DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

This new website lets you upload documents and pdfs to your hearts content so you can publish all your articles yourself.
There is one in the eye for mean editors who refuse to publish your work!! But anyway, just to test out how it works, I have uploaded an article that is already published in elearning. It’s about Flickr. I wrote it, but is it against the rules for me to put this online? Does anyone know? Is it mine to put up? (I know I should know the answer to this question.)

Click here to read.

So anyway I like the idea of being able to make all my writing (including chapters etc) online. But I am unsure about coptright rules if the stuff is laready published.

I have a very crap myspace account. I only opened it to see how it worked etc. I don’t pay much attention to it,
But looking at it today I discovered a new link to a site which lets you load in your photos to make slide shows. It is here.

This is what I did. Display of some street art.

In the meantime Flickr has added functionality to its site letting you make collections and letting you display your images differently on your home page, like this.

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

Apparently, in line with modern trends to put stuff online, a funeral director (S Clarke and Son) is making his funeral services available to watch online. Rivetting stuff. . And you can see for yourself … check out the website here.

But I prefer the ultimate in multimodality on YouTube … This video has it all … sound; text; moving images, and FOOD as ART… . Here we have speed painting with chips and ketchup.

grabbed from Guy’s site… who heard about it from Colin and Michele… who heard about it from …

(But that is the way of the web 2.0 and social networking isn’t it?? - nicking each other’s stuff - it is called ‘creative commons’) ….

well anyway here is the video that had me falling about laughing: (You HAVE to watch it)

And it reminded me of bits of Steven Johnson’s book where he talks about how people would feel about books if they were invented AFTER video games (etc.)

For example - reading books is a solitary activity; books always end in the same way, however many times you ‘interact’ with them; there is only one route through a novel (page 1 to the end); books offer you no real choices about who to be/identify with; no choices about plot; you need no strategy to get through - you can just coast along etc etc.

Unlike video games which usually require strategy planning, can be played competitively with others, they can offer you a choice of roles; the endings (and plot) can be differen every time; you have to make decisions etc etc.

I love wikipedia.
I love the way anyone can contribute.
You can contribute in many languages.
You can look up practically anything you are interested in - and it is usually there … like

this;
and this;
and this.

(I love street art). …

If you want to you can register on wikipedia and start adding to the knowledge base by editing a page. It is as easy as ABC (which is not easy for everyone.)

But

sometimes

naughty people mess about like when I once looked up info about Alison Krauss. She is a fantastic singer and VERY modest.

Someone had deleted all the ‘proper’ text and replaced it with ‘Alison Krauss causes cancer.’ (And I doubt the veracity of this claim).

But the wiki community quickly sorted out the silliness and the text was back in order within the hour. (I this kind of incident is a small price to pay for the uptodateness - especially in comparison to the staid and non contemporaneity of leather bound tomes on library shelves - The Encyclopedia Britannica goes out of date before it is printed.)

With so many people reading and contributing to wikipedia I think it manages to be a dynamic and incredibly uptodate encyclopedia; but no doubt it does enshrine certain idelogical values.

And some people have had ENOUGH . They have set up their own wiki which is more Christian; more Conservative and apparently more pro American.

And so what ever you think of these values, at least they are explicit that they have them.

Ladies and Gents I give you…. Conservapedia.

And funnily enough you will notice Conservapedia has (ahem) used very similar software to wikipedia. .

These are some of

the complaints Conservapedia levels at wikipedia.

And of course wikipedia describes Conservapedia … like this.

So knowledge is not neutral. We know that.

But at least open collaboration and shared writing on wikipedia is an attempt to be inclusive.

And finally, for your information, this is how Conservapedia defines street art.

What do you think of THAT??

Oh well. (And you might like to read Dana Boyd’s take on wikipedia). She is a great commentator of all things apophenia.

OK?

Henry Jenkins is producing a series of excellent videos which will be just great for the new online MA in New Literacies.

Here is Henry Jenkins talking about his project:

See here for example the series on video blogging - how to do it and why….

Anya mentioned the PEW website where I have discovered a LOAD of useful papers, research based stuff, plenty of quantitaive data, that will be invaluable for my presentation in Swansea later this month…

Anyway … time for a smoothie … mango and raspberry