My project mentor, Jon Winet, visited the Digital Library Seminar (021:239:001) last Monday. He shared with the class his past work as well as ideas that are forming his future new media artwork. He has an interesting take on the role of librarians with society, stating that library professionals are indeed "radicals". That is, he believes the defense of free and open access to information is much sexier and more exciting than popular opinion would have it.
I enjoyed Jon's broad definition of "information flows", especially how this notion informs his thoughts on the Internet, globalization, and new media art. However, his thoughts are not limited to these areas. Information retrieval via computer technology helps us retroactively better understand information processing within previously existing media forms. Jon cited the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (1485) as demonstrating the characterstics of hypertext. First, hypertext is similar to traditional reading styles, however it is dynamic because parts of the text can point to other websites, videos may open and applications may run. The Lady and Unicorn tapestries compartmentalize the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and also the emotion of love. Parts of each tapestry link to portions of the next. What we have learned about hypertext enables us to reevaluate past methods of representation. In turn, our understanding of past cultures is modified. In addition, the connections made from present to past may better inform the design of graphical user interfaces in the future (GUI).
What does all this have to do with library and information science? Historical knowledge of reading styles, and the graphical design informing these reading styles, provides innovative ideas for LIS professionals working in digital environments. Infohawk, the online catalog at the University of Iowa is not well informed by methods of navigation through hypertext. It is not intuitive on how to link books and articles together through subject once a user has found a single entry that interests them, for example. Digital reading makes a lot of lateral connections. It is not solely linear and hierarchical. Online catalogs could come a long way in matching this reading style. It is inevitable that persons growing up with computers will icreasingly retrieve information in this manner.
Enough of my soapboxing. Here are some of Jon's ideas about "Postweb" technologies. These are platforms he believes are fundamentally different than normal web-browsing:
- mobile phones - global positioning systems may work with these, 4th screen - SMS text messaging
- Widgets - small programs carrying specialized information
- Youtube - for use in video-on-demand [is like TV, but choose what to see and when]
- 4-D video installations
- Web 2.0 - social networking sites like facebook, blogs; Also - user-generated content like Twitter, Wiki's, GoogleDocs
Jon mentioned one way that a librarian has incorporated new fun media technologies into their job. This librarian uses the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution with teenage library users. She will "dance-off" with users that have late books. If the teen wins, she will waive their library fines.
[http://the-data-stream.blogspot.com/2007/01/dance-dance-revolution.html]
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I am attempting to gain some sort of base knowledge on web design in the Virtual Object class I am auditing for the IMLS fellowship. You can check my progress here:
http://intermedia3.art.uiowa.edu/~manthone/
The content of the site is pretty inconsequential. I figured that I would put up some nonsense in terms of content and put more energy into the languages that support web design. I have been working directly with the languages via text-editor rather than working within dreamweaver. I'm hoping that this strategy will help me troubleshoot code better. I am gaining a working knowledge of the language, rather than knowing how to work dreamweaver really well. So far, we have worked with HTML, CSS and Javascript. We are currently working with Flash.
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My plans for the next week:
- meet with Jon Winet and Jim Elmborg. Talk about the feasibility of purchasing land for the VWU at UI within Second Life.
- keep working on building objects within Second Life
- work with Flash
