jill/txt

One of the things I love about blogging is that it combines immediate publication with the archive - and that the people who are directly involved in something discussed on a blog will very often show up and add their point of view to whatever the blogger wrote. So something that was posted and discussed months ago can be brought up again later, and the discussion will still be there, archived. And people involved in the issue can comment on it at any time, often re-starting the debate.

Today I found a comment in my moderation queue from Dan Britton, a co-author of 200 pages of (pro-copyright, anti-government regulation) statistics. Dan Britton explains that while he can see how the section on piracy, for instance, might be interpretated as having a political agenda, “it’s really not intended to be a political tool at all, or at least I never had that impression when I was working on it”. Interesting to have a bit of an insight into the process of making the book - though I still think there’s reason to be aware that even statistics may be skewed.

Good heavens - apparently high school Norwegian textbooks say that Norwegian bloggers often call a blog a “vlogg”. No, nothing to do with video logs, this is supposed to be a short form of “vevlogg”, which would be an optimistic translation of “weblog”.

Turi Marte gets back at her Norwegian teacher - or the textbook - by naming her school blog “vlogg” and laughing at the idea that such a term is actually in use.

Meet The Truants. A guild of academics who are also trolls, taurens and orcs - and who wrote the articles in Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.

This wonderful graphic is from an article about the guild and the anthology in Dagens Næringsliv yesterday. The full text of the article is online, but to see the image properly you have to buy the paper - or buy a PDF of the article.

Oh, and if you’re interested in joining the Truants, and you’re a researcher of games playing on the European World of Warcraft servers, contact Torill Mortensen, our excellent guild leader.

Zoomi.com takes the hundred thousand or so best-selling books off Amazon.com and presents them so you can browse through them on as you would in a physical bookshop. It’s kind of fun zooming in and out - and I enjoyed typing “blogging” into the search field and seeing all the covers of the blogging books lined up together. That actually gives you a pretty good quick overview of the kinds of books out on the subject, because yes, you can often judge a book by its cover. But as Sebastian Mary writes at if:book, it also carries with it the disadvantages of a physical bookshop. I think I’ll be sticking to the non-zooming online bookshops myself.

There’s a great interview with Jessica Langer, one of the contributors to our research guild’s book Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, in WoW Insider, where Jessica explains a bit about how the guild works and what her chapter’s about, as well as describing some of the other aspects of the book. Go Jessica!

Michael Abbott, of The Brainy Gamer, is preparing to teach a course on RPGs and has posted a wonderfully comprehensive bibliography of books and journal articles that are related to online and offline role-playing games - everything from Lord of the Rings to T.L. Taylor and beyond. A book I hadn’t heard of and wish I could have read before writing my chapter for our World of Warcraft Reader (which is about rhetorical moves in quests in the game) is Jeff Howard’s Quests : Design, theory, and history in games and narratives. Well, I couldn’t have read it, because it only just came out this February - though if I hadn’t been so caught up in pregnancy-mind at the time I might have noticed the note of it on Grand Text Auto. If you’re doing work on role-playing games of any kind, or planning to teach a course of your own, this is a great resource.

I remember when I was writing my PhD dissertation some days I’d be thrilled because I’d written a new section so EASILY - and then later I’d realise I’d written almost exactly the same thing months earlier.

At first I thought it was a total waste, but I decided, after a while, that it was simply a way for my brain to tell me that this thing was really important. So I relaxed into it.

Of course, with a PhD dissertation, you usually don’t want the same thing written twice. But with blogging, I don’t think it really matters. Repetition is part of life. If I blog the same thing twice, as Kjerstin finds she often does, I guess that just means I think it’s really important.

A colleague asked me how to find Creative Commons images. The best and easiest source is Flickr, where you can now find several million images using each of the different kinds of Creative Commons licence. To search within these images, simply click the “see more” link from each kind of licence.

Before using a Creative Commons licenced photo it’s important that you read the licence properly. There are different licenses, with different requirements. There’s one that’s just “attribution”, which means you can use the image however you like so long as you include a text saying who made the image (took the photo). Others are non-commercial (is your journal non-commercial? Quite likely?), some don’t allow you to make derivative versions (so you can’t make a colour photo black and white, or crop it, or put text over it), some will only let you use the image in a work that is also released under a Creative Commons license, and so on. Often you’re required to link to the license, or to include the full or an abbreviated text of the license near the image you use. See the screenshot up in the left corner of this post? When you’ve found an image you want to use, click on it to get the individual page for it, scroll down till you find the “Additional Information”, and follow the link that says “Some rights reserved”. That links to the exact license, explaining just how you can use the photo. And that’s it!

In some bizarre wave of enthusiasm I thought it would be a great idea to extend our already generous 54 weeks of parental leave by working for a few weeks this summer while Scott took care of Jessica. Poor Scott; I forgot that while I’d tied up most of my work obligations, he’s in the middle of a pile of them, such as preparing for the coming semester’s teaching and organising the September electronic literature conference he’s chairing. And as you academics know, just because you’re “on vacation” doesn’t mean you can stop working. So Scott’s “vacation” involves working afternoons, and this week I’m sitting here in the office finishing revisions to a long overdue paper (sorry Lisbeth and Jeremy, I promise you’ll have it very soon!) - and pumping breastmilk. I’m lucky enough that my sister lent me her double electric breastpump - the pump-in-style (great name, eh?) that she used with her kids, and I must say, it’s a different world from the cheap hand pump I used last time round. This thing rocks - I can read blogs while I’m using it and I produce far more milk than with that nasty hand thing. But I’ve got to admit, one day in I’d decided that pumping at the office is a total nuisance. I kind of like the achievement of seeing all that milk (you never see it when you’re breastfeeding) but the coolness of the new gadget (yes, I had that geeky gadget-love for it at first!) wears off pretty fast once you’re rinsing the “horns” in the sink in the hallway and trying not to drop the membranes down the drain. And heck, I have my own office to pump in - many mothers have to use their car, or sit in a toilet booth. Ladies, you have my whole-hearted admiration! I love nursing Jessica, but I don’t know how long I’d stick this pumping business out.

Just a very short time of this back-to-work business has made me very appreciative of my long parental leave - and of Scott, who says Jessica barely notices I’m gone so long as he has enough milk for her (oh no! I’m expendable!) - and of being employed by the state, which gives me two hours paid leave a day since I’m nursing, so I’m working a very pleasant 5 1/2 hour work day. And of course, the work of an academic is highly flexible, especially in summer time. And we’ll be very happy to have ten extra weeks of leave next year before we have to start thinking about day care for Jessica. But oh dear, I’d far rather be with my baby. And I think next time round (because oh yes, another baby would be wonderful, in a while, if we can) we’ll not be doing this…

I wonder whether I’ll need to pump at work when I go back in January and Scott takes his semester’s parental leave. Jessica will be eight months old and I’m sure I’ll still be nursing her - but she’ll be eating solids too and I imagine I’ll be nursing less frequently. I sort of hope I can get by without pumping at the office, with those nice 5 1/2 hour days so I can run home and nurse her instead (yay again for nursing leave!) but I suppose I’ll deal with it if I have to. Does it get easier with time do you suppose?

Mark Merino over at Writer Response Theory posts a fabulous table matching up a work of electronic literature to each popular web 2.0 tool. I’ve stolen the whole thing, it’s so useful - I hope Mark doesn’t mind (yell at me if you do, Mark!). Mark suggests using these creative works of fiction and poetry to enrich a course where students learn about social technologies and web 2.0: “You wouldn’t think of teaching writing without some examples of powerful rhetoric or inspirational works of literary mastery. At the very least, you’d expect students to be aware of some of the poetic, evocative, and creative potential of language. So why teach a course in Web 2.0 tools without some examples that push the boundaries of functional literacy with these tools?”

Have any of you experience with using creative works like these in teaching web 2.0 and the like?

Leafing through friends and fellow bloggers’ websites I came across Jim Barrett’s description of rallies against the Swedish FRA law in the small Northern town of Umeå. And that reminded me that I’d meant to write about this law, which has had the Swedish blogosphere in a state of uproar for weeks. You see, the EU has proposed various surveillance laws, to be adopted by member states, where all citizens’ activities online will be stored for up to 18 months, I think, purportedly so that the police can find terrorists and solve crime more easily. It’s easy to imagine other less worthy uses such total surveillance might enable - Europe is mostly pretty democratic today, but a Big Brother surveillance system like this makes totalitarianism easy, and makes civil resistance almost impossible - and totalitarianism in Europe is not that distant: my parents’ generation remember when Norway was occupied by the Nazis; I was still in high school when the Berlin wall fell. Certainly the movie industry will be happy to have such extensive data stored as well.

The biggest principle objection to the law is that suddenly, the government can spy on anyone. Previously, authorities had to have reasonable grounds to suspect that a person was guilty of a crime before they could get a warrant for this. That’s a pretty big shift in what we think of as fair.

The Swedish government just ratified their version of the law, the FRA law, where all cabled transmissions by telephone, fax and email are to be surveilled by the military. The website Nätverket Stoppa FRA lagen has more information (in Swedish).

The Data Retention Direktive is Norway’s version of this law - which we may or may not be obliged to ratify, as members of the EEC.

The image above is by @nolifebeforecoffee at Flickr, and the stencil is by Banksy, in the underpass by Marble Arch in London.