder.html?features/ellertson/home.html
- technology: some flash-based, but working a line between print and multimodal
- member’s critique: liked the theorization, the ethos of the video, appropriate use of medium
- http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/9.1/binder.html?http://www.msu.edu/%7Ecushmane/one/landscape.html
- technology: flash-based interface–distant from a textual interface
- member’s critique: could not read it because he couldn’t download the plugin in his office computer, quickly dismissed once he read it
Her question is then that it’s incredibly important to have clear definitions of evaluation criteria. Need to do more to help department members use the criteria appropriately.
Cheryl Ball: New Media Scholarship: Taxonomies, Heuristics, & Strategies to Connect (?) Authors, Editors, Departments, & Tenure Committees
Cheryl has collected lists (read: taxonomies, heuristics, strategies) connected to evaluating digital scholarship. I’m going to beg her for her works cited page. Seriously. She’s created a digital scholarship axis that she first presented at CCCC 2008:
Strategies for Understanding Digital Scholarship
- textual performances
- seminars/colloquia
- in-text reading/analysis guides
- extra-textual T&P binder narratives
- co-articles in print journals
She’s negotiating between her own work and her departmental guidelines. She would like feedback about what’s going on in all institutions and how work is getting addressed for T&P committees.
Virginia Kuhn
Virginia looked at these same issues from the perspective of authorship, though from a number of authorial perspectives: the perspectives of published authors, student authors, etc. Looking at: http://iml.usc.edu/dev/kairos .
General issues:
- the problem of calling scholarship into question
- how to effectively comment on text/sound/image for student drafts
Video issues with putting the site together:
- compatibility
- compression
- uniformity with out losing experimentality
She is going to start using Sophie with her honors students even though there has been concern about standardization. She thinks it allows the intellectual work to come through. One her student’s projects: http://immersiveflow.org/
C&W 08: Bolter Keynote
Open Writing Spaces: Inscription and Technology
Bolter began his speech by joking about the number of us (me included) sitting in the back row to access power for laptops.
In sum, it seems that he is tracing a trajectory from what he calls cyberspace, which was preoccupied with VR to what he calls Augmented Reality (AR). Augmented reality, in comparison with VR, isn’t completely immersive. It basically allows a mashup between a real world environment and some digital element, such as bringing a Second Life avatar onto the college campus (in real time, not just doing some photo composition).
From Bolter’s own website:
The AR user typically wears a headset, similar to that used for Virtual Reality. The difference is that with AR the user can see her physical environment; the computer overlays information or graphics in her field of view. Blair MacIntyre and I have been exploring the domains of education and entertainment by blending digital video of actors and sound into the AR view. Examples described in the DART web site include: Alice’s Adventures in New Media and Three Angry Men.
So, why do it though? It might be cool to have a meeting with my friends in Nebraska and Oklahoma where we each are experiencing the same space through AR, but is it really necessary? Are you seeing something here I’m missing?
Some further notes:
- historical context: hypertextual writing–there was a movement of literary hypertext; he is still emphasizing the power of hypertext to have influenced a number of following events. Makes a split between the internet and belles lettres–seems like he’s presenting a bit of a binary.
- Enter Game Studies. New form of digital inscription. Games include procedural rhetoric. Anyone else need to know more about procedural rhetoric? Ian Bogost Persuasive Games is the text Bolter quotes. Seems like Bolter is identifying games that are overtly persuasive, even political. Go to http://newsgaming.com . Are these games a new kind of writing, Bolter asks?
- Comparison of the hypertext movement and the game studies movement. He thinks the literary world successfully beat back the hypertext movement. The response to the game studies movement comes in the form of a binary: either games are dangerous or games are innocuous. The hypertext movement was a formal movement (focusing on form), but the gaming movement is more informal, eclectic.
- Furthermore…cyberspace as the “old” paradigm; cyberspace as an escapist space from the “real” world. Bolter uses the example of VR technologies. VR turning into a new interface…of course the reality of VR is much less impressive than the hypothetical. VR centers on disembodiment: “our identities have no bodies” Barlow “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.
- So, the paradigm shift from this concept of cyberspace to ??? “ubiquitous computer” “tangible computing and media” “wearable computer” “mixed and augmented reality”. Shift that moves from completely immersed (VR) to an integration of technology into real environment.
- Factors in this shift: personal computer, graphics, inter-computer connection
- Bolter’s term is augmented reality (AR): in the 1990s the idea was that a worker could have information from a computer that supports the construction of the real world
- His interest is more in AR experience-based situations than worker modifications.
- He provides examples that use virtual reality technology but that use the actual space as a background for the experience and that allow you to switch identity positions during the game and experience the space from the point of view of all the characters. The third example is “Voices of Oakland [a civil war graveyard]“, that works just like an audio tour of a museum except that it uses GPS tracking to tell where you are and play the appropriate audio at the appropriate time. In the next edition he hopes it will be possible for participants to contribute their own voices to be heard by other participants. Other ideas are being able to deliver users poetry at given subway stops through something like their cell phones when they arrive at a certain stop.
