jill/txt

Note to self: Touché by Mouchette is all about the user having to caress the screen with her mouse to penetrate it for its secrets. Useful for that chapter about touch in digital texts.

At the McLuhan Program in Toronto they aim to “essentially (..) teach people to think like Marshall McLuhan did… you know… come up with cute aphorisms, predict the future, that sort of stuff…” I wonder if that’s the official learning outcome? That quote’s from David Weinberger’s blog who links to it: the title of a course blog for the program is, of course, What is the message?

This weeks my students are doing JavaScript forms and I’m racking my head to think of any blogs that use forms usefully, so that I can give the students a constructive and useful task to do with forms rather than one of those “make a form with X, Y and Z and then never use it” exercises. Makes me imagine some kind of forms art - oh, Ian Haig’s My Favourite Babe (which also has an artist’s statement at Rhizome’s art base) uses radio buttons and so on rather amusingly come to think of it, on the third or fourth page I think. Any ideas or links about interesting yet fairly simple JavaScripty blog things?

OMG. I got a link from Wired! What a claim to fame! It’s from another story on Salam Pax that discusses how the immense load on Salam Pax’s blog from Baghdad is creating problems for the server where he keeps images and such, and in the tail end it discusses the authenticity question, which is where the link to my post on that sneaks in. I’m linked from the word “believe”. Salam’s last post, btw, was on Monday.

Strangely my stats show no record of anyone clicking through from Wired, and I hadn’t read the story, so it was Chuck’s comment alerted me to it. Thanks :)

Oh, I know. I don’t have the code to track visitors in the individual entries, only on the front page! So of course my stats don’t show people going straight to an individual entry. How silly of me!

I wonder whether the hackers who yesterday replaced Al-Jazeera’s content with an American flag will be as relentlessly hunted by the FBI as they would be if they’d targeted CNN or Wall Street? Perhaps?

Today’s class was pretty good. First I asked the students to individually read one of four different web fictions for ten or fifteen minutes. The options were Tor Åge Bringsværd’s dictionary story Faen. Nå har de senket takhøyden igjen, Liz Miller: Moles: A Web Narrative, Gavin Inglis: Same Day Test or Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War. Then they discussed the way in which the piece was structured with two or three other students who had read the same piece. I asked them to see if they could draw the structure, and while that didn’t really work with all the works, they figured out some important stuff doing it. For instance, in Bringsværd’s piece there’s an index with links to all the other pages. It’s not the entry page of the site. Students decided that since it was called “indeks” and had links to everything else, that must mean the piece is hierarchically organised, which made it obvious that we hadn’t really figured out what hierarchies are in previous discussions.

After that, I talked a bit about hypertext in general, Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, various systems, the web, hypertext fiction, a brief demo of afternoon, and a sampling of some print “hypertexts”. I think I talked for about ten minutes. Yes, it was the short version. Then, after a break (we’d already used 55 minutes) the class regrouped with four to a group and each person had read a different work. They presented the works to each other and tried to work out which, if any, of Mark’s patterns could describe each work. Only two had actually read Mark’s article, and obviously had they read it it would have been easier for them, but they had it on screen and figured some stuff out, and they can read more later. Then I brought out the list of stages of learning we talked about on Tuesday and told them that so far, they’d described and classified, and done a really good job of it too. They’d also started comparing, which is one step up. Another move ahead would be to figure out whether there’s a connection between the patterns in the work and its content (explain causes), and perhaps even generate new ideas based on these reflections.

It all ran smoothly, the students came up with some wonderful interpretations, most of them were avidly blogging their thoughts by the end of the class, and I didn’t even get into a sweat worrying that I had to magically get them to summarise everything in a fancy plenary discussion. I usually worry about that. I’m just so impressed that the students worked so much out on their own. I actually managed to set up an activity where they could do their own learning. Yay!

I’ve that known Finn Bostad and others in Trondheim have been thinking about weblogs and research logs and writing and pedagogy for a while; Finn’s and Ruth’s blogs have interesting thoughts about teaching, blogging and writing. Finn’s blog is called saywords. Ruth’s just restarted blogging after a post from last October saying “this isn’t working”, but she’s going to be using blogs in Norwegian classes at a high school.In Norwegian.

Next semester I’ll be teaching digital culture, which is a survey and theory course rather than being practical like this semester’s web design course. I want to use blogs to focus on thinking and writing, so it will be different to this semester’s installing and customising frenzy. I found some inspiration for thinking about this in MC Morgan’s Web Logs and Wikis: New Writing Spaces for Advancing Writers at Bemidji State University, which I think is in Minnesota. There are lots of Norwegians there, aren’t there? Anyway: the assignments are great. Instead of being presented with a blog already set up, or struggling with the horrors of installing MoveableType, students are simply asked to set up a weblog and announce it to the class weblog. They decide for themselves which system to use, though blogger.com is recommended for this first blog. The course also uses wikis, and I’ve been thinking about that too - after all, I don’t actually want to teach blogging for the sake of blogging (though it probably sounds that way sometimes), I want to teach digital culture and digital communication. That includes a basic literacy in how to write, link and communicate on the web.

In Morgan’s personal weblog I found a wonderful comment on student essays which I think I’ll show my students, because it’s just what I’ve been struggling to tell them recently:

In Narvik a couple of weeks ago I talked about young Norwegian net writers, and I particularly mentioned Karina Junker Larsens web papirepler and Mia Frogners torquate.net. This evening I had an email from Mia and a comment from Karina, which also led me to an interesting-looking writing course that uses weblogs and wikis and had linked to Mia’s site. Torquate’s currently home of a beautiful web poem which is constructed from bits of song lyrics by TOOL, combined with some of Mia’s own responding words, design and images. Apparently the content of the site changes regularly, though. Mia also has a web , Hungry Eyes.

At first I thought I found Lt. Smash’s blog so unsatisfying because it’s bare of emotions, or almost bare. Lt Smash, an American soldier fighting in Iraq (if he’s not a hoax too), writes matter of factly in a prose that’s barer than Hemingway’s:

Reports of deaths and casualties bring mixed emotions. Sadness at the injury or loss of fellow warriors. Relief at the low numbers reported. (23/3)

I suppose the staccato of the sentences could be interpreted as manly grief. I looked at Salam Pax’s blog to see why I prefer it. An obvious reason would be that I don’t support the American soldiers, and I have sympathy with the civilian population of Bagdad, but I think there’s more. Here’s Salam:

We obviously still have electricity, phones are still working and we got to phone calls from abroad so the international lines are still working. water is still runing.

Salam uses full sentences, which I do appreciate. His occasional spelling mistakes confirm his presented identity. But what really draws me in is that he writes about details. Scouring his recent posts he doesn’t write about his emotions any more than Lt Smash, and when he does, there’s often a dose of irony surrounding his words as protection. The feeling is in the details, when the irony lets go of his language. And there are lots of details:

We got to phone calls from abroad … around 6:30 my uncle went out to get bread … the Iraqi TV was showing patriotic songs and didn’t even bother to inform viewers that we are under attack … The Iraqi Satellite Channel is not broadcasting anymore. The second youth TV channel (it shows Egyptian soaps in the morning and sports afterwards) also stopped transmitting.

Meredith uses details like this, too, and I love the posts her details come out in. Meredith has a talent for observation, and she often inserts an observed detail into a tiny story of something she’s experienced. Though the detail is not precisely related to the episode she’s relating, together they create sparks.

Nearby, a rookie policeman is hovering; waiting for jay-walkers, so he can make his first arrest. Behind him, a more senior copper watches proudly, the mother lion overseeing the cub’s first kill. (17/3)

Lt Smash on the other hand rarely notes details. A hard sarcasm filling every word. Perhaps that’s the only way he can cope with his life right now. When the sarcasm lifts set phrases appear: “We will not forget. And we will not rest as long as our freedom and safety is threatened.” But these ritual patterns of words are only another kind of linguistic protection.

The words with which Lt Smash closes his post last Wednesday aren’t observations of details, but they affect me more than anything else he writes. I think it is for their ordinariness combined with the drama and danger of his situation:

I’ve got to go to work now.
I’ll post again when I can.

Selmer Bringsjord gave an interesting talk at our department yesterday on developing synthetic (i.e. simulated) characters. Bringsjord works on artificial intelligence and among other things on how to use AI for generating narratives and games. While simple bots in MUDs and MOOs and virtual worlds can be quite convincing for a while, they usually work on superficial levels, for instance spouting out prewritten responses triggered by a word you typed to them. Mention “music” and the bot will say “My favourite band is X”, for instance. Bringsjord’s team wants to develop the deep structures of synthetic characters, and in particular, they want to simulate beliefs. Imagine The Sims where your characters aren’t just neat, nice and playful, they also relate to each other in different ways depending on whether they believe in revenge or pacifism or where they think that X probably dislikes Y because Y is an avid environmentalist while X and Z care more about personal comfort. The Sims do talk about peace and aeroplanes and such (based on the speech bubbles) but don’t have a sophisticated system of beliefs.

Rather alarmingly, Bringsjord’s team is trying to simulate evil. I suspect I’ve created myself a rather dramatic interpretation of this, which may not quite match with what they’re actually doing. I can’t seem to imagine it outside of the dramatic schema of a film that has probably already been made: the mad scientists who try to simulate Evil, but once simulated Evil of course becomes a rogue piece of software and annihilates the planet by taking over the network, causing wars, distorting the media, deviously changing innocent emails to create utter havoc until a group of unacknowledged but quietly heroic nerds ir better yet hackers thought to be malicious but actually deeply ethical somehow tame the program reestablishing stability and love to a shocked but now wiser world.

Bringsjord wants to simulate an evil character because evil is an ingredient in a lot of stories, and he’s interested in using AI in interactive narrative and entertainment. I don’t suppose the evil synthetic character will really be capable of destroying the world. And the presentation was mostly about other things, robots, architectures and projects, all interesting. But I stil can’t stop plotting that movie in my head.

Just before my six year old daughter fell asleep she told me the day’s woes: “The spå* said that B. was a princess, and he didn’t like that, and so he pushed S. so hard that she fell on top of me and hurt my foot!” I looked serious and said “Oh” slowly and that was all that was needed, but inside I was thinking of gender and what it must mean when from the age of six girls have to put up with violent boys as a matter of fact, and six-year-old boys are already indoctrinated to think that being called a princess is the ultimate dishonour. And Norway is one of the least sexist countries in the world.

* I don’t know the English for spå. Kids fold them out of paper and use them as fortune telling machines, opening them and shutting them according to numbers chosen by the person to be “spådd”.

The bombing of Bagdad is humane, Rumsfeld assures us.

After a story on MSNBC news yesterday there have been lots more discussions about Salam Pax’s authenticity. One of the chapters in my thesis is about hoaxes, fictions and realities on the net so this list of links is largely so I can gather more background for that chapter.

Paul Boutin has a list of reasons that make the authenticity of Bagdad blogger Salam Pax likely, though it can’t be proven. He’s looked at IP-numbers, traceroutes, site hosting and so forth (via Liz). There’s a busy discussion in the comments of a post at kottke, too - though some of the comments are plain wrong (for instance one says that his yahoo profile states he lives in Jordan, but the profile is not for Salam but for Raed, whom Salam claims to be looking for). Diane reports her more personal though not f2f relationship with Salam. Noah’s given his electronic writing students writing exercises that could result in more blogs like Salam, only overtly fictional. Meredith comments it all and links to more links to more discussions at Boing Boing. Wampum writes about attempts to discredit Salam as a propaganda machine. One has to admit both the discrediting and the creation of a blogger would be clever propaganda strategies. If he starts reporting US soldiers are raping civilians and noone else reports it his authenticity becomes an issue, but so far, he’s only given plain reports of what it’s like being in Bagdad during bombing. If that’s propaganda, I think I’ll take it.

There are other personal accounts from the region. Bettejo Passalaqua is a volunteer with the Iraq Peace Team, and her last post, dated yesterday morning, describes waiting out bombs in the shelters. The beds in the hospital she’s working in were still empty, waiting victims. Kevin Sites is a CNN reporter in Iraq. His blog hasn’t been updated in three days. Allison Kaplan Sommer is in Israel, and writes about sending her kids to school with gasmasks. The BBC has gathered reports from all their correspondents in the region in the form of a collective weblog, Reporters’ log

Whoever he is, Salam hasn’t yet posted today, after many posts yesterday. I hope he’s OK. [21:44 He’s posted this evening]

The students are on strike. There’ll be protests this afternoon at five. Saturday there’s a rally at three. That probably goes whereever you are.