Tools of the Trade

Love, love, loooove Chicago's Threadless Tee's. Like this one in particular:


http://www.threadless.com/product/805/Tools_Of_The_Trade

On writing together

Earlier this month the New York Times reviewed Aquamind's NoteShare. Fallows does a good job pinpointing the crux of the difficulty of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) -- simple interface usually means limited functionality while robustness usually means the need for an entire IT department. NoteShare sounds like a comfy balance. Looking forward to the PC version later this year. I'm getting tired of emailing documents and creating Yahoo groups for every conference panel proposal I'm on.

While asynchronous collaboration certainly works for most academic work, there are often times early in the process (identifying the unifying theme of several projects) and late in the process (close-editing of collaboratively-written documents) when synchronous collaboration would be nice.

I seldom sit down at a computer with another person, but in co-authoring an article with Jason Swarts when I was in Raleigh last year, we'd meet in a coffee shop with a laptop and pass it back and forth. Extreme writing, as it were. I found the process extremely rewarding. One of my main concerns about teaching composition is that by having students writing in isolation all the time, they can develop bad habits or at least never see other ways of writing that they themselves might benefit from. They develop a mere knack when learning a craft is the goal.

Happy Birthday Louis Braille

Google honors Louis Braille, the inventor of a system of writing for the blind and visually impaired based on raised dots. The braille system represents a wonderful early example of accessibility well ahead of its time. Here's a great image of someone reading braille. In looking at images of braille, I've noticed that there are different modes of presenting it. This image shows raised-dot-only text. This, however, shows ink on the dots which might help different readers. And this image shows traditional writing printed with the braille text. Finally, there are numerous devices which output digital text into braille. (You can see one in action in one of my favorite movies, Sneakers.)

[image from Google]

Wiki as Personal CMS?

This Ask Ars installment features a question about using a wiki as a personal content management system (the discussion offers myriad solutions). The writer, who lives in a house with four roommates, asks about using one to manage mundane tasks:

We’ve all decided that a wiki would be an efficient way to communicate information to everyone in the house. For example, when is the water bill due? Check the wiki. Who do we contact about the trash pickup which never seems to come? Check the wiki.

This life-hack question reminds me of Cheryl Geisler's research into the use of technologies for managing home-life (here and here). It's my home-life texts that I have the most trouble tracking (especially due to nearly annual moves). Electronic banking and bill-pay has cut down on the negative effects of this, but remember how complicated it can be with multiple roommates.

Artistic Proof 1.1: Maxims

There's nothing like leather.

Paying so much attention to the role of tools in getting work done, I'm especially interested in sayings about tool use. This one's a bit older, but speaks to the tendency to derive one's nostrums from one's (usually limited) experience. It's a lot like a saying by Abraham "hierarchy of needs" Maslow, which is almost annoyingly popular today, especially among programmers:

If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It's true we get overly reliant on the tools we know how to use, especially when the learning curve for such specialized tools as software is so steep and their proliferation so tremendous that it's hard to keep learning new tools.

Oh, and this tidbit from Hal Fulton at Rubyhacker is just too good to leave out.

I don't mean to sound like a spammer,
But Ruby has such a neat grammar —
When a task I assail
Starts to look like a nail
Then my code starts to look like a hammer!

One last one:

He that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. ~ Confucius

To me, it speaks to both the role of tools in getting things done and our tendency to futz about a good bit before settling in to get work done. ("Hmm... gotta mow the lawn... Wait! I think this mower blade needs sharpening!" Yep, that's me alright.)

Leapfrog Fly Pen/Computer: Friend or Foe?

One of the most-touted kid-gifts this holiday season is Leapfrog’s FLY Pentop Computer (warning: slow, flash-heavy, chatty, youth-oriented website). In short, it’s a pen-based PDA with standard functionality (music, calendar, calculator, notepad, etc.), geared toward tweens, as opposed to Logitech’s io2 Digital Writing System (designtechnica review).

The FLY pen allows you to interact with your writing… you can draw a calculator, drum pad, date & time, etc. on special paper and interact with it. Actually, the concept is pretty cool – being able to draw a calculator and then use it – but I’m not convinced how useful it is to have to draw one’s tools every time one wants to use them.

Fly’s functionality is well described in this article from BusinessWeek Online. And it’s been featured in The New York Times [subscription required] and Gizmodo (twice). But the most interesting critique has come from Kristen Kidder of Bitch Magazine (“feminist response to pop culture” and a damn good read) about a functionality I’m particularly interested in: computerized interlocutor as aid to invention. To prompt journal-writing, the pen has pre-recorded questions it can ask. In theory, this is an excellent idea. Conversation (even in the form of leading questions) is a good way to prompt writing. It’s why all grade-school reading is followed by “discussion questions”. But the questions that are posed and how they are phrased can speak volumes, as Kidder reveals:

LeapFrog Enterprises, leading U.S, manufacturer of educational toys and longtime enthusiast of gender stereotypes, is poised to extend their reign this fall with the launch of Fly... Fly's accessories fall sharply along the boy/girl divide. The most notable program is the female-oriented Dear Me Diary (recently renamed the Fly journal), an interactive notebook full of more than 600 writing prompts designed to excite girls about writing and self-expression. The concept is simple: With just a touch of the pen, preteens suffering from writer's block can trigger questions designed to stimulate their creative impulses. A good idea, no? Sure, but there's a catch: A good portion of the topic suggestions reinforce the misconception that all middle-¬school-age female friendships are cemented through the sharing of petty gossip. “Ooh—dish alert! What's going on?” and “What are you so jealous about?” are just two examples of the questions designed to get Fly girls thinking.

I'm all for promoting female self-expression (and what writer doesn’t need a little inspiration from time to time?). I just wish LeapFrog was able to deliver it without aggressively channeling their inner mean girl. – Kristen Kidder
[“Poison Pen” November, p. 21]

I’ve come to see that one potential benefit of technology is using it to prompt social interaction. For example, what if, when creating a resume in MS Word, the task pane included a link, “Chat about this document with a buddy”? As a writing teacher, I’d be pleased as punch if technology suggested social interaction that should happen to improve the document or writing process, but when enacted in the social-norming ways Kidder describes, maybe those girls would be better off with traditional paper and pen and a real friend.

[Image from NY Times]

Someone keeps moving my tools!

Previews of the new Office 12 interface are available [see here and here] as is C-net's video review. While I understand this process is how we got from here to here, I still get tired of having to learn where particular functionality has been moved. Can you imagine typing if, every few years, the keyboard developers decided to swap and add new keys? How's a guy supposed to develop operational fluency?

Anyway, here's the new "ribbon" interface.






[via Digg, image from xBetas@PDC05, oh and title adapted from "Someone keeps stealing my letters..."]

Typewriter Fetish

The Classic Typewriter Page is a vast storehouse of information about early versions of a breakthrough writing technology. The site includes a brief illustrated history of typewriters, "typewriter collecting and care", and huge lists of early models complete with pictures.

The most interesting aspect of the site, from my perspective, is the glimpses it affords into the development of the technology. A variety of unusual arrangements can be seen, helping us to imagine what might have been had qwerty not become the standard.


[Image from The Classic Typewriter Page]

Pencil Revolution

Our love of the tools of literacy... Where does it stem from? In some cases, it's nostalgia -- the deep-rooted connection we made to the smell of pencil shavings beginning at age 5, the intense relationship we had with paper ruled with pink & blue, solid & dashed lines and the struggle to get our wobbly letters to adhere to those lines.

In other cases, it's techno-philia in its true geek-guise. The rabid appreciation for the latest, sexiest technology. In both cases, it stems from the time we spend alone with these tools as we work with our ideas. It's why Ray Bradbury named characters Faber and Montag (a paper manufacturer) in what I consider to be his greatest work.

With this relationship in mind, I begin an ongoing series of entries entitled Writing Technologies Fetish. Today's installment -- Pencil Revolution, a blog/manifesto devoted to our little leaden friends (sorry, "graphite" didn't have the alliterative zing). There's a companions site in the form of the Pencil Revolution Flickr Group. [Image from Pencil Revolution]

[Update: Pencil Revolution brings us this piece of web-based zen: images and sounds of pencil writing.]

Another critique of IT use as depicted in film...

Minority Report had a pretty sexy view of future IT. Johndan mentions it in Datacloud, but OK/Cancel sees a problem.


[From: OK/Cancel]

There was also the climactic scene where, for some reason, a file had to be physically removed from one screen and walked over to another. Yeah right, all that futurism and still the climax relies on sneakerware.

"The great-great-grandfather of the Hipster PDA"

43 Folders links to a blurb about life-hacking forefather Thomas Jefferson's portable note-taking device.


Jefferson's hipster PDA [from monticello.org]

Autopen and the distant hand of authorship

This somewhat recent Talk of the Town from the New Yorker raises some interesting questions about what happens when a writer is physically removed from the writing he or she is doing. I find it facinating that, despite Margaret Atwood's argument, remote signing doesn't feel the same.

Even more intersting, to me at least, is how similar Autopen looks to Thomas Jefferson's polygraph machine. Really, I guess its just a matter of scale as to how removed the writer is from writing on each machine. La plus ca change...

DAMILIC Corporation's Autopen [from damilic.com]



Jefferson's polygraph [from monticello.org]

Also mentioned in the Talk piece, LeapFrog’s FLY pentop computer and Margaret Atwood's tragically named Unotchit "gizmo".