Networks within Networks: Humans, Technologies, and Metaphors

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Reverend

I’ve heard Gardner Campbell talk at length about Networks of Networks as a way to describe what’s happening in a course like his own New Media Studies or ds106. You can listen to him wax poetic on the concept in this talk given to ds106 back in January of 2011. The idea here is that rather than understanding courses like these as MOOCs in terms of massive, broadcast learning experiences, they become localized, fractal relationships that form a loose, yet dynamic, community born out of the web (not unlike the metaphor Mike Caulfield has been exploring with Inter Library Loan and online learning here).  I love this idea, and for me it’s a jumping off point for beginning to understand scale in new, more complex and compelling ways. The idea of numbers is compelling only insofar as you are trying to monetize those numbers, the figures of fractal course frameworks and transformative learning networks are much harder, though not impossible, to assess because it begins to outline the contours of humanity in these courses. In fact, the very idea of constantly using and re-using new relationships between ideas to explain these technologies seems distinctly human—but I have to admit I don’t speak dog 😉

The occasion for thinking about the Networks of Networks idea came while playing around with Jeff Mcclurken’s ds106 blog last night.  And let me say it’s awesome to see Jeff playing around with ds106, and his reasons for doing so are exemplary—walking the walk is always awesome. What’s more, mcclurken.org is actually a mapped network on UMW Blogs, not a mapped domain but a mapped network, and the difference is significant. Jeff can build a series of sites within his own domain that remain within the larger network of UMW Blogs, a network of networks that anyone and everyone inside (or outside of UMW Blogs) can create. As we move forward with the Domain of One’s Own project (which is a done deal and provides 400 faculty and students their own domain and web hosting the first year) we can start approaching the idea of setting up these spaces as networks of thought and interaction rather than the more static connotation of a site.

What I ‘ve always loved about WordPress is as a technology it provides a solid metaphor for the concepts of networked learning, web-based platforms, and distributed openness—it’s not surprising either because it’s an application of and on the web—a result of years of  web thinking, to quote Jon Udell. So when I was fixing a bug in Jeff’s network that was preventing comments on the site (basically the Cookies for Comments plugin had a rewrite in the .htaccess file that was borking all comments on networks other than UMW Blogs) it occurred to me that Jeff’s mcclurken.org is not just a mapped site, but a network of his work that other faculty and students can also create. From there the question of how we think about syndicating and aggregating these networks so that they make sense and provide possibilities for serendipitous discovery. This is just one of many questions that we have to grapple with in regards to the Domain of One’s Own pilot that we are starting at UMW. Let’s not force people to use the web hosting as much as we let them decide from a menu of options for mapping on an external service, networking on UMW Blogs, creating their own, etc.

Image credit: Scott Schrantz's "Monterey Bay Aquarium"

More than anything though, the macguffin that will be driving my thinking for the next year is how can we use aggregation and syndication to bring individuals, courses, and departments to the umw.edu website in a seamless way so that our university’s WordPress install can leapfrog UMW Blogs and become the public platform for syndicating and aggregating the activity around the community in order to demonstrate the life of the mind at UMW and beyond. This is an idea Cathy Derecki and Curtiss Grymala have been pushing for a while, and I outlined it at a recent talk I gave at Penn State University that the great Brad Kozlek was kind enough not only to attend, but also to take pretty comprehensive notes. The “university website is not a brochure – but a fish tank providing a view into the activity of community,” and the fact that UMW is soon to have numerous levels of engagement at the individual, course, and department level will allow us to start imagining what this might look like in terms of representing the work being done throughout the community in some simple, dynamic, and enagaging ways on the web.

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

A bava face trace

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Reverend
A bava face trace by snakepliskens
A bava face trace, a photo by snakepliskens on Flickr.

This Daily Create is my first of many assignments for ds106 this Summer—I’m a camper through and through and it’s never too late to join in on the fun, get started here. It’s only week 1 of a perfectly timed 10 week course, and I have no question it will blow your mind!

As for today’s Daily Create, I came into work and saw Timmmmyboy’s awesome trace that he did on the iPad using the Brushes application and I finally decided to breakdown and try it out. This is my first piece of art for #ds106 that was created with an iPad—despite my description in the about page two and a half years ago:

This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer (none of those wimpy ass iPads), a hardy internet connection, a domain of your own, some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster (and we’ll spend time helping you get up and running with at least two of the last three requirements).

http://ds106.us/about/

Jimmy eat crow and he don’t care.
Jimmy eat crow and he don’t care.

One day you are screaming about YouTube and copyright then next you are making love to an iPad. It’s back and forth with you.

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Fear of a YouTube Planet

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Reverend

Today it occurred to me that I’m probably gonna lose my YouTube account very soon. Like a lot of folks on YouTube, I upload silly videos I’ve made, clips I’ve ripped from DVDs to talk about films I like, random trailers, clips of video games, my kids dancing, etc. I started using it because the embed feature made the hassle of uploading and embedding your videos on your own server seemingly redundant—-it’s all done through YouTube. Which is great until, well, it’s not.

I’ve been on YouTube since 2006. I’ve uploaded more that 240 videos; I’ve also had almost 2 million views on those videos. What’s more, I’ve probably had around 50 copyright complaints, and they have been coming fast and furious as of late. There must be some crackdown in the office of YouTube, I imagine it like Joe Spinelli telling Stallone off in Night Hawks.

Wouldn’t you love if that’s how executives at YouTube talked about shutting down our ability to share and interact with our own culture? I feel like a criminal for quoting works I love. I feel like a criminal for wanting to further imagine through the offspring of our moment. Worst of all, I have to feel like a criminal when I am having fun. It’s becoming a much more serious crime, and I’m scared about that prospect. Not so much that they’ll sue me, but more that they have already occupied my mind trying to convince me that sharing online is evil. To convince me that a video sharing site owned by an advertising company that promises to “do no evil” has become the de facto mediary between millions of people and what seems a basic human right to re-use, remix, and re-imagine the media we inhabit. The implications of what the culture we have watched, supported, and even become fanatic about is making upon us is become increasingly difficult for us to understand more richly under such a model. Since the addition of YouTube six years ago Google has become a copyright constable for the entertainment industry—and a bad one at that. As much as I’ve enjoyed YouTube for years, it’s hard to give them a pass on the way they are policing everyone and I think it is high time for me to starting deriving a backup plan. I think I’ll eventually let them delete my account, but in the meantime I’ll be making a number of videos private until I have everything backed up (anyone have YouTube exit strategy tips?).

Ultimately, the straw that broke the camel’s back on this one came today when I went on a mad strike and disputed almost every claim I had claiming educational fair use. Seems a large number of my older video uploads to YouTube had been claimed recently, which could mean anything from a commercial, an ad, or even no access. Many have already come back saying tough shit, we don’t buy it.

The next step would be to challenge them, but at that rate I need a lawyer, some cash, and would need to pull the whole Larry Flynt thing with flags, snipers, and middle America—which I’m not really into. I just wanna share video with people when I have something to say about movies on my blog. It’s crucial to the academic work we do, it’s crucial to the virtues of discussion, and it’s crucial to the simple fact of being a citizen. Quite frankly, we need a better way than YouTube. We need a venue that hasn’t gotten in bed with the entertainment industry. We need a place that, like my blog, I don’t have to worry about someone else deleting from me without due process and a real engagement around what copyright, fair use, and the ability to use our culture to explain and interrogate it is. If I wasn’t getting threatened by YouTUbe I probably wouldn’t be leaving right now, but I am so I am. They suck. And what’s important I guess from me in all of this, is that it is useful to keep that in mind and I am kicking myself for the 242 times I chose convenience over freedom 🙂

Below is the email I got yesterday telling me that my video was deleted, and if I wanted to get it reinstated I would have to do more than a dispute, I would have to do a DMCA Counter Notice, which would mean I’m legally bound once I challenge this and I would need a lawyer, etc. Here is their wording:


Please understand that filing a counter-notification may lead to legal proceedings between you and the complaining party to determine ownership. Be aware that there may be adverse legal consequences in your country if you make a false or bad faith allegation by using this process.

One step up from a dispute, and the second one I have gotten. This, by the way, is part of the opening credits for The Wild Bunch which is magical (I own it on VHS, Laser Disc, and DVD) and no video on YouTube could do it any justice, but I was using it in as part of a blog post to make a point about Sam Peckinpah’s film, it is a visual aid, a quote, a piece of the visual argument I need to make my point. But I can’t quote it, it has become property of some media conglomerate that would have me pay them every time I want to share how I understand a piece of the culture I was thrown into—I believe this is a concept we will look back on in time and understand it as an awful and repressive act against any sense of democracy and freedom of expression. It’s a crime against thought. I need my very own space to do my “crimes,” and this Summer I’ll be experimenting with some options. Will I be part of the Vimeo diaspora? Or can we set up some other solution on our own, we’ll see very soon 🙂

Posted in YouTube | Tagged , | 21 Comments

Open Lab/Open Hearts: the Video

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Reverend

My CUNY homies: MBS, Matt Gold, Luke Waltzer, Mikhail G, me, and Daniel Phelps.

I’m becoming a really comfortable presenter, some might even suggest too comfortable—which I would agree. But this video of my 20 minute presentation at the opening of CUNY’s Open Lab site (I blogged it here) actually has one of my craziest bits on Andrew Allingham’s Boatload/Buttload/Shitload infographic as well as some advice for folks embarking on creating an open, online community at a university. The advice is actually what I think led to the successes of both UMW Blogs and ds106. Another thing about this presentation, I framed it for a student audience and really showed off the awesome work ds106ers constantly do. I think I am really proud of this video is because it’s how I wanna give every talk: excited, unhinged, and still somewhat cogent.

Posted in digital storytelling, pop culture, presentations | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Thinking about the Library of Congress Movie MOOC

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Reverend

I recently watched These Amazing Shadows (2012) based on Andy Rush’s recommendation and it got me extremely intrigued with the criteria for getting a film on the National Film Registry, what exactly does “artistically, culturally, and socially significant” mean? Seems like these three terms as criteria could frame an entire semester of inquiry for a movie MOOC 😉 What’s more, it would enable us to approach this idea of significance from a variety of different genres: narrative, documentaries, instructional, home movies, avant-garde, shorts, newsreels, animation, etc.

I’m currently working on a draft version of the syllabus for such a course that would ideally be taught in conjunction with the Library of Congress, Packard Campus, and I am thinking about how the class might be structured. Right now I’m thinking the class could sample a few films from each genre chosen for preservation, and then ask some basic questions about how the criteria of “artistically, culturally, and socially significant” might be understood for a number of those films (another way I was thinking about is by decade, but that is fodder for another post). As of now there are 575 films on the National Film Registry’s list, and if enough people play along with this class—we might be able to cover quite a few of them within the wider community. I’ll pull a few examples that I’ll analyze and share out from each genre to talk about while using this as a way of encouraging others to pick a film on the list and share back their findings through their blog. I like how this allows for a lot of freedom and self-direction for anyone taking the course.

What would also be awesome would be to get a number of folks from the These Amazing Shadows documentary (as well as the filmmakers) to talk to us about films they submitted and why, or bring in members of the actual National Film Registry committee to get a better sense of the whole decision process.

I’m also thinking we should dedicate part of the class to coming up with a number of films we think should be added in the coming years from a range of genres accompanied with an articulated argument as to why. I think there are a lot of ways we could bring in the wider community with stuff like this, and even make this topic the basis of the series we actually program at the Packard Campus. So awesome!

All this was inspired by “my email friend” at the Library of Congress, Packard Campus as well as by the great Rick Prelinger‘s bit in These Amazing Shadows when he talks about the 1954 Red Scare documentary The House in the Middle funded by the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. This 12 minute instructional film brilliantly illustrates how film is a powerful record of just how culturally-inflected the idea of reality truly is. It’s as much a primary source of a historical moment as it is an over-the-top, scare mongering attempt to get people to paint their house. If you haven’t seen The House in the Middle, it comes highly recommended, and is just one example of what’s to come from this still very embryonic course. I would love any ideas you might have about approaching such a course, films to focus on, etc.

Posted in 106movies, moviemooc | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Faculty Academy 2012: Under Disruption

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Reverend


A week from today Faculty Academy with be doing its 17th tour of duty at UMW. It’s become a mainstay on campus, and it’s become one of the few events where the teaching and learning that happens all year on campus gets featured publicly. It’s an awesome event, and every year as it approaches I once again realize that it’s a means to reflect on the amazing stuff happening on campus while at the same time providing an opportunity to think about what might be next.

This year we are actually bringing the conference back to the Mary Washington College campus (it’s been held at the Stafford Campus for the last five years), and given we’re in the new renovated Monroe Hall we figured we’d experiment a bit with the conference. Rather than starting off with presentations, we’re actually gonna be kicking off the conference with a media carnival that will feature a wide range of new media we’ve been experimenting with this year. So we will be setting up a different featured technology across 4 rooms: 3D printing with the makerbot; internet radio; the live streaming video kit, and real-time graphic visualization. The carnival should be a blast, and I expect it will be an exciting way to get the conference started, get people walking around, discovering things, and socializing all the while. I’ll be part of the internet showcase, and I am going to steal a page from Grant Potter and Brian Lamb’s book at Open Ed last year and wander around the conference and interview people on the radio so the folks in the showcase room can hear the possibilities 🙂

What’s more, our plenary speakers Giulia Forsythe and Grant Potter will be running at least two of those four showcase sessions and addressing the UMW community about Visual Literacy and the Adjacent Possible respectively. I’m fired up to be fortunate enough to have both Giulia and Grant come to UMW and inspire our faculty and staff to be as amazingly creative, open, and engaged as these two are, they walk a mean walk!

In between plenary sessions and the keynote (which I’ll get to in a second), the meat of the conference happens featuring a variety of presentations from UMW’s faculty. I think the sessions this year promise to be far more interactive and conversational given that more than half the submissions have been for panels. What’s more, at lunch time both days we’ll be featuring two major initiatives for the coming year: during Wednesday’s lunch Jeff McClurken will be framing the idea for a Digital Studies program at UMW and on Thursday Tim Owens, Martha Burtis, and Justin Webb will be framing the Domain of One’s Own project . I’m excited to get the conversational opened up more broadly for both of these initiatives, they’re awesome.

And last, but certainly not least, keynoting this year’s conference we have NYU professor of Fine Arts David Darts delivering a talk titled “When I Hear the Word Culture, I Reach for My Source Code: The Struggle for Freedom and Control in the Digital Age” (and if that title isn’t cool enough follow the link and read the description!). [A quick aside, I think this is the first year that every invited speaker is Canadian—what is this world coming to! :] This particular group of speakers at this years conference all have a very real and important edge to the work they are doing in this space: they want it open, they want it free, and they want it now! It is gonna be a sick one, and they all will bring the A-game down on this mother…..anyway, I got the chance to speak with Darts this past fall thanks to Grant Potter, and if you want to have an idea of some of the awesome you are in for, listen to David Darts describe his work with the Pirate Box which is one of his many provocations in the space of technology and teaching to challenge the commodification of the web as product and champion it as a space for freedom and possibility. Click the link below.

David Darts on his PirateBox Project

Oh yeah, did I mention Faculty Academy is totally free and I’m having a party at my house  to cap it all off on Thursday night? How can you not come? Register here and be there, hippies!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Reason number 12,250 why blogging rules

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Reverend

Scene from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood

I’m a pretty regular blogger, since December 2005 I have blogged on average 285 posts a year, every year for almost seven years. It’s not all good, it’s not all pretty (especially grammar wise 🙂 ), and it’s not all that appealing to too many people besides myself. So then why do it? I  hate that question because I don’t think about blogging like that, it’s something I do—it is a part of me, it is how I have learned to think about things and share them all at once. It has been the single greatest element of my professional life over the last seven years, and it has opened up an avenue of creativity and joy I would be less happy without. That’s it, quite simply it has made me better.

That is probably the most important lesson I try to impart on the students I’ve had in ds106, but I fail many more times than not. I  know it’s a hard lesson to “teach.” You must experience it, live it, feel it, want it—-it can’t be lectured at you. I recognize that, and I accept it—although begrudgingly. [The same goes for faculty, but I am less and less inclined to try an convert them these days, they should really know better by now—it’s 2012.]

But if I wanted to provide yet another reason why blogging has been so awesome for me here we go. I’ve been talking about a class I want to teach about the National Film Registry on the bava here and here. It is part of my process, it’s what I do: I write about ideas that I have even if they’re not fully formed. What’s more, oftentimes other people read them. I don’t always know why, there’s not always a trace, but I know that they are reading. Case in point, thanks to an email I got today I now know one of those readers works at the Library of Congress, Packard Campus and has read my recent post on my outing to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad with the kids. The reader happened to follow a link to this post wherein I loosely framed my idea for a class centered around the Packard Campus. In short, my intentions of researching whom I need to talk to at the Packard Campus about this class over the coming weeks has been taken care of for me. If all goes well, I will be put in touch with them shortly and we will start talking about whether such a class is even a possibility. How sick is that? Blogging reminds me how awesome the web is. It also reminds me that I have staked my little claim on that space and I sometimes think that in the grand scheme of things I may be making that web just a tiny bit better for one or two people, and that is just enough. Long live blogging. LONG LIVE THE BAVA!

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Alien GIFs

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Reverend

The following GIFs are all way too big, but I don’t care. I’ve watched Alien a few times this week, and I can’t get enough of it. I want to do a GIF series about computers from films during the late 70s and early 80s. Mother rules.

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Disneyland Dream (1956)

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Reverend

While doing research about The 7th Voyage of Sinbad for my last post I discovered, thanks to this 2008 post on Cartoon Brew, that in 2008 a home movie taken in 1956 at Disneyland titled “Disneyland Dream” was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in what Home Brew refers to as “one of the oddest choices LoC has ever made.” You can watch the movie in its entirety on the Internet Archive here.

What’s more, Andy Rush’s recent post features the film”These Amazing Shadows” couldn’t be more timely given it points to this documentary which is all about the National Film Registry and it’s cultural significance.  Which begs the question why would they designate a 30 minute home movie taken by an unabashed amateur as a cultural treasure that needs to be preserved? The reason listed below is taken from the Wikipedia article:

The National Film Registry cited its “fantastical historical snapshots” of early Southern California and the budding importance of the home movies in “American cultural studies as they provide priceless and authentic record of time and place.”[5]

This idea of home movies in the 50s and 60s as genre of films that archivists like Rick Prelinger have been championing for a while now is fascinating, and I wonder if the explosion of “home movies” since the advent of YouTube can even more clearly delineate and reinforce the cultural significance of such a genre given it is currently the engine that drives a large part of the culture we view online. Perhap’s another reason for its preservation is that it captures an eleven year old Steve Martin selling guidebooks (actually this is not really a reason because Steve Martin discovered this himself after the film was added to the list of historic films):

More and more I am thinking the film class I am imagining for the Spring 2013 semester might focus very specifically on the ideas of film preservation, the National Film Registry, and the selection process behind a number of the 575 films preserved in the Registry. It could be a very fun class to use this as a filter, and start limiting it to genres of films selected, seemingly odd choices like Disneyland Dream, number of Oscar winners selected, etc.  It would be interesting to see how different the list of preserved films is from those that received Academy Awards.

Posted in films, Internet Archive, movies | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Harryhausen’s Dynamation is Dynamite on the Big Screen

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Reverend

Yesterday is one of the moments as a parent I’ve been waiting impatiently for: taking my kids to a Ray Harryhausen film in beautiful 35mm on the big screen! And let me tell you it was worth the excruciating wait! My 5 year old was cuddled up in my lap most of the time, while my 7 year old was hopping up and down at the edge of his seat in sheer joy the whole film. Despite what people say to the contrary, you can live vicariously through your kids  🙂

We saw Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) matinee at the Library of Congress, Packard campus in a real theatre with other people and a curtain that opens and closes. What’s more, the programming was pretty genius, because right before the feature film they showed the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Ali Baba Bunny” (1957) which was a brilliant pairing and introduced my kids to another masterpiece in its own right.  What’s more, before the film a Library of Congress curator talked to the audience a bit about the Dynamation process, though we arrived a bit late so we missed most of this, which is a shame. However after the film we picked up a hand-out that illustrated the Dynamation process innovated by Harryhuasen, which is basically an early version of green screening. Oddly enough I found that same hand-out online here, and figured I would reproduce it below for anyone unfamiliar with the process:

The technique

The process was simple but very effective.  He projected a live action image onto a rear screen in front of which was placed the animation table with the model.  He would then place a glass sheet in front of both.  When the live action plate had been shot Ray would establish where he wanted to make his matte line and so by looking through the camera viewfinder he would re-establish that line and with a wax pencil on the end of a stick, follow that line by drawing it on the glass.  When he was satisfied that the line was accurate he would then paint out, with black matt paint, the lower section, below the line.  He would then photograph the animation of the model reacting to the live action on the plate.  Afterwards he would then create a second pass in the camera to reinstate the lower previously matted out section so creating a combined image of the creature seemingly as part of the live action.

A drawing done by Ray illustrating the Dynamation process 


Matte line Combined

Interesting how this approach is a pre-digital means of creating layers of animated action and art that they could use to create the illusion of live action and animation without the use of split screen. In many ways this process is the proto-type for a visual layering of elements that is a commonplace in creative applications for manipulating images, sounds, and video (i.e., Photoshop, Audacity, Final Cut Pro, etc.). And while The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was not the first time Harryhausen used this rear screen technique (that would be in 1952 with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms),  it was the first time the term Dynamation was used to describe Harryhausen’s innovative stop-motion animation. In fact, there were a few firsts associated with this film: it was the first of four scores Bernard Hermann wrote for a Harryhausen film (which many suggest rank among his best); the first of three Sinbad films by Harryhausen; the first, and only, Harryhausen film selected for preservation by the National Film Registry (Might Joe Young has not made the cut yet!); and the first time audiences encountered Harryhausen’s animated skeleton—which would make an armies return in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

What’s wild about Harryhausen is that he is that rare case where you can call the movie “a Harryhausen film” even though he is credited for the special effects rather than as the director. I think that’s because most of the filsm he was a part of  are  first and foremost vehicles for his brilliant monstrous conceptions—and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad remains so legendary because it contains quite a few classics that serve as the basis of many of the monsters in films to come. The most memorable monster from the film is the Cyclops which was based in part on Ymir from Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957) and would be the inspiration for later creatures like the Centaur in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and the Trogolodyte in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).

The Serpent Woman, which was Harryhausen’s favorite animation of the film, would be the basis for my favorite animation of all time: Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981).

Fun comparison of two of Harryhausen's great animations from a "Hail Harryhausen!" forum thread

There’s also the two-headed hatchling and adult Roc that would be the inspiration of his later Pterodactyl scenes in One Million Years B.C., as well as the Dragon which reminded me a lot of the Hydra from Jason and the Argonauts.

Finally, as I already mentioned, there was the Skeleton with sword and shield that would prove so popular that four years later Harryhausen would animate a whole army of them that for many mark his crowning achievement in the annals of animation.

In short, it was amazing, and a little more than two weeks from now on may 24th the Packard Campus will be screening the 1925 classic The Lost World that features the work of Harryhausen’s mentor and the original stop animation pioneer Willis O’Brien. It’s really awesome to live so close to a film treasure like the Library of Congress, Packard Campus—-and this is really getting me fired up to starting working on my idea for an online film class that centers around the Packard campus as a resource.

 

Posted in movies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments