Sue Thomas

Transliteracy Research Blog, Forum & Conference + New Media Writing Lecture Archive

Lots of news from me today, and all about transliteracy. A new website, a new forum, and a One Day Conference!

Since transliteracy research began at DMU in 2005 under the umbrella of PART (Production & Research in Transliteracy), group members have produced a significant range of projects, events, presentations and publications, stimulating an informal research network around the theory and practice of transliteracy.

Kate Pullinger and I have now established The Transliteracy Research Group with the aim of focusing PART's work yet more closely. TRG will continue to draw in a broad coalition of theorists and practitioners, both from DMU and other international institutions and organizations, whilst continuing  to develop our already strong links with business, local community, and the broader cultural sector. A major strength of transliteracy events at DMU is that participants have come from academia, the arts, information sciences, pedagogical researchers, and the creative industries, and this has impacted in many different areas.

The Transliteracy Research Group (TRG), is a research-focussed think-tank and creative laboratory.  The public face of the group resides here, on a new blog run by Kate and I, with regular contributions from the following De Montfort staff, Phd students, and graduates of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media:  Tia Azulay, Heather Conboy, Gareth Howell, Anietie Isong, Jess Laccetti, Kirsty McGill, and Christine Wilks.

Please join us as we develop this new field of academic research. You can contribute via comments to the blog or join the forum community 'Transliteracy Notes', designed by Gareth Howell.

As well as the new research group, we would like to bring to your attention a new resource, the Creative Writing and New Media Archive, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media. This archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley.  Created by CWNM graduate and digital artist Christine Wilks, this resource will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media.  Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it in 'Transliteracy Notes'.

We will be hosting a day-long Transliteracy Conference on Tuesday 9 Feb, 2010, at the brand-new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester, UK.  Please watch for our Call for Presentations, going out next week.

Lots of news from me today, and all about transliteracy. A new website, a new forum, and a One Day Conference!

Since transliteracy research began at DMU in 2005 under the umbrella of PART (Production & Research in Transliteracy), group members have produced a significant range of projects, events, presentations and publications, stimulating an informal research network around the theory and practice of transliteracy.

Kate Pullinger and I have now established The Transliteracy Research Group with the aim of focusing PART's work yet more closely. TRG will continue to draw in a broad coalition of theorists and practitioners, both from DMU and other international institutions and organizations, whilst continuing  to develop our already strong links with business, local community, and the broader cultural sector. A major strength of transliteracy events at DMU is that participants have come from academia, the arts, information sciences, pedagogical researchers, and the creative industries, and this has impacted in many different areas.

The Transliteracy Research Group (TRG), is a research-focussed think-tank and creative laboratory.  The public face of the group resides here, on a new blog run by Kate and I, with regular contributions from the following De Montfort staff, Phd students, and graduates of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media:  Tia Azulay, Heather Conboy, Gareth Howell, Anietie Isong, Jess Laccetti, Kirsty McGill, and Christine Wilks.

Please join us as we develop this new field of academic research. You can contribute via comments to the blog or join the forum community 'Transliteracy Notes', designed by Gareth Howell.

As well as the new research group, we would like to bring to your attention a new resource, the Creative Writing and New Media Archive, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media. This archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley.  Created by CWNM graduate and digital artist Christine Wilks, this resource will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media.  Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it in 'Transliteracy Notes'.

We will be hosting a day-long Transliteracy Conference on Tuesday 9 Feb, 2010, at the brand-new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester, UK.  Please watch for our Call for Presentations, going out next week.

My first-ever tweet April 2007 - a few more than 140 chars!

I've just used http://backupmy.net/  to back up my tweets. Not sure about it though - am more interested in backing up my Favourites than my own pronouncements. Anyway, I was amused to read my first-ever Twitter post, where I obviously hadn't yet got the hang of 140 characters!

leaving Santa Monica today to fly up to San Francisco ready for Web 2.0 Expo and my great twittering experiment. Will I be able to keep it u
Sat Apr 14 14:14:18 +0000 2007

Reprise: Social Networks and the Dissolution of the Monasteries #2009

In March 2008, after a conversation with Toby Moores, I blogged about the ways in which we thought the impact of social media might parallel the impact of the dissolution of the monastaries. But way back then, none of us expected the economic crash that was to come. It makes me smile to read that last year I wrote:  "today there is not a single drive to traumatise and destroy our major institutions and companies with sledgehammers" - hah hah hah.

Amplified Leicester: A citywide experiment in social media

I'm very excited to announce our new project, Amplified Leicester. Funded by NESTA Web Connect, it's a city-wide experiment to:

• explore diversity and innovation
• build a network across diverse communities
• create, share and develop new ideas
• use social media like facebook and twitter as an amplifier

Find out more at the website. If you live in Leicester and you'd like to participate, do get in touch for information on how to apply. 

Experimental Peer Review & Funding: We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it.

For a couple of years now Toby Moores and I have been trying to set up a project we call Open Source Thinking, based on Toby's desire to share failed and mis-directed projects with others who might be able to run with an idea that did not work the first time around. Here's a link I gleaned from Alex Pang to a similar topic - Eric Weinstein, mathematician and hedge fund manager, talking about The Importance of Risky Research. He suggests that science can learn from finance by applying methods of shorting, not to money, but to ideas and propositions.

Applied to science, shorting could reveal what the senior people actually think of the juniors. If you want to short somebody, and you do the calculation of what happens should their ideas take off, it can be frightening. It's not like losing an even-money bet—it's being on the hook for an unbounded negative experience. Imagine Erwin Chargaff shorting Watson and Crick on what he called their "extreme ignorance" in 1952.

So, asked the interviewer, should journals and funding sources should be more willing to take risks on young scientists, even if they might be wrong? Weinstein:

We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it. There are lots of seductive dumb ideas. If you start swinging at all of them, you're going to bankrupt yourself. The important thing is to assemble an ideas portfolio. That way, whether they mostly work and occasionally fail spectacularly, or rather mostly fail and occasionally work spectacularly, you are giving young people and their risky ideas room to work.

Makes a lot of sense to me, but achieving it would require a radical buy-in from academia and I just don't see that coming any time soon.

"Economommies" find new ways to combine family life with employment

Here in the US, my neighbour and many of her home-schooling colleagues are becoming 'economommies' - that is, women who were 'stay-at-home Moms' before the economic downturn but who now need to supplement the family income with paid work which allows them to look after the kids too. See full blogpost at NLab.

Laid-Off Architect Sells Advice For 5 Cents

 

See full post at NLab.

Edible Books

A hungry student's dream debuts at City College

By COLBY FRAZIER — March 25, 2009 In the mass of inky words and pulp pages that is a book, an infinite number of people, places and ideas wait to be lifted from the page by a human eye.

Once this occurs, anything can happen. The reader is free to write a paper about the book, tell a friend about it, or better yet, make some food, as 30 Santa Barbara City College students and faculty members have done for the school’s first Edible Book Festival scheduled from 2-4 p.m. today inside the Luria Library.

“The idea is to celebrate our love of books and our attachment to food,” said Elizabeth Bowman, a campus librarian who organized the festival.

City College’s festival is loosely based on The International Edible Book Festival, which was founded in 2000 to celebrate the birthday of French author and gastronome, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

The festival’s rulebook is short: everything made has to be edible and based on a book.

Read the rest at UCSB's The Daily Sound

I had a brain adventure in the Maker Shed @ ETech 2009, San Jose

O'Reilly ETech, social media, and non-profits

On Monday here at ETech, CEO Tim O'Reilly's keynote described the way in which the tech industry has been living in a bubble and declared that it should now turn its attention to the 'reality bubble' and work on 'stuff that matters'. For too long, he said, the industry has been focussing on pretty gewgaws instead of addressing problems that have been mounting for years whilst the best and the brightest have been preoccupied with throwing sheep at each other on Facebook. He emphasised the need to use our extensive skills to address the world's greatest challenges. This will, of course, include working with nonprofits, which statement rang a bell with me. A few weeks ago I interviewed Stewart Brand, who has a pretty successful record of persuading big companies to experiment with digital futures of all kinds. I asked Brand whether there were any examples of when his methods had failed, and he thought for a while then responded that he had failed to engage non-profits. The reasons, he felt, were cultural and related to the risk-averse nature of many non-profit agencies who are usually dependent on portfolios of funding from sources, often very traditional and not transliterate (the latter is my term, of course, not Brand's), whom they dare not offend.

I'm sure this is something O'Reilly will be thinking about as they move towards their challenges, and especially in relation to the first upcoming  O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC this September.

I'll be posting more about ETech and San Jose when I get back to Santa Barbara. Am about to hit the road. One word though - I met quite a few O'Reilly people this time and found them all very friendly, energetic, and interesting. Quite an impressive mini-ecology going on in that company!

Wolfram Alpha - next big thing?

Noticed in a tweet from Tim O'Reilly quoting a message from Tim Berners-Lee regarding possibly 'the next big jump in capability' - see this article by Nova Spivack about a different kind of knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha

Spivack writes:

Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

Presumably if this takes off it will once again change the ways in which we obtain and process information. Just as we got used to searching, maybe now we will have to learn the skill of questioning...

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman - 1997 but could be 2009

I've been reading quite a range of books during my research for The Wild Surmise but I've especially enjoyed Ellen Ullman's 1997 Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents. Eugene Miya at the Computer History Museum was keen I should read it as a commentary on life in Silicon Valley in the 90s, and it is certainly hugely informative about those early days of startups - the uncertainty of tech companies rising and falling on a weekly basis, the role of venture capitalist, and the nagging doubts of a generation who began as left-wing idealists and ended up with stock options that made some of them very rich.

The danger of Susan Greenfield

Once again Baroness Greenfield has been giving evidence to the House of Lords about the dangers of computers and social networking. I would like to know who else is giving evidence to them? Is hers the only voice? If so, I fear for their ability to make reasoned decisions about this field. This time she claims that "Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity", warning "It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world."

Well, it may be hard to see, Baroness, but why don't you give it a try? Yes, the human brain is sensitive and yes, it may be changing. But in the year of Darwin's anniversary, why should we assume this is a Bad Thing? Couldn't humans do with a bit of tuning up?

Her remedies are, forgive me, intensely naive if not insulting to earlier generations and present non-literate cultures. She claims that there is "a risk of loss of empathy as children read novels less.". I wonder what kind of era she comes from? Novels have been around for 400 years maximum - what did children do before then? Were they not intelligent? Did they not develop talents in rapid response / high concentration activities such as hunting and fishing? I could go on spelling this out, but I don't think I should have to.

The danger of scientists untempered by Humanities knowledge of history, anthropology, sociology and culture is once again rearing its head. Baroness, it's not enough to measure brain activity, we must understand it in the wider context of human culture. Please, get some experts with a wider range of viewpoints on your team, including some who really know about education and social networking. You are in urgent need of a transliterate perspective. Without it you are a danger to society.

x-posted from transliteracy.com

Smiling online nourishes our relationships

My watchword for 2009 is 'nourish' - relationships, oneself, and one's community as a whole. And yesterday turned out to be a good example of nourishment in practice. My family held a little farewell party for me because tomorrow I'm departing for a four-month research trip to California.  Most of us are pretty connected and in touch a lot by email, Facebook, texting and phonecalls, but it's a long time since we were all physically together in one person's home and it was a really lovely and warm occasion.

I was reminded of it today when I saw a tweet from Tim O'Reilly pointing to a post by Stowe Boyd commenting on research on Social Networks and Happiness conducted by Nicholas A Christakis and James H Fowler reported at The Edge.

It explains how posting smiling pictures of oneself strengthens online interactions. Here's an excerpt:

The figure below is a map of part of this Facebook network in 2007. It contains 353 students, each represented by a node; each line between two nodes indicates that the connected individuals were tagged in a photo together. Students who are smiling (and who are immediately surrounded by smiling people in their network) are colored yellow. Students who are frowning (and who are immediately surrounded by such serious looks) are colored blue. Shades of green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

Notice how strongly the blue nodes and the yellow nodes cluster together, indicating large-scale structure of smiling in the online network. Moreover, people who do not smile seem to be located more peripherally in the network. In fact, statistical analysis of the network shows that people who smile tend to have more friends (smiling gets you an average of one extra friend, which is pretty good considering that people only have about six close friends). Not only that, but the statistical analyses confirm that those who smile are measurably more central to the network compared to those who do not smile. That is, if you smile, you are less likely to be on the periphery of the online world.

It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

This makes a lot of sense, so in the interests of nourishing my social networking practice I'm replacing my Facebook profile picture with one which is almost embarrassing in its smileyness...

Seth's Blog: The high cost of now

Seth's Blog: The high cost of now. This post by Seth Godin reflects my increasing irritation at the amount of time Twitter is taking up in my life. He says: "The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs." In this case I think he's mostly referring to money, but it's true of time too. Twitter used to be fun, but now it has become an essential element of my communication portfolio I can't afford to miss a single tweet in case I lose out on a dinner invitation, a meeting date suggestion, or an important piece of research. I'm forever checking Home and @Replies to stay on top of information that used to arrive by email, and I'm tired of it.

Please everyone - if you want to contact me do it by email, and save Twitter for updating me on the important stuff like where and when you're having your next latte!

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  

Obama used social media as a vital tool in reaching huge audiences

Barack Obama has taught the world a lesson in the use of social networks. This former community organiser already knew how to connect with many different cultures and communities, then he combined that knowledge with an understanding of social media, and his reach became huge (thanks also to a large and skilfull team). Now we can learn from his success and apply his methods to our own projects. More on this in Read/Write/Web's Obama's Social Media Advantage

x-posted here

Interested in a PhD related to transliteracy, social media, or nature and cyberspace?

I will have space to supervise some new PhD students from Autumn 2009, and would like to hear from researchers interested in developing projects around topics such as:

• transliteracy
• nature and cyberspace
• psychogeography, especially in the digital
• social media for business and innovation
• other social media applications

More information here.

Is your wireless router turned on 24/7 ?

This weekend I stayed at a friend's house and was intrigued to notice that she turns her router on when she turns on her laptop, and turns it off again when she's done. It surprised me because it has never occurred to me to turn off my router, even when I go away. So I tweeted a brief enquiry to find out what other people do. I also emailed my provider, Plus Net, to ask for their advice on the matter. Here are some of the answers I received:

 

Songs of Imagination & Digitisation - first meeting

Songs of Imagination & Digitisation - first meeting
Originally uploaded by suethomas

Great first meeting at the Poetry Society Cafe today. We read excerpts from Blake's prose and poetry and discussed whether he could be counted as an 'amplified individual'  It was interesting to think about his relationship to work at a time when the Industrial Revolution was only just developing, cities were growing very rapidly, and the factory working day was a new concept. Today, I think, we may be heading back in the opposite direction, towards perhaps a kind of technologised, independent and comparatively wealthy peasant class. That aside, it was a great meeting and a wonderful opportunity to learn and share ideas. Many thanks to Chris Meade for setting this up and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it develops. Follow the project, and look out for William Blake's personalised netbook (courtesy of Bill Thompson)
T-shirt expertly modelled by Lisa Gee
See more photos at Flickr

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation

Link: Songs of Imagination and Digitisation.
I've been invited to contribute to this fascinating if:book project about William Blake. Looking forward to meeting everyone this week.

Our love affair with the train (and mine with the plane)

I always like listening to Lisa Jardine's radio essays but this one was especially enjoyable. BBC NEWS | Magazine | Our love affair with the train.  How I wish that English trains were as pleasant to ride as European trains.

I disagree with her about airports though. When I was growing up in Surrey in the early 1960s, one of our family day trips would be to Heathrow, where we would take a picnic and spend the day watch the planes taking off and landing. Our entertainment was to wonder where all these people might be going and why. When Dad flew on occasional business trips he would bring back the tiny salt and pepper sets and other airline ephemera for us to pore over, a kind of cargo cult of the future when one day we would all be frequent flyers.

Slow Teaching

Those who know my work with digital media may be surprised to read that I largely support this remark by Mark Bauerlein in his article Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming in the Chronicle of Higher Education (19 Sept 08):

---given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students' minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can't do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.

I don't agree with restraining the digitizing of classrooms, which Bauerlein also calls for, but I do agree with ensuring there's a mix of learning spaces available. I also think that teachers should have the imagination to sometimes teach outside of the classroom altogether. In my own case, I teach mostly online and am constantly struggling with ways to bring that slower and more physical engagement into the learning experience.

Most of Bauerlain's approach is the same-old same-old but I do think we must pay attention to the need for slow spaces both in teaching and in life. Slowness is certainly a vital element of transliteracy.

Thanks to Mez at Facebook for the link to Bauerlain's article.

Independent on Sunday: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?

There's a quote from me in today's Independent on Sunday's Books special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? First, it contains a few factual errors, so here's the corrected version with some added links.

The new-media lecturer: The Professor of New Media: Sue Thomas

"The aim of my course is to produce 'transliterate' writers – ie,   literate across many different kinds of media. When we think 'literacy' we think about print [insert comma] and transliteracy is about shaking off that domination of   print which has, in a sense, I think, been a distraction.

"The internet has caused us to rethink what we mean by literacy: the   [traditional] idea of literacy implies that before print people were   illiterate – but, in fact, people simply were literate in many other things,   such as oral and visual culture.

"One of the writers from my course is Alison Norrington [link to Alison's work Staying Single], a chick-lit   author: she learnt how to take her stories beyond the book on a blog, on   Facebook, on Twitter, by making little movies, by sending her heroine into   Second Life. Another is Christine Wilkes Wilks [link to Christine's site], who has a filmmaking background   and wrote an interactive memoir using design and programming. You don't need to be able to read and write much [at all, actually!] to tell a story.

"Will books exist in 50 years? Definitely, but they will also be just one of the many ways we experience art. I feel quite cynical about the cloak of   preciousness that's been woven around the novel: it's such a recent medium –   we've only had it a few hundred years and yet you often hear people say,   'We've always had novels.' No we have not!"

Sue Thomas teaches the world's only [online] MA in creative writing and new media [link to course website] at the Institute of Creative Technology Technologies at De Montfort University

Second, it's amazing how many people quoted in the article talk about digitisation and e-readers - that is to say an electronic version of a linear text - without any awareness at all of hypertext and multimedia. I find this both depressing and puzzling, but then what's new? I've been depressed and puzzled by it for over a decade already.

Thirdly, my comments (drawn from a much longer conversation with Kate Burt) rather imply that I don't see any value in reading and writing. Of course I do value both extremely highly. It's just that working with new media has opened my eyes to the many other kinds of literacies that I had simply ignored before when I too was fixated on print, and it is for those that I make my plea when I press for consideration of transliteracy, a concept which simply gives us even more opportunities to connect with each other's minds.

Finally, the title of the section is 'Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?'. It asks: 'Is the paper-and-ink book heading the way of the papyrus scroll? Can serious literature survive in the brave new world of web downloads, e-books and ever-shortening attention spans?'

I don't get it. Does that mean that people have only been serious and intelligent since they started to read and write? Oh dear. The famously illiterate Socrates would no doubt have something to say about that, and I doubt it would be comfortable listening. In The Phaedrus we read* that in 370BC he asserted writing was an aid “not to memory, but to reminiscence” providing “not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” Readers would, he said, “be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Plus: Look out for an interview with Chris Meade in the same article. Chris is also a CWNM student, graduating this year. and Director of if:book London.

*Of course, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Plato did exactly this when he transcribed the conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus as it was taking place under a plane tree by the banks of the Ilissus; Abram, 1997, p. 177.

Google Chrome - of the Earth?

So, Google has chosen an Earth element for its first browser. It's a pretty name, somewhat intense to articulate, and round in the mouth, forcing an O. It's designed to take browsers in a new direction in terms of design and function, but it also pushes towards a new kind of metaphor.

I've spent the summer collecting examples of nature metaphors used in the way we write and speak about cyberspace. So far I already have around 500 and I've hardly begun. Last week I started categorising them according to the Four Elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire and it became immediately clear that we favour watery metaphors - flow, stream, torrent, river etc - way above the other three. What makes Google's choice of name so interesting  is that its origin as a lead-based pigment breaks away from this trend and looks to the Earth for its symbolism.

Chrome 1800 - from the Greek - so named from the brilliant colour of its compounds. Chem. 1. The metal CHROMIUM. 2. The yellow pigment and colour obtained from chromate of lead; as orange, lemon. attrib. and Comb: c. alum, a double sulphate of chromium and an alkali-metal, isomorphous with common alum; c. green, (a) the sesquioxide of chromium, used as a pigment; (b) a pigment made by mixing chrome yellow with Prussian blue ; c. orange. c. red, pigments prepared from the dibasic chromate of lead; c. yellow, the neutral chromate of lead, used as a pigment. [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]

Just for fun, what might this mean? Well, we might think about Chrome's intention to stop the bloat that has made Firefox so sinkingly slow. Right-click on the pretty blue bar at the top of Chrome and you'll find a link to its very own Task Manager where you can watch live as it 'recycles' memory between the tabs, demonstrating a dependable foothold which treats each tab as an independent entity and protects it from any flooding memory-leak from the neighbouring tab next door. For those of us floundering in the messy primeval swamp of Web 2.0 and scared stiff by the threat of a recession it's quite comforting that in Chrome we can now be less impacted by our surroundings, that each tab can keep itself to itself.

In their well-known study Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson say that "Many of our activities are metaphorical in nature. The metaphorical concepts that characterize those activities structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality. This can begin to happen when we start to comprehend our experience in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it."

So, what's going to happen as we float away from Firefox and IE and plant ourselves firmly in the earthy world of Chrome? Of course, lead is a very heavy metal and, more importantly, it's very poisonous, as those living in houses where their water flows through lead piping are all too aware. In fact, this browser name is loaded with metaphors, both good and bad. Were Google aware of that when they chose it? I'd be very surprised if they weren't.

x-posted from The Wild Surmise

Request for examples of nature metaphors in cyberspace

My project The Wild Surmise aims to bring together a complex legacy of thinking and writing about the natural world with contemporary views of computers and the internet drawn from texts, personal interviews, surveys, and of course the web itself. The result will be both critical and lyrical, a creative narrative of the many ways in which we use our experiences of nature to situate and comprehend our experiences of cyberspace.

At the moment I'm collecting examples of nature metaphors used to describe cyberspace and the internet and it's turning out to be a giant task so I would really appreciate some help.

To give you an idea of the kind of material I'm collecting, here are some watery metaphors dating back to Al Gore's remarks to the National Press Club, Dec 21st 1993, when he famously introduced the concept of an 'information superhighway'. Read the whole speech and you'll see that there are quite a few watery images in there too. He said 'It's a "phase change" -- like moving from ice to water; Ice is simple and water is simple, but in the middle of the change it's mush -- part monopoly, part franchise, part open competition. We want to manage that transition.'[1] And we're still using that same metaphor today:  'Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.' [2] 

Tim O'Reilly uses quite a few nature metaphors in his writing, including watery ones like : 'The "blogosphere" can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet.' [3] and of late, many people have been swimming in the Twitter stream so I tweeted the question 'If Twitter were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?' J.P. Rangaswami replied:  'a collection of zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart' [4] and David Terrar imagined a: 'twisty canyon with a fast flowing river ' [5] Those are just a few examples from a huge number of images used to conceptualise the cyberspace experience, and there are hundreds more to be collected.

You can help with the research by contributing examples of nature metaphors, along with the context and source so that they can be referenced wherever possible. If you only have a sense of a usage but can't provide a source, please add it anyway since I may be able to supply the missing information. Please include your own personal imagery too. The list isn't public at the moment but I do plan to publish it in a year or so, when your contribution will be acknowledged if used.

Which nature metaphors have you come across? Please use this form to add your contribution.

I look forward to reading your thoughts,and thanks in advance for your help.

[1]  Gore, A., 1993. Gore's remarks on the NII, 12-21-93. Available at: http://www.ibiblio.org/nii/goremarks.html [Accessed August 14, 2008]
[2]  Dash, A., Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web. Available at: http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/10/rainman-blackbird-facebook-and-the-new-tables.html [Accessed August 4, 2008].
[3] O'Reilly, T., 2005. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O'Reilly. Available at: http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228 [Accessed December 31, 2007].
[4] Rangaswami, J.P.  2008. If Twitter were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be? The Wild Surmise. Available at: http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/natureandcyberspace/2008/04/if-twitter-were.html [Accessed April 20, 2008].
[5] Terrar, D. J. 2008. If Twitter were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be? The Wild Surmise. Available at: http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/natureandcyberspace/2008/04/if-twitter-were.html [Accessed April 20, 2008].

x-posted at The Wild Surmise

Transliteracy in the THES 14th August 2008

Hannah Fearn interviewed me for this article some months ago and since then she has obviously been very busy raising the issue with other academics. The end result is a fascinating and pretty comprehensive piece which will, I hope, provoke plenty of debate.

Grappling with the digital divide By Hannah Fearn Times Higher Education Supplement, 14 August 2008
Students are increasingly 'transliterate', communicating across a range of technologies. Can academics keep up?

x-posted from www.transliteracy.com

www.suethomas.me

Years ago I had a colleague who was obsessed with domain names and bought them for every member of her entire family - even the kids. She was always urging me to purchase suethomas.com but it seemed rather unnecessary. In recent years though I've come to regret it - especially since I am so often confused with Sue Thomas FBEye (although she doesn't own suethomas.com either, which is some consolation I suppose.)

So today when the new .me domain was announced I thought right, I'm having that! And when it went live at 4pm I was there, credit card poised, to buy http://www.suethomas.me . Maybe it won't catch on, but if it ever does, I'll be ready :)

Rushkoff's The Next Renaissance, transliteracy, and structural holes

Today is my 57th birthday. I'm somewhat superstitious on this day of the year and tend to seek for signs which indicate the focus I should pursue for the 12 months ahead. This morning the sign came early, over breakfast, when I read the Edge transcript of a recent talk by Douglas Rushkoff, The Next Renaissance, given at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in NYC. Apparently during the conference the Forum decided to change its name to the Participatory Democracy Forum. Rushkoff's talk presumably had a lot to do with that.

The reason his talk seems significant on my 'special day' is that he is outlining something about my own experience. He says that the network 'creates value from the periphery'. This is significant to me because I have lived my life at the periphery, often quite uncomfortably, but in the last few years that space has become increasingly important. Indeed, recently there have been very noticeable attempts by those at the centre to pay attention to what is going on at the periphery because they are coming to realise that this is now where the influence resides. Rushkoff observed:

The next renaissance (if there is one)—the phenomenon we're talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we're using—the biases of these media—cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center—like a centrally issued currency—the network creates value from the periphery.

This means the way to participate is not simply to subscribe to an abstract, already-written myth, but to do real things. To take small actions in real ways. The glory is not in the belief system or the movement, but in the doing. It's not about getting someone elected, it's about removing the obstacles to real people doing what they need to to get the job done. That's the opportunity of the networked, open source era: to drop out of the myths and actually do.

I read this as a call to work at the periphery to actually get things done, rather than focus on the centre in order to create a degree of influence which may eventually, if it survives that long, make an impact at the edges.

But I'd like to add another step. Rushkoff's comments assume that there is only one periphery. In fact, there are millions. So I'd like to recall Ron Burt's work on structural holes, and my own development of the concept of the transliteracy which takes place there, and propose to those working at the (many) peripheries that they draw upon the resources of transliteracy to support their efforts to understand each other and to collaborate. The way this might work is explained here so I won't repeat it in this post, but suffice it to say that in some cases the periphery is still too familiar, and maybe we need to move beyond it and into the wild to really appreciate its benefits.

So that's my 'lesson learned'  for this year's birthday I think - a reminder that peripheries will continue to grow in currency this year and that a lot of people will be actively seeking guidance on how to operate on those margins and how to benefit from the transliterate spaces which connect them. Where my birthday focus comes into that picture is that I want to continue to be involved in the process in a pro-active way. As Rushkoff says: "Change does not come from the top—but from the periphery. Not from a leader or a myth inspiring individuals to consent to it, but from people working to manifest it together."

Congratulations Dr Jess Laccetti!

Tomorrow my first-ever PhD student, Jess Laccetti, will graduate at De Montfort University. Not only is she my first PhD student, she is also the first to graduate through the IOCT. She's so busy that's it's hard to keep up with everything she does, so I stole this list of current projects from her website:

Update: Spring/Summer Term: *** Supervising a Master's Thesis for the IOCT MA in Creative Technologies. *** Creating second installment of Education Pack for Inanimate Alice *** Writing journal article on narrative possibilities and links in web fiction *** Writing Curatorial Essay for Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media Salon/Presentation Event (marking 2 years of the course) *** Managing the Online Identity of a few online gaming companies ***

-- and that's just in the last few months! Jess is multi-talented and has a wonderful future ahead of her so watch out for her name.....  (I stole this photo too)