Tracking your own changes

I'm fascinated by people's writing processes and how they strategically mediate those processes. Here's a wonderful anecdote from Jenny's comment to Jason Swarts' interesting post on particle vs. stream views of text:

I even use Track Changes myself when writing a paper. I like to have the original draft embedded in even my sixth or seventh draft, since it is in essence the same document, just with lots of different colors.

In a sense, using Track Changes enables me to develop my thoughts more thoroughly and clearly. And days later, when I'm reading and re-working the paper again, I don't have to wonder where a thought was coming from. My entire thought process is right there embedded in the text. It doesn't seem static to me because I can see how things developed from my initial ideas.

[via: Coherent Fragments]

Tracking your mediated life

Bill Hart-Davidson pointed me to Onlife, a new Mac-based software use tracking program.

[Onlife] observes your every interaction with software applications... and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more... then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.

The idea isn't too far off from this project (from Bill, Clay Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachary), which seeks to reveal patterns of communication among people rather than an individual user's patterns of software use. And Onlife's visualization displays look quite similar to my own research data charts of writers' object use over time:


So naturally, just as I mis-used screen-capture software, I'm interested in Onlife as another possible tool for researching writing. ;-)

Cool on (Massively?) Multiple Levels: This Spartan Life

The repurposing of video games to animate new content (machinima) first came to me in the form of Red vs. Blue. This Spartan Life is an innovative use of the same technique to reinvent the familiar genre of talk show. Billed as "a talk show in space", their interviewee list includes media pioneers like Bob Stein and Marty O'Donnell. Episodes also include DJ OCTOBIT and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers -- the funniest synchronized movement I've seen since the SNL men's synchro swimming skit.

Better yet is the intelligent discussion about the promises and challenges of new media. Here's a typical quote from the Bob Stein episode:

Imagine a company's manifesto written today and fast forward 150 years since it was written. You would have not just the 50-page essay, you'd have the comments of millions of people who would not only say 'yea' or 'nay' about various points, but they'd make links to other arguments etcetera, etcetera -- you know every few years, the authors -- Marks and Engles -- might come around and they might actually look at everything everyone had said and reissue a new version so that after 150 years you have a corpus that's literally millions of pages. So the problem becomes how does an editor make navigating through such a large data space useful?

All this and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers? Awesome.

Tune in and get fragged.


Screencap from thisspartanlife.com

Co-locating Text as Life-Hack

Giles Turnbull over at O'reilly describes his attempt to "organise all my work, all my personal stuff, all my writing, in one huge text file?" -- the most extensive attempt at textual coordination I've heard to date. Read his post and the 43 Folders post that told me of the attempt to learn more about the rationale and pros and cons of the approach.

"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]

Speaking in Ignorance (of Audience and Context)

I now know how my students feel. In my field, student writing is often criticized for being poorly thought out. I believe bad communication is more the fault of ignorance about the situation in which it will be used. And students, through the mere fault of being young and inexperienced, are often ignorant of the contexts in which writing occurs. This happened to me yesterday with my voicemail.

I'm a brand-new faculty member at DePaul University. Yesterday, I tried to set up my voice mail. It's been years since I had a real job, let alone voicemail; and setting it up is quite different from setting up one's answering machine at home. It was the task of making three separate recordings that put me in my students' place.

1. record your name
2. record a message for external calls (coming from outside of DePaul)
3. record a message for internal calls (coming from within DePaul)

The problem was, other than #1, I had no idea how these recordings *ought* to differ, because it's been so long since I used or experienced voicemail in this way, that I had no idea of audience expectations or contexts. I had to *guess* what would be useful for these two different audiences. And I don't know when my recorded name gets invoked either. So here were my best guesses:

1. "Shaun Slattery" (I had the option of also stating the extension number. I decided against it, but don't know if that was a good or bad decision.)
2. "This is Shaun Slattery at DePaul University; I can't take your call right now. Please leave a message and I'll get back to you."
3. "This is Shaun Slattery in the Department of English. Please leave a message and I'll call you back."

Are these sufficiently distinguished for internal and external calls? Do they provide information useful to those two audiences? No. Idea. Whatsoever.

CFP: TechComm special issue

Clay Spinuzzi will be editing a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, "Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work." See the full call for papers; here's a taste:

It goes by many names: Distributed capitalism, the control society, the informatics of domination, the support economy. Whatever its name, the characteristics are the same: control over organizations is as distributed as ownership is in managerial capitalism; digital technologies play a vital enabling role; consumption is individuated, taking the form of the desire for unique identities and unique experiences; direct relationships between customers and businesses become more important; and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences. These needs are supplied not by large, vertically integrated companies but by temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly recombinant. Work is fragmented temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily.

What does distributed work mean to us as technical communicators? How is it changing our field? Should we adapt to it, critique it, or resist it? In this special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, we will discuss distributed work's implications for technical communication theory, methodology, pedagogy, ethics, and practice.

Schedule:

• 1-2 page proposal for paper: March 15, 2006
• Full paper (if proposal is accepted): June 30, 2006
• Scheduled publication of issue: Summer 2007

Contact information: Send proposals in .DOC, .RTF, or .HTML to
Clay Spinuzzi, clay.spinuzzi[at]mail.utexas.edu

Automated textual coordination 1.0

Mostly, this is an excuse to play with a neat online toy, "Spell with flickr", by Kastner. But it also shows that by executing rules for coordinating texts, scripts can automate some processes that would take quite a bit of time to do by hand.

[Actually, I had to hand-paste the auto-generated HTML because Blogger wont allow Kastner's java. But it's still pretty nifty.]

Healthy Technological Criticism

In his recent post "The right tool for the job", Jason Fried over at Signal vs. Noise shows the kind of critical thinking about technology that I'm hoping to teach my students. He does a great job ackowledging that any technology is only one of several possible solutions for a given situation and it's that situation or context that should drive one's choice of technologies.

Amen Jason!

Taking Notes

Taking Notes
Originally uploaded by philgyford.

This blog serves as a sort of zoo where I can collect specimines of writing phenomena related to my research. Today's exhibit is a wonderful example of textual co-location and remediation found in the wild.

Phil Gyford has posted this Flickr image of his life-hack/notetaking system. He's got a carfully managed process of taking Post-It notes while reading, then transposing them to the web so that he (and others!) might use them.