Yup, it's been a little while since I've posted. Mostly because of end-of-the-semester grading and administrivia. Do I have to worry about people dropping me from their blogrolls for lack of productivity? Yuck, that sounds too much like tenure.
In any case, here's what I've been up to, more or less:
I'm giving a talk at MITH tomorrow called "To Blog or Not to Blog?" The abstract:
A "blog" is short for "Web log"--a continually updated online journal. Once dismissed as a fad, blogs are remaking the Web in some surprising ways. Blogger, blogdex, the blogosphere, blogrolls, blogshares . . . what does it all mean? What's a trackback? What's an RSS feed? Who is Salam Pax? How do you start a blog?
Assistant Professor of English Matthew Kirschenbaum will discuss his involvement in the blogging community, delivering an overview of blogging for beginners by first going behind the scenes in his own blogs and then discussing the potential of blogs for teaching, their unprecedented role in covering the war in Iraq, and suggesting why blogs just might give us a glimpse into the future of digital discourse.
Incidentally, one of my students (Tiffany Chiou) sent me this on the difference between blogs and online journals. Not sure I really buy it, though--the distinction seems pretty arbitrary.
Like everyone else, I've been reading Steven Johnson's Emergence, and, inspired by that and other forays into systems theory, have downloaded the StarLogo software Steven discusses. So I too can now grow simulated slime mold colonies on my screen.
I'm working on final revisions for my chapter on "Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability" in the forthcoming Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. The middle term, aesthetics, is proving the hardest to wrestle with. I'm less interested in how beauty enhances usability than I am in the idea that beauty thickens the interface, creates a kind of generative opacity we can productively set against the mantra of transparency one finds in typical usability and design discussions.
The volume should be out early next year.
Also finished a novel, Blake Morrison's The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, a fictionalized account of the life (relatively little is known about Gutenberg's actual biography). One thing I learned, which is based on fact (as reflected in surviving court documents) is that Gutenberg was diddled out of the profits from his invention by his business partner and financier, Johann Fust. So, an early IP dispute. Which reminds me too that there has recently been some important new computer-aided research on exactly what Gutenberg may have invented. Anyone know more about this, where to go for published results?
Finally, Kari suggests that my Virtual Lightbox, which is essentially an image-based whiteboard (all users can move and manipulate a shared image set in realtime) might come close to being a visual wiki, which ties the project--perhaps?--into current discussions of social software.