Sue Thomas

NLab: Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience event today

Our NLab event today NLab: Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience including launch of new Andrea Saveri video. Watch it unfold at Twitter and contribute your own thoughts via hashtag #nlab.

'Transliteracy: A Unifying Concept', University of Nottingham, 6pm 28 May 2009

I'll be speaking about transliteracy on Thursday 28th May 2009 as part of the Generation Net: Arts and Culture in the 21st Century lecture series at the University of Nottingham.

Room A18 (Arts Graduate Centre),
Trent Building.
6pm to 7pm followed by wine and nibbles.
Admission is Free.
All are welcome.
To book a place email Iain Smith

UCSB English Department / Literature.Culture.Media Center Talk 24th Feb 2009

I'm giving a talk about my Wild Surmise research in the Literature.Culture.Media Center at the University of California Santa Barbara on Tuesday 24th February 2009, from 3.30pm-5.00pm.

When Geeks Go Camping: Cyberspace and the Outdoor Life
This talk examines the evolution of nature metaphors in computing and cyberspace via some examples of the influence of Californian outdoor life on computer culture in Silicon Valley and beyond. It is drawn from research for a book-length study, The Wild Surmise: Nature and Cyberspace, which discusses the many ways in which we use our experiences of nature to situate and comprehend our experiences of cyberspace.

More information on the UCSB English website.

Transliteracy Lecture

Transliteracy lecture by Sue Thomas from IOCT on Vimeo.

This talk is drawn from the article Transliteracy: Crossing Divides, written with my DMU colleagues and published at First Monday in December 2007. I've presented it numerous times over the last year and now have this video version. But be warned - the lecture covers a lot of ground and it's 42 minutes of me talking, so not for the faint-hearted. Maybe one day I'll have time to slice it into bite-size chunks but for the moment I'm afraid there's only this long version. It was delivered to a mixed group of postgraduate students from the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media, the IOCT Master's degree, and students working on Music Technology, in the IOCT on October 24th, 2008

Credit: the video was filmed and edited by Adam Weikert, IOCT.

Vision of Students Today (with thanks to mwesch)

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing items in a set called ENG1009. Make your own badge here.

I taught a session about collaborative writing for my colleague Kathy Bell today. The students were a great bunch and I hope they'll produce some collaborative Googledoc pieces as a result. I also showed them Michael Wesch's video A Vision of Students Today and invited them to produce some responses on the fly. We were very short of time and I'm afraid some of my photos are a bit blurred, but they came up with some excellent work in only ten minutes. Click here, view this slideshow, or browse through the Flickr badge above to get a sense of what they produced. (apologies for my appalling camera shake - I blame the Nokia N95). I promised them a copy of the slides for the talk and attach them here. Download ENG1009 2008

Slides and links for British Computer Society talk 2.12.08

Thanks to all those who attended my talk last night, and thanks to the BCS for my commemorative blue-sky coffee mug! Here as promised are slides plus a list of links to the videos and websites I discussed:

• Medieval Helpdesk
• Howard Rheingold A (re)slice of life online, part one: Introduction
• Transliteracy Research Blog
• Michael Wesch The Machine is Us/ing Us  (for university teachers I also recommend Wesch's chilling A Vision of Students Today)
• Chris Meade Digital Livings
• Noon Quilt
• A Million Penguins
• Staying Single
• Anietie Isong
• Streams, rivers, torrents and clouds @Amplified08 (CreativeCoffee Club)
• Inanimate Alice

Talk for the British Computer Society, Leicester. Tuesday 2 December 08

I’m very honoured to have been invited to speak to the British Computer Society in Leicester and I’m  looking forward to an interesting discussion. It starts at 7pm, with a free buffet at 6.30pm. Open to all.

Collaborative Creative Writing New Ways of Reading – New Ways of Writing
Creative writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing.  No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines.  The online MA in Creative Writing and New Media works with writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing.  Studying together online, these students from around the world came together in virtual space to debate the challenges of new media and look at new ways of transdisciplinary collaboration such as their 2007 collaboration with Penguin Books on the now-notorious Million Penguins Wiki Novel. 

Talking, listening, writing

updated 11.11.08

• 24 Feb 2009 When Geeks Go Camping: cyberspace and the outdoor life University of California Santa Barbara
• 2 Dec 2008 New Ways of Reading, New Ways of Writing British Computer Society, Leicester
• 27 Nov 2008 Amplified08 NESTA
• 20 Nov 2008 Transliteracy Workshop IOCT Future of Creative Technologies Conference
• 12 Nov 2008 Transliteracy  University of Cambridge
• 29 Oct 2008 How LinkedIn and Facebook can improve your professional practice DMU School of Pharmacy
• 14-17 Sep 2008 When Geeks Go Camping: cyberspace and the outdoor life Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts
• 19-20 Jun 2008 NLab Social Networks conference, De Montfort University
• 29 May 2008 9pm BST Mark and John - The Fantasists, part of the Making of a Monster series on the Crime and Investigation Network
• 29 May - 1 Jun 2008 Visionary Landscapes, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA
• 21 Feb 2008 University of Bangor
• 3 Dec 2007 Thomas, S., Joseph, C., Laccetti, J., Mason, B., Mills, S., Perril, S., et al. (2007). Transliteracy: Crossing Divides First Monday, Volume 12 Number 12 - 3 December 2007  

How LinkedIn and Facebook can improve your professional practice

Slides for my talk at the School of Pharmacy at DMU, 29 October 2008

Download linked_in_schl_of_pharmacy_2008.ppt

Transliteracy Workshop 24 Oct 08

I gave a talk about transliteracy to students from the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media + IOCT Master's students + Music Technology students - an eclectic group! I mixed them up to work with people they'd not met before and asked them to map the way transliteracy works within the IOCT Lab.

Download transliteracy_ioct_cwnm_2008.ppt
The First Monday article which informed the talk
Flickr photoset

Video of the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media Showcase, 18 June 2008

IOCT Salon: Creative Writing and New Media Showcase, 18 June 2008 from IOCT on Vimeo.

Along with Kate Pullinger, I devised and teach the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This first annual CWNM Salon is a unique opportunity to enjoy the best work from the first two years of the course with installations and talks from the following authors:

Chris Meade Presenting his work drumming - becoming - forgetting ( drummingandme.blogspot.com ), a 'blunder... a cross between a weblog, a ponder, a wander through time and a terrible mistake." This one is about the role of percussion in his life.

Toni Le Busque Miffy Johnston's Toenails and Other Stories - a combination of fiction and non fiction 100 word stories using Sophie ( sophieproject.org ), an open-source platform for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment, created by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

 Kirsty McGill Discussing her ongoing project to develop a next-generation rich-media tour for the UNESCO World Heritage city of Bath.

Christine Wilks Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker's daughter - a memoir in pieces (embroidered) Cutting through the memories, stitching up the fabrications, pinning down the facts, unpicking the past... An interactive memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.

Alison Norrington Showcasing Staying Single, Alison's first cross-media work of fictional blogging which gave readers a variety of ways to engage, participate with and receive the story, including fragmented chapters emailed to subscribers, SMS alerts through Twitter, mini documentaries of real-life stories, meet-ups in Second Life and Machinima films. She will also offer a sneak-preview of her plans for her second cross-media fiction I ♥ NY.

There's also a essay by Jess Laccetti, specially written to accompany the event. Download CWNMbrochure2008.pdf

Transliteracy is...

Testing Sproutbuilder

November 2007 Transliteracy: Crossing Divides

This is the public version, with copyright issues removed, of the presentation I used during a series of lectures in North America, November 2007, at:

Washington State University, Vancouver, WA 8 Nov 07
Institute for the Future, FutureCommons Event, Menlo Park, CA 12 Nov 07
Writing.Wise, Vancouver, BC, Canada 13 Nov 07
The New Screen, Victoria, BC, Canada 15-17 Nov 07

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The Uses of Transliteracy: narratives across media

Symposium on Narrative and Multimodality: Language, theory, contexts, Plenary Speaker, UCE, Birmingham, UK, 27-28 April 2007

The term 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. Today we extend the act of transliteration and apply it to the increasingly wide range of communication platforms and tools at our disposal. From early signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV & film to networked digital media, the concept of transliteracy provides a cohesion of communication modes relevant to reading, writing, interpretation and interaction, but it remains relatively new and is still in formation. This talk explored possible uses of transliteracy as an analytical tool for the examination of multimodality.

Writing and Transliteracy

Powerpoint slideshow for presentation to First Year students on MUST 1009, March 2007, De Montfort University. NB - Visit the slideshare page to activate the links.

Footprints in cyberspace: stories of virtual life and the natural world

Lapidus Annual Conference, Keynote Speaker, Leicester University, 7-9 September 2007

The coming of cyberspace has generated many stories of community, creativity and self-expression. And as we settle into its growing and diverse ecology we are beginning to understand the internet not as a hostile urban sprawl, but as a luxuriant landscape of glorious complexity, not dissimilar to the plains, mountains, oceans and estuaries of the natural world. This talk looks at some examples of what happens when we discover nature in cyberspace, and proposes ways in which these discoveries might transform our relationships with the planet and with each other.