Author Archive
One Second Film Festival
I was there in the first one, and it’s brilliant!Third ONE SECOND VIDEO FESTIVAL extended its deadline till 5/5/2008
////jury:
The winner will be selected by a formula that combines the Gambling Online and the algorithm DEEP DREDD.
////rewards:
+ In this edition you can bet for the prize-winning video and gain some good money to cash or to spend on our favourite website virtual casino: UNIBET
+ THE VIDEO WINNER WILL INCREASE HIS/HER ECONOMY IN AT LEAST 500 EUROS.
+ watch the Bingo conference for the presentation of the festival (spanish)
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=65141081480C642C
////dates:
1 April - 5 May : UPLOAD videos
5 May - 9 May : BETTING on videos
10 May : online PRIZING
////requisites:
_ fill up the application form
_ upload the 1 second video (.mov .wmv .avi .mpg) _ upload a snapshot of the vide
From The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
Before the semester is gone, here’s a message we got from one of the lurkers on our blog:
Did you know that
- In the top box office G-rated movies from 1990-2005 three out of four characters are male?
- In the top box office G-rated movies from 1990-2005, plots with female leads often revolve around physical appearance and the ability to attract a male?
- That the prevalence of female characters being depicted as sexy (scantily clad, bedroom eyes, females valued for appearance rather than strength of inner character) is as high in G-rated films as in R-rated content?
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (GDIGM) works with the entertainment industry to reverse these discrepancies. In 2004, Geena Davis sat with her pre-school age daughter watching television and movies, and they both began to notice something: a lack of female characters. Davis thought, if my daughter notices, then what message does this send to all children? She went on to raise funds for the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children’s entertainment (4 discrete studies, including one on children’s television) and to found GDIGM (pronounced Gee-dime). Learn more at www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org.
——————————–
Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks again,
Melody Morrell
Program Associate
Final week: Wikimarathon, Digital Divide and Postnationism
The next week would be our last, so I want us to go on a wikimarathon and get the process we discussed in class going. The main focus in my view would be to discuss our work this semester through the themes - meaning not make this deliberately a summary of the course, repeating information which is already in the blog, but work on a manual addressed at the embed researcher. Write theme pages and then refer to the your travelogues with links from it. No need to repeat what we already have on the blog. Ideally we will have a theme which refers to several different travelogues to make its point.
Please continue the good work here: http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/wiki/ (don’t forget to log in)
Before you do anything, please log in and provide your real name (or something we can cross reference with the blog). Now you are welcomed to start editing.
More discussion can happen on the wiki discussion pages, here on our blog, or on Max’s weird chat thingie… (any chance we can embed it in the wiki’s sidebar?)
Please make sure to each make at least 20 edits this week, or in other words, make sure you edit so much that you stop counting. This wiki is what we leave behind this class and will be what you take with you from it.
Required Reading:
Frost, Catherine “Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity After the Internet†(a pdf will be emailed to you, please do not share.)
Required viewing:
Nicolas Negroponte, â€Interview with Riz Khan” Al-Jazeera October 2007:
For Stephanie & a volunteer:
- Read the article and view the presentations
- Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday (the 27th), ideally running some threads between them.
- Add to the themes covered to the wiki (hint: look at the title for this post)
- Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class
- Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
Brief: The New Media Embed Program Manual + Ubicomp
We will now embark on the last assignment of the semester:
During the next two weeks we will gather our knowledge and compose a collective manual for the New Media traveler. It will include some lessons you gathered both about your own travelogues and about others, browse your author pages to recap the semester and the three travelogues for that matter. Other notes and tips will be about your own ideas of how to publish, when to publish, how to compose a post, what will users read? what would they comment on? Does or how do rating works? How does chat works? How does it fail? The importance of context, image vs. video, on participation vs. authorship… Moreover, each one of you presented a reading in class, try to contribute your takes from that reading into the NMEP manual. We will try together to finish the class with the essence of what should an embedded reporter consider while exploring new media environments.
Reference: military journalism, travel guides, tutorials, cooking recipes…
Like many other things in this class, this is an experiment… It will become what you make of it, and it starts right now. Please point your browsers at http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/wiki/
Before you do anything, please log in and provide your real name (or something we can cross reference with the blog). Now you are welcomed to start editing.
You are welcomed to propose some structure on the wiki discussion pages, here on our blog, or on Max’s weird chat thingie…
Please make sure to each make at least 4 edits this week (from creation of full pages to typo corrections
Recommended Reading:
Required Reading:
Brian Holmes - Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure
Required Viewing:
- Bruce Sterling’s presentation in the Innovation Forum:
Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.
For Patty & a volunteer:
- Read the two articles and watch the presentation
- Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday (the 20th), ideally running some threads between them.
- Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class
- Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
Brief: Concluding the Travelogue & Tactical Media
That’s it, we will be concluding our third travelogue next week and will need you to write a closing post. This post will be an article of sorts on the subject you researched with your intervention being the ‘experiment’ you were using as a form of investigative journalism. You may take a few more days to conclude your intervention or continue it (you don’t have to stop if it doesn’t make sense to, this is beyond the class’s scope now).
Next week, will be all about Tactical Media which is a term you run into in previous classes but will go much more into next week.Â
So over the next week we can expect you to:
- Report more from your travelogues and reflect upon it.
- Write your final article, use the formatting tips, if you’re using images, use captions too.
Recommended Reading:
- De Certeau, Michel “The Practice of Everyday Life“
Required Reading / Viewing:
- Wark, Mackenzie “Strategies for Tactical Media” (I have a slightly better formatted PDF for you if you want one, email me)
- The Yes Men, The Dow/Bhopal Case:
Optional Viewing:
- The Yes Men: The Movie
Image captions
I added a feature that would allow us to add a caption for an image, check this out:
enjoy.
I fixed the e-mail subscription
so if you want to get your nmrs fix by email, now you can…
enjoy…
A tour-de-formatting
Continuing what we discussed today, here’s a tour-de-formatting, so you know what’s available for you to use to better write your posts.
By the way, this introduction paragraph is styled as H6 (it’s a new formatting I added for that purpose exactly. You can choose it from the formatting drop-down menu available by expanding the editor link, or by wrapping your tags with <h6> and </h6> in the HTML mode.
Sub Titles
I’m using <h3> for subtitles (like here above), they are very useful to screen through a post and as we discussed in class, to make sure that even if you haven’t read the whole thing, you still know what the post is about and where in it you might find the content you’re interested in.
Block-Quotes
This is something you’ve all been using and is proving itself. From time to time it suffers an over use. If you want to quote someone, please choose the actual part worth quoting. Otherwise, either link to it or include it in a paragraph. It is hard to read long text in a block quote format as you are probably starting to noticed towards the end of this segment.
Here are some bullet points, look how useful they can be:
- Use the titles wisely they are the most likely elements of your posts to detemine if the reader will continue reading it.
- Use videos wisely, they are time consuming and we will not necessarily watch them.
- Use images wisely and size them responsively. You don’t want your post to become heavy on images and hard to read. You can change the size of images either using an image editor before uploading (preferable) or after, through the image dialog box. The size of our post column is 530 pixels.
- Bloggers tend to use the Strikethrough just for fun to correct text they posted earlier. This is mainly used when updating a post after it was already published.
- When writing a long post it is polite to use the ‘more’ tag to break the post from the main page. In general though, you are loosing readers for doing that, so just try to keep your posts short and sweet, or well formatted enough to be accessible.
- Clean formatting - When pasting text from an external source (mainly text editors) try to make sure you don’t have some formatting leftovers that you don’t like. There are a couple of pasting options like the:
- Paste As Plain Text - gets rid of formatting and just pasts the text
- Paste from Word - safely maintains the formatting of Microsoft Word documents and some other word processors, without including junk tags
- Remove Formatting - gets rid of formatting after you’ve already pasted them. select the text you want to clean first.
- Use Bold when it makes sense.
Tags
Tags are super useful both to identify the post and to make connections. I would recommend each one of you chooses a unique tag for your travelogue so each post in the series contains links to other relevant posts. If you use the tags correctly these posts will indeed be relevant. Try to be consistent with the tags. Remember travelogu3 is not the same tag as travelogue 3 or travelogue-3.
That’s all for now. Enjoy.
ShiftSpace @ Dorkbot Wed 7pm
It’s all here:
Brief: Going Meta on Yourselves
Hi Class,
On the III Travelogue front:
- This week you will be going meta on yourselves - meaning, you will be writing about your intervention and what you’ve learned for it. With some of your travelogues, your intervention might still be ongoing and with others you might still (currently) still be before the the launch of your intervention. Anyway we want to know how you summarize your action, and when applicable how do you summarize the responses to it within the environment you explore.
- If this is in any way not clear, comment here with your questions.
- Plan your time of posting in advance, as you know, it is crucial to your posts readability.
- Comment on each other’s posts.
Recommended Reading:
- The introduction from Alexander Galloway & Eugen Thacker’s The Exploit: We-are-tired-of-trees
Required Reading:
For Nick Stergiou & Natalie:
- Read the article and the interview
- Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday (the 6th), ideally running some threads between them.
- Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class
- Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
