I've been sent videos of 3 lectures at the 3Ts conference at SUNY Empire State College on 15 March 2013. My talk is embedded below and features introductions by the college provost, Deborah Amery, and the Dean, Tom Mackey. I really enjoyed all of our conversations that day.
Here are my slides from 3Ts 2013: Transliteracy from Cradle to Career, held at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs on 15 March 2013. Thanks to Tom Mackey and Michele Forte and their colleagues for a very stimulating and enjoyable event. We talked about many things in the course of the day and I tried to keep a note of all the links I needed to pass on. Here, in no particular order, are the items I think I promised to share. Do contact me if I missed anything.
My title is Developing the notion of technobiophilia: researching across diverse disciplines and I'll be focussing on the way I've used Evernote to work across very diverse materials.
Many thanks to everyone who came to my Professorial Lecture on 26 April. We had good conversations afterwards, and there were some interesting comments on Twitter too - see #technobiophilia
I've uploaded the slides here, and audio will follow soon. I've added two more slides at the end with some links I used in the lecture plus a brief bibliography for those interested in finding out more about biophilia.
My Professorial Lecture was postponed from its original date last November and will now take place at 6pm on Thursday 26 April 2012. Tea and coffee are served from 5.30pm and refreshments are provided afterwards at 7pm. I'm really looking forward to it and extend a warm welcome to all friends and colleagues. Admission is free. Registration is here.
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
My Professorial Lecture has been postponed. The date, 30th November, was set months ago but now it clashes with possible nationwide industrial action. I feel this creates too many conflicts and complications so would prefer to find a different date. We are looking for an alternative some time in Spring 2012, and meanwhile I'd like to thank everyone who signed up and hope very much you'll be able to make it on the alternative date. I really appreciate your interest in the talk, and will announce the new date as soon as it's decided.
Update: The lecture has been rescheduled for 26 April 2012 but booking hasn't opened yet.
I'm speaking at this event in Lincoln and looking forward to working with a great group of people. It's part of the Frequency Festival and you can register here
'A powerful and provocative day of discovery, insight and debate looking at the future of writing and publishing and arming you with the pervasive opportunities and challenges that ‘digital’ provides in this ever-changing world. Hosted in partnership with Writing East Midlands, the University of Lincoln and Threshold Studios, Re/Write will broaden your horizons and challenge your perceptions of what it means to be a writer or a creative in the digital age.'
Every professor is asked at some point to give a Professorial Lecture. I've been invite to present mine on the evening of 30th November 2011. I'm really looking forward to it and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all friends and colleagues. Admission is free but you need to register via this page.
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
CreativeCoffee Club was founded in 2007 by Toby Moores, CEO of Sleepydog media company, and myself. We wanted to provide a place for business people, academics, teachers, public sector workers and managers to use new social media tools to network and exchange ideas, and to discuss how to foster creativity and innovation in the workplace.
From 2007 to the summer of 2009 CreativeCoffee Club Leicester was coordinated by Shani Lee and met at the Graduate Bar, De Montfort University, but since late 2009 it has been based at Phoenix Square in the heart of Leicester's Cultural Quarter and coordinated by Jayne Childs. The format of fortnightly Wednesday morning meet-ups has proved very successful and remained unchanged for four years, and under Jayne’s leadership CreativeCoffee has gone from strength to strength, gaining a substantial and very active membership.
Since 2007 CreativeCoffee Club has been funded by De Montfort University as part of the NLab project which was established in 2005 to help small businesses respond to the opportunities and challenges of new media. Over the years, NLab has made a major impact on local businesses via its conferences, seminars, mentoring, research and networking opportunities, the most influential of which has been CreativeCoffee. But NLab will come to an end this July, and we’re very pleased that CreativeCoffee Club looks like a valuable spin-off which needs to have a life of its own beyond NLab, so we’re pleased to announce that the management and coordination of CreativeCoffee Club will be handed over to Phoenix Square on 1st August 2011. Phoenix is already an important partner of DMU and this move is further evidence of our continued collaboration.
Invitation - Wednesday 20th July 10.00-12.00
We’ll celebrate the changeover with a display of videos and photos from four years of CreativeCoffee Club, so come along to see yourself in the past! Toby Moores and I will be on hand to say a few words, and then we’ll formally hand over to Phoenix.
I really enjoyed speaking at FutureEverything in Manchester last week and, indeed, met quite a few UK geeks who go camping :) Thanks very much to Imran Ali, who invited me, and to Drew Hemment, the magician who has made this impressive event happen annually for 16 years in a row.
I believe there will be a filmed interview available soon but for now here are links to an audio interview and a pdf of my slides.
At the end of June I'll be visiting China for the first time. I'll be speaking at the DAW Symposium: Visions and Trends in Transdisciplinary Art and Science at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts (XAFA). It promises to be a huge and very impressive event. I'm just one of many speakers from several countries and I'm really looking forward to meeting them as well as our Chinese colleagues. I've been learning a little Mandarin this year but not much went in, I have to admit, so I have a lot of revision to do before I leave.
I'd like to thank my colleague in the IOCT, Professor Hongji Yang, for very kindly working out a translation of the word 'transliteracy' for me in both characters and pinyin. I'll be very interested to hear the view of other Mandarin speakers as to what this means to them.
Of course, various social media apps are blocked in China so I don't know which I'll use to journal my trip, but, time permitting, I will try to post some reports and pictures while I'm there.
I'm really looking forward to our Amplified Leicester Showcase event on 15th April 2010 at Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester.
In 2009/10 Amplified Leicester offered a small group of participants from across the city the chance to: • Benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures • Generate new ideas quickly • Think like a futurist and see the bigger picture • Organise and collaborate better • Be persuasive in different social situations • Share and develop creative ideas • Manage the stream of information which bombards us every day • Choose the best people to collaborate with • Make the most of different kinds of resources – social, economic, creative
Every fortnight participants attended inspiring
lectures and workshops and in between meetings worked together via
Twitter, Facebook and other social media applications. They filmed
interviews in their communities and shared the videos online.
On Thursday 15 April 2010 we will showcase their work and expand the
conversation to include the city and beyond. This one day event at the
new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre
will include practical workshops run by the participants themselves,
presentations of their experimental projects, and talks by the project
team. Keynote speaker, Andrea Saveri, an independent foresight and
strategy consultant based in Berkeley, California, will locate the
Amplified Leicester experience within a global context. Find out more at www.amplifiedleicester.com
Admission is free of charge. Register early to avoid disappointment.
My title is Journalists who tweet: How the news is changing First blogs, now Twitter. Today it’s not enough just to write your copy - many journalists also have to blog and tweet it too. How are those changes affecting the profession and its audiences? This talk discusses the impact of social media upon news reporting and the ways in which contemporary readers expect to interact with the media.
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
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
