All posts by Murph

Biographical, Daily Create, Images

Everybody Eats When They Come To My House

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Cross-posted from my thoughts on education blog, because a daily create for the You Show looks a lot like one for DS106. Starting to understand why Jim Groom is pushing the “write once, publish anywhere” idea of Known.

I love to be in the kitchen. The kitchen is my playhouse. It’s a place where I can focus, where learning and doing emulsify, where this singular moment connects to long tradition. I expect I could find the path from the stove to the fridge to the sink with my eyes closed.

OW! Well, I can if the cat’s not in the way.

So it was easy to drop what I was doing and answer the question “where’s the you in your kitchen?”  I had a quick look around – knives on a magnetic strip on the wall, utensils on hooks, fridge, cluttered counters, the sink…

the Lodge cast iron skillet. The stove is my place in the kitchen, and what I want on that stove is either that heavy black pot frying chicken, or the large brewing kettle full of wort.

Brew kettle, chicken frying pan. My place, in my kitchen.

Yes, the cabinets really are that cattywampus. It’s an old house.

This was a pretty quick shoot – though I did have to get the stock pot down and declutter the counter a bit. No flash, though it took one overexposed shot to learn that.  I’ve loved playing with the presets in the Flickr app, but this shot didn’t need them.

I’m a relative latecomer to the smartphone world, and I’m still getting used to this idea that I am always carrying a camera. I tried to become a shutterbug for a while in my early teens, but it never really took. If playing with the You Show and DS106 only made me better at taking photos (and more conscious/confident of the option to take photos), that would be a big step in the right direction.

Daily Create, DS106, Images

I’m not your handyman

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A visiting faculty member in Music found out that, back in high school, I played the flute. He fixed me with a stare like a dog gives someone who doesn’t play with a ball and said “well, why aren’t you in my wind ensemble?”

I said “I used to play. It’s been 20 years!”

The corner of his mouth rose. “And tomorrow, it will be 20 years plus one day.”

I’m still not in the Wind Ensemble, but the phrase has stuck with me. And so, before the cobwebs on this blog are “2 months plus one day” old, a few short writeups.

measuretwicecodonce

I made this one for TDC 1051. The create starts with exploring Unsplash, looking for a photo which seems to want a DS106-themed caption.

Well, I can’t help it, I’m a punster from way back, so this is the one which spoke to me. A dad joke for a picture of dad’s workbench.

That leads to the visual challenge – where and how to place the text. I still have a lot to learn about color palettes and tricks like drop shadows which can enhance the visibility of text. I remember that brighter colors popped on this image, but they also looked cartoony, fighting with the detailed photo. It was also tricky to find the location – the light and shadow in the upper right, the diagonals of the folding rule, the bright light on the lower left. Ultimately, all those restrictions led to their own solution – if the caption doesn’t fit in a single block, where do two smaller blocks fit?

I’d welcome any comments which might help me think about this kind of design.

Assignments, Audio, AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments36, DS106

There goes the last DJ

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I agreed to give a mini-workshop on podcasting on Wednesday, to force myself to learn more about Audacity. Creating a bumper for DS106 Radio seemed like a good way to get started, and it’s a manageable amount of work for a 20-minute demonstration.

Here’s the thing, followed by how I made it:

First, I wanted to know what I’d be saying. The old Outer Limits opening came to mind – “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.” That speaks a little to the “own your tools” ethos of DS106.

But if “we” control it, that suggests that “you” (the listener) doesn’t. And that doesn’t sound very DS106 at all.  So I rewrote it, for a participatory audio culture, to be “Radio DS106 – You control the gain; you control the Auto-Tune.”

Then I went hunting for an audio track to mix in. A search for “sci-fi” on CCMixter turned up a track called “Space Station Melody” by a member called Gurdonark. (For a 15-second bump on a non-profit radio station, you could probably make a fair use argument for whatever you wanted to sample… but it’s also a chance for me to model searching for Creative Commons-licensed material for my faculty.)

It’s kind of funny, come to think of it… the futuristic pinging of Space Station Melody is more reminiscent of the pizzicato opening of The Twilight Zone than the dramatic strings and horns of The Outer Limits.

Anyway, I recorded into Audacity, imported the Space Station Melody MP3, and arranged the voice track to the point in the music where I wanted it to start. I brought the volume of the music down a hair while I was talking with the Envelope tool, and used the Fade Out filter to get out. (And then trimmed off the end of the music.)

I owe a link of thanks to Nicky Memita for her post on this assignment, which was quite useful as I navigated Audacity’s imposing list of filters and effects.

Biographical, Daily Create, DS106, Images

I almost believe that they’re real

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Self-portrait in books

I’ve been intrigued by book spine stories for a while. I probably first saw them through LibraryThing’s contests (which they call bookpiles). Then recently, I was tagged in a wave of Facebook chain posts asking me to “list 10 books which have stuck with you.”

I saw the call for TDC 984 while I was at work. Looking over at my bookshelf, I saw my professional history – a paraprofessional job coding HTML, a transition into reference librarianship, a core text of instructional design, and all the while, a commitment to the broad liberal arts. So I played with different ways of arranging them in my window (it’s work, boss, honest) and snapped a picture with the Flickr app.

Rereading the instructions, it occurred to me that this is something like a Cubist exercise – it’s a picture of me, abstracted from 3 different angles at once. Obviously I didn’t achieve that with the visual style, but the realization helped me decide that I wanted to present different parts of myself more than I wanted to play with the poetic or narrative power of book titles.

The middle panel is just 3 things I like – cooking and storytelling, poetry, and broad humor. The shot is taken on the staircase in my home, largely because the exercise had reminded me of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).

Backgrounds are important in these shots – out the window of my office, the staircase, the top panel, which is about my wife and myself, is on our porch. They contribute to the story as much as the titles do. I used the Flickr app’s preloaded filters to get the colors where I wanted them. It felt a bit like a cheat compared to actually understanding how to set color levels, but it’s a start.

I got frustrated trying to figure out how to arrange the three pictures in GIMP. The importance I’d ascribed to the backgrounds fought with the collage arrangements I imagined.  Ultimately I decided to go vertical on the grounds that a finished imperfect create beats a perfect one which never gets published.

I’m not entirely clear if it’s supposed to be read top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top… it hasn’t told me yet.

Best Work, Biographical, DS106, Video

Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time

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Of my storytelling to date, I think this is the one I’m most proud of. But then, it’s about one of the things in my life I’m most proud of.

I made this during a workshop we hosted for faculty at Kenyon. It’s out of the Berkeley Center for Digital Storytelling model. (The workshop was actually coordinated by a trainer from Ohio State’s Digital Storytelling program.) This is a storytelling tradition which focuses on autobiographical narratives, respecting the storyteller’s experience and the “gift of voice” when they tell it themselves. There’s a strong social justice component to telling untold stories, which I think is part of why this particular mode of digital storytelling is appealing to academics (especially those pursuing a service learning pedagogy).

It’s also a very intense process – really a full 40-hour week of work, considering the writing process, the tech training, and the process of recording, finding and layering soundtrack, and image selection, ordering, and import. A tremendous amount of the work is done in writing circles, in which these personal narratives are laid out for the group’s supportive critique. That’s a lot of vulnerability to give, and accept – and honestly, my story didn’t require the kind of exposure which some other storytellers engaged.

This story is based on the diary I kept while on the rebuilding trip, and audioblogs I made at the time. Those audio reports were a particularly exciting composition exercise – every night, imagining myself as David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow, I sat down and wrote my reflections on the day and the trip, and edited them into a short news-like report for my friends up north. I then posted them to Blogger through a now-defunct service which let me make audio posts through a cell phone call. (These were the pre-smartphone days, kids, at least for me. I was working on a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go burner.)

Fortunately, I saved those MP3s before the system went belly-up. I’ve put them on Soundcloud, but marked as private. I haven’t decided whether I want to revive those particular moments yet; as years have passed I’m less impressed with the emotional rawness and quick polish of that work.

Truthiness! Stephen Colbert in a parody of the I had a fair amount of trouble with the “truthiness” of the process. Some of the images in that movie are actual shots of the day in question. Some are other shots of our trip, or of New Orleans. Some are CC-licensed shots from Flickr or elsewhere, unrelated to my life at all. I had to wrestle with that. Did I sell out my own story by using a picture of “college students” which is from Madrid, not Gambier? Did I fail to carry the stories of the people of New Orleans when I used pictures of cleaning up a South Asian volcano blast? At the end of the day, I decided that the images help me tell a story which I still believe needs telling, and I made my peace with it. I still grit my jaw every time I look at them, but I’m proud enough of the result to share it with you.

Biographical, Daily Create, DS106, Images

John, John! I can see your house from here!

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I was intrigued by the “Draw Your Own Map of the Internet” project, and moreso when it became a Daily Create. But it was this tweet from John Scalzi which really led me to get out a piece of paper and make my own.

(Oh. There’s a template. And it’s landscape, but I worked in portrait orientation. Oh well.)

This is a riff on Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue. View of the World from 9th AvenueThat’s why it’s in portrait orientation, and a weak attempt  at perspective. It’s a personal view of the Internet – not an attempt to reflect what I know about the whole web, but how I think of my place in it. It reflects how I spend my time; it also reflects priorities in the way I use the Internet. (And of course, it reflects the way I wish to portray those things.) It’s also, really, a map of the Web, not the Internet. Notice that there’s no App Store, that I think of “email” as “the web” and not a separate thing anymore, that there’s no Netflix or Amazon Prime (which I watch through my Roku and TV, rarely my laptop or phone), that I don’t even think about protocols other that HTTP anymore.

In reflection, I’m a little troubled by the fact that I think of email as my home. That’s where I start and end the day, where I’m most reachable but also most secluded. Facebook is the patio table in my yard where most of my socializing happens; Twitter is the birdfeeder on the tree where lots of things fly in and out. Google+ is that really cool swingset over in the corner which hardly gets any use. Notice the “access road” running at an angle from the main highway, which shows the way my friends lead me out to other points on the web – occasionally their web homes, more often through citation.

Groom, Levine, and Rheingold as the
Don’t blog like my bruddah!

It’s probably Click, Link, and Embed’s fault that I thought of my webspace on Reclaim Hosting as “the garage”. It’s the tinkering place, and the place from which I go places. It’s adjacent to my home, but it’s a detached garage… which may say something about how I think about being “reachable” and “building things”  – or it might only reflect the fact that my real garage is detached. OK, this metaphor is officially beat to death. Sometimes a garage is just a garage.

I dunno why my car is some kind of ’70s-’80s land yacht, except that it’s probably been that long since I last drew a car.

There’s no particular reason that work-y things ended up on the left, and general interests/recreation on the right. It’s not like this is a time diary – but these are the neighborhoods which explain how I think about my time on the Web.

Of course, everything leads to Google, and Google leads to everything. Maybe that’s Oz, and I should draw little feet under my house.

There’s some stuff missing – webcomics ought to be on there somewhere, as should LibraryThing. But it’s a reasonable draft, and a fun project to reflect on the way I engage with the web.

Best Work, Biographical, Text

Did you go crazy, or did you report?

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I’ve been meaning to transfer some of my better stories from my first, late, and unlamented blog. My Facebook feed is spilling over with people’s remembrances of September Eleventh today, and I thought I might share mine.

This was originally written for a contest at Powell’s bookstore, in 2006 I think.

 

Lynn walked into our morning meeting in tears, and announced that a plane from Boston had flown into the World Trade Center. My stomach flipped as I thought of my friends who were moving out of Massachusetts that week. I didn’t know their plans. I didn’t know where they were. All I could do was run to my office in panic and try to find out. Today, even recalling the memory makes me ill.

(It wasn’t a rational fear; Michael and Ann share a fear of flying which borders on the pathological, and they were in Western Massachusetts anyway. In a psychic bond, their first thoughts were for my father, who at least does get on airplanes regularly without chemical sedation.)

Everyone has a September Eleventh story, and I suppose mine is similar to most. For most of us, our fear of loss was actually greater than our loss. That is, after all, why they call it a “terror attack.”

Our stories don’t often extend to the next few days, as America walked in our haze of grief and fear and senselessness. The media virtually suspended itself. My 160 cable channels seemed all to be set to CNN. After about two days, I’d had all the news I could stand, and I had to turn away from the box.

I couldn’t begin to think about reading nonfiction, and fiction seemed to be either too heavy or too light to handle. But poetry… maybe poetry would have something to say.

And that’s how I came to read T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding in September 2001. I opened that big Norton Anthology of English Literature which every once and future English major owns, and turned its onionskin paper, and looked for solace.

Eliot wrote Little Gidding in 1942, while he watched the Nazis bombing the cities and civilians of Britain. It grabbed me like a branch grabs a drowning swimmer. This expatriate Missourian knew what I felt, had seen what I’d seen and more, and needed to tell me something. And I desperately needed to hear it. Teachers talking about “timeless literature” came into shining focus like never before.

I needed two tries to read the second section, depicting the aftermath of a bombing raid, “ash on an old man’s sleeve” and a ghost in the twilight. Eliot’s burnt roses could have fallen from Windows on the World. And yet, if I could not be distracted, at least I knew we were not alone.

Eliot did have solace for me. Little Gidding says that life somehow must triumph. I thought of Eliot, reading Julian of Norwich, and passing that thousand-year-old crutch to me:

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.

No one in America had said “all shall be well” in days. But if Julian could believe it, and Eliot could believe it, perhaps I could as well.

And in September of 2001, that voice coming through the page was enough. It was more real, and more comforting, than any voice coming from the box, even than any of the voices around me. Personal sadness has brought me back to Little Gidding many times in the following years, and every time, I feel that branch brush me in the rushing waters, and I grab hold.

DS106, Thoughts and Ideas, Weekly Summary

I me mine

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Allright, I give. I’ve got a million things I want to say about DS106 Week 1, but if I don’t say something and hit publish, I’m never going to give myself permission to move on to week 2. Plus, I’m not part of the group conversation as long as these ideas are in my head. Rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good I’m just going to hit the damn Publish button on my thoughts on Art, and come back to technology and The Wire later.

In Art

Thinking back over the videos for Open DS106 Unit 1, I’m struck by the feeling that they all treat Art as something selfish. I heard a lot about what the Artist is trying to do in their creation, and I heard a lot which suggests that Art is found in the viewer’s reaction. What I don’t remember hearing is the idea that Art is a mode of communication – that the creation and the reaction are inseparable (except by time and distance).

I think it’s worth it to conceive of Art as a very stylized (and slow) way of having a conversation. Certainly this addresses all of the points in the Rhett and Link video. Conversations are allowed to presuppose a certain base of knowledge. That can be as simple as a common language, or as complicated as an academic debate. Some conversations are easy, and some are hard, demanding active listening and a willingness to have your attention focused by the interests of another. So no, sometimes Art isn’t a transcendent eureka moment, sometimes it’s a hard slog to figure out what you’re supposed to get out of it.

This isn’t to say that it’s always the listener’s fault when the communication doesn’t happen. Particularly in Art, where the artist may be manipulating details and symbols very subtly (or more boldly than we’re used to), I think it’s important that the artist thinks about who they’re talking to, and why. Gaiman’s advice to try things in your art before someone tells you they can’t be done is terrific advice – but I think it implies a certain element of the scientific method. Fail again, fail better is a good slogan, but it requires that evaluation of what “better” would look like, and how we might reach it. (And particularly, to the extent that an artist fails to include groups in the conversation, I think they at least have an ethical obligation to ask themselves if they’re OK with that and why.)

DS106, Images, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments24

I’m smart, and I want respect

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I’m already on Season Two of The Wire, but I’ll try not to include too many spoilers for my comrades in #wire106.

Ziggy Sabotka is a fascinating character – a runt, a screw-up, a dreamer. It was Episode Seven when the penny finally dropped how much James Ransone‘s  characterization reminds me of John Cazale‘s work as Fredo Corleone in The Godfather – little shifty guys trying to walk tall. They even bear a physical resemblance, perhaps made stronger by the fact that both characters dress with a colorful (yet unsuccessful) flash which stands out on camera.

Having found the two characters I wanted to compare in a Triple Troll Quote, I started thinking on a third. Now Terry Maloy is nothing like Ziggy or Fredo… but we got a little brother, we got the docks, we got organized crime, and we got one of the greatest monologues in film history…

And so we get my second triple troll quote:

On the Waterfront posterThis was a fun one to make. I knew I needed the shot to include Ziggy’s orange leather coat; fortunately Google returned a high-quality image. The red text seems to fit the image’s color scheme. I picked an italics serif font in an attempt to echo the poster for On the Waterfront; it’s not really successful at that but I think it does evoke some of the helplessness of the 3 characters, at least compared to the block font you get on most memes. (GIMP could give a better font browser – I couldn’t really tell if I had a script font available to me, and I wasn’t prepared to hunt for long.) I did like working with GIMP for positioning and resizing the text block; that was pretty easy.

Ultimately, it reminds me more of a dorm poster than an Internet meme graphic, but I’m happy with it.