Surface Tablet vs. iPad Video, via SAY Media

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Apple iPad
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Revisiting Good Blogs: Innovative Interactivity (II) - A Digital Watering Hole for Multimedia Enthusiasts

One of the blogs I enjoy following is Innovative Interactivity (II).  Here is the description from the "About" section of the blog:


"Innovative interactivity serves as an open forum for multimedia producers, interactive web developers, and new media professionals. Content focuses on the dynamics and theory of how people receive and react to different forms of information on the web, both through visual, multimedia storytelling and interactive information design."


"The goal is that this blog will provide an outlet for those in the online realm, whether you are interested in learning about multimedia storytelling, interactive web development, programming languages, software tools, data visualization, or all of the above.  Hopefully you will be inspired from what you read here to surpass your current standards in order to develop highly effective multimedia interactives for the digital community."

Tracy Boyer Clark is the founder & managing editor of Innovative Interactivity.  She is finishing up her MBA/MSIS dual master's degree at UNC-Chapel Hill. 


Here are a few links to recent II blog posts:
Behind the scenes of NFB's One Millionth Tower
Lessons learned from Internet Summit 2011
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg delivers monumental speech for women in tech

Quick Post/Link: digitalculturebooks: New Media Studies & Digital Humanities at University of Michigan

I graduated from the University of Michigan years ago and would have been thrilled to participate in a project such as the new "digitalculturalbooks".  Sadly, the my undergraduate education pre-dated the internet and the explosion of engaging technologies!  

Here is information about digitalculturebooks from the "about" section of the website, via graduate student Jonathan Tarr:


digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. digitalculturebooks seeks to explore all aspects of new media and its impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication and will present work that exhibits and advances the understanding of the relationship between humanities and digital technologies. The imprint aspires to both investigate and demonstrate new forms of scholarly practice in the humanities.
digitalculturebooks is an experimental publishing strategy with a strong research component. By making our content available in print and online, we intend to:

• develop an open and participatory publishing model that adheres to the highest scholarly standards of review and documentation;
• develop a model for press/library collaboration at Michigan and elsewhere;
• showcase and extend Michigan's leading role in the development of digital resources;
• encourage and participate in a national dialogue about the future of scholarly communication.

• About Us
• Our Books
• Book Series
• Use Guidelines

• News
• For Authors
• XML Publishing

What We're Reading

• Au Courant
• booktwo.org
• Collision Detection
• danah boyd
• Media Commons
• Mimi Ito
• O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing
• Publishing Frontier
• Scholarly Communications @ Duke

 Jonathan Tarr established a Facebook page for digitalculturebooks.    More info to come!

 

Multimedia Storytelling; Brian Storm & Scott Strazzante (info via Innovative Interactivity)

Brian Storm, the founder and president of MediaStorm, recently was a presenter during UNC's Photo Night, an event that celebrates various forms of photo-journalism. Tracy Boyer, author of the Innovative Interactivity blog, recently posted about her experience attending the presentation and her chance to chat with Brian Storm over lunch.


Tracy's post provides a good overview of MediaStorm's business model, which has four main components - multiple platform publication, project-specific multimedia agency, an interactive production studio, and evangelism/training.  I think that MediaStorm's business model will hold well for the future, given the rapid changes in technology, journalism, and cross-platform interactive media. Despite the economic downturn, MediaStorm had their best year, according to Tracy.


Below is an example of what you'll find on the MediaStorm website:


Common Ground  (excerpt)
Photographer: Scott Strazzante

The full Common Ground project can be viewed at http://mediastorm.org/0023.htm


"On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home — the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois — was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin's home once stood.

Common Ground introduces us to the lives touched by this land, as photographer Scott Strazzante takes us on a visual journey exploring the differences and similarities of these two families while simultaneously asking us to look at what is common among us all."





What I liked about the videography and photography is how the photography juxtaposed similar pictures depicting the commonalities between the older couple who once lived on the farmland that was transformed into the suburban home for young families.


RELATED
ABOUT MEDIASTORM (from the MediaStorm website)

"Originally founded in 1994 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, MediaStorm relaunched in March of 2005 with a focus on creating cinematic narratives for distribution across a variety of platforms.
In November 2005, MediaStorm premiered its award-winning multimedia publicationhttp://mediastorm.org. Utilizing animation, audio, video and the power of still photography, we publish diverse narratives that speak to the heart of the human condition.

MediaStorm is widely recognized for the quality editorial work we've produced for our many clients. We have created award-winning multimedia projects, interactive applications, and web sites for media companies, foundations and advocacy groups. Our clientele includes Starbucks, Council on Foreign Relations, and National Geographic Magazine. MediaStorm projects have also appeared on numerous websites including MSNBC, Slate, NPR and Reuters and have been broadcast on PBS..."

"MediaStorm is a multimedia production studio based in Brooklyn, New York and collaborating virtually with creative resources around the globe. MediaStorm's principal aim is to usher a new era of multimedia storytelling, via our  publication, our advanced workshops and our industry-leading production and consulting services. The people we hire and the culture that we have created for quality and innovation at MediaStorm are the keys to our success."

MediaStorm Founder Brian Storm advises journalism community to partner and collaborate
Tracy Boyer, Innovative Interactivity,  2/17/10
Bloggers: If you link to MediaStorm, be sure to send an email to info@mediastorm.org with your URL.


Some of my previous posts about multimedia/digital storytelling:
Visual Literacy and Multimedia Literacy Quotes
The Importance of Storytelling and Multimedia Content-Updated
Digital Storytelling Platforms and Multiple Perspectives: A look at the work of Jonathan Harris - food for thought for interactive timeline design.
Two Interesting Posts:  Colin Mulvany "Will the touch tablet save professional journalism?" & Michael Arrington -"The End of Hand Crafted Content"
Umajin Creative - Digital Storytelling for Interactive Whiteboard or Touch Screen- free demo available.
Resources for the (therapeutic) use of digital and multimedia storytelling & social stories for children and teens.

People-Centric Public Media, Public Media 2.0, & New Media: Considerations for Interactive, Collaborative Multimedia Content

I followed a link from an article written by Andy Oram, of the O'Reilly Radar and found some interesting information related to public media. The graphics and quotes below are from a publication, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics (pdf), written by people from the Center for Social Media at the School of Communication, American University.

Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics    Full Report pdf

Center for Social Media,  School of Communication, American University



"Multi-platform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature
of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the
public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one
signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities
for civic engagement.

But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic
that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media
for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it
matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.

The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also been most disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to define truly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives, and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments into tomorrow’s tried-and-true public media.

Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting, need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0."

Action Agendas
"Public media institutions and makers need to develop a participatory national network and platform; to cross cultural, social, economic, ethnic, and political divides; to collaborate; and to learn from others’ examples, including their mistakes.

• Policymakers need to create structures and funding to support national coordination of public media networks and funding for production, curation, and archiving; to use universal design principles in communications infrastructure policy and universal service values in constructing and supporting infrastructure; to support lifelong education that helps everyone be media makers; and to build grassroots participation into public policy processes using social media tools.

• Funders can invest in media projects that build democratic publics; in norms setting, standardization of reliability tools, and impact metrics; and in experiments in media making, media organizations, and media tools, especially among disenfranchised communities."
Some key points from the article:
Five fundamental ways that people's media habits are changing - The Five Media Habits:
Choice
Conversation
Curation
Creation
Collaboration
Trends with possibilities for public media 2.0:
Ubiquitous video (choice, creation, collaboration)
Powerful databases (curation, creation)
Social networks as public forums (conversation, collaboration)
Locative media (choice, creation)
Distributed distribution (choice, curation)
Hackable platforms (creation, collaboration, curation)
Accessible metrics (creation, curation)
Cloud content (choice, creation)
Pervasive gaming (choice, collaboration)

RELATED
Eight Public Media 2.0 Projects That Are Doing it Right
Jessica Clark, Mediashift, 10/6/09
("MediaShift tracks how new media -- from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism -- are changing society and culture.")
The intersection of media literacy and public media 2.0
Katie Donnelly, Public Media 2.0, 10/16/09
VoiceThread "VoiceThread is a powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents, and videos"

I'll update this post with some of my thoughts/reflections about Public Media 2.0 and interactive multimedia content development.

The Social and Technological Innovations in Social Media: Video of recent panel presentations moderated by Henry Jenkins at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism

Times are changing faster than we can change the buzzwords that convey this change. Social Media. Spreadibility. Immersive Journalism.

Henry Jenkins, the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, recently moderated a panel on the topic of social and technological innovations in social media.  If you are in the mood for reflection, the videos below of the panel presentations are worth a look.  Topics covered include on-line social networks, 3D virtual worlds, immersive journalism, social computing research, "stickiness moving to spreadable", and more.

If you are in a rush, the following article provides an overview of the panel discussions, along with key quotes from the various participants:

Annenberg panels explore "Social Media:  Platform or Provocation for Innovation?
Lara Levin, Student Writer,  USC Annenberg News   11/16/09


Session 1- Video    Social Media:  Platform or Provocation for Innovation?


Session 2 - Implicatons of Social Media for Business, Learning and Institutional Development


Description from the USC Annenberg YouTube Channel:
Nov. 5, 2009: "Implications of Social Media for Business, Learning and Institutional Development"


"As part of the week-long visit by and dialogue with Annenberg Innovator in Residence Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Dean Ernest J. Wilson III hosts a half-day conference titled "Social Media: Platform or Provocation for Innovation?" In this panel, "Implications of Social Media for Business, Learning and Institutional Development" experts from USC Annenberg and IBM will explore recent innovations and future trends in the social media space as well as industry responses to these developments. The rate of innovation in social media has been staggering in recent years. The result is a substantially different media landscape than one confronted by media organizations even five years ago. The conversation will focus on both the demands of the new media marketplace and the barriers that organizations are likely to face in attempting to meet these demands. In addition to Wladawsky-Berger, panelists include USC Annenberg faculty members Henry Jenkins, Jonathan Taplin, Dmitri Williams, Marc Cooper, executive in residence David Westphal and research fellow Nonny de la Peña. They will be joined by IBMs Steve Canepa, general manager for media and entertainment and Julia Grace, software engineer and Melissa Cefkin, ethnographer and research scientist."

Christopher Baker Revisited: Resident Artist at Kitchen Budapest

I first learned about Christopher Baker when I was taking an information visualization class. I was impressed by his work, My Map: A Self Portrait, which was created from his archive of 60,000 e-mails:

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Here is more of Baker's work:

Baker's Murmur Study is a live visualization/archive of Twitter:


"One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause." -Baker

Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. (The paper is recycled.)

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome)

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome) from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

"HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome) is a kinetic sculpture that considers the subtle, often-subconscious ways that mobile communication technologies shape our senses. The title references the recently discovered Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome -- a syndrome wherein mobile phone users become hyper-attentive to their mobile devices, often experiencing phantom ringing sensations even in the absence of incoming calls or messages. This work carefully orchestrates the vibrations of a collection of mobile phones to produce a familiar yet quietly-disturbing cacophony."

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise "An immersive video installation featuring over 5000 video diaries found on the internet."

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

"Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard." -Christopher Baker

Christopher Baker's blog

Christopher Baker's Projects

About Christopher Baker:

"Christopher Baker is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape. He creates artifacts and situations that reveal and generate relationships within and between these networks. Baker recently completed his Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is now the senior artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media arts lab in Hungary. In his previous life as a scientist, Christopher worked to develop brain-computer interfaces at the University of Minnesota and UCLA." (taken from Christopher Baker's website)

Christopher Baker's Artist's Statement:

"My work is fundamentally concerned with the complex relationship between society and its technologies. Trained first as a scientist and only recently as an artist, my practice represents an uneasy balance of eager technological optimism, analytical processes, deep-rooted skepticism and intuitive engagement. Much of this practice is inspired by the interconnectivities – visible and invisible – present in the modern urban landscape. I am energized by the diversity of human expression that continuously activates our vast communication networks. I am awed by the scale and varied histories of the built environment and urban infrastructure. As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting these physical and digital worlds, I attempt to make work that examines the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles. Primary to this task is an exploration of the ways we imagine and represent ourselves before (potentially massive) audiences and the ways we navigate and abide in public space. Thus, architecture and place figure heavily into my often site-specific practice. With these interests at heart, large-scale video projections allow me to create works that fuse existing physical spaces with more ephemeral digital elements, resulting in revelatory and sometimes disorienting forms."

Christopher Baker is currently a resident artist at Kitchen Budapest.

What is Kitchen Budapest?

"The spicy innovation lab Kitchen Budapest, opened in June 2007, is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams"

"Research fields What happens to the net once it meets the urban space? How does private space relate to the saturating wireless networks? Where does user created content gain authority? How does our use of cities alter as we get more and more real time feedback of its dynamics? What makes a home smart? Street-smart?"

"We would like to rethink and remix the possibilities of new media in our everyday lives and to argument connections between new technologies and our society."

I am happy to live in a world where experimental artists can find places and spaces to grow and thrive!

Digital Storytelling, Multimodal Writing, Multiliteracies...

Digital storytelling, multimodal writing, and multiliteracies are overlapping concepts that weren't around during my first round as a university student. As more people of all ages create and share digital content on the web in new and imaginative ways, teachers and university scholars have taken notice. Is there a consensus that the printed word, as we've known it, is in the middle of a digital transformation?

Let's start out with digital storytelling.

By now, everyone knows about YouTube and vlogs as new means of communication. There is more to digital storytelling than uploading a few hastily put-together video clips from the family camcorder, or slapping together a PowerPoint presentation with a few bells and whistles. There are now some standards. Digital storytelling is an art.

The following definition is from an article from EduCause, 7 things you should know about Digital Storytelling.:

• "Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. Sophisticated digital stories can be interactive movies that include highly produced audio and visual effects, but a set of slides with corresponding narration or music constitutes a basic digital story. Digital stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective. The resources available to incorporate into a digital story are virtually limitless, giving the storyteller enormous creative latitude. Some learning theorists believe that as a pedagogical technique, storytelling can be effectively applied to nearly any subject. Constructing a narrative and communicating it effectively require the storyteller to think carefully about the topic and consider the audience’s perspective."

Petter Kittle, from the Northern California Writing Project, Summer Institute 2008, touches on the topic of multimodal writing in Multimodal Texts: Composing Digital Documents. Related to this is the concept of digital writing.

"Multiliteracies is an approach to literacy which focuses on variations in language use according to different social and cultural situations, and the intrinsic multimodality of communications, particularly in the context of today's new media."

• "...it is no longer enough for literacy teaching to focus solely on the rules of standard forms of the national language. Rather, the business of communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners are able figure out differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another. These differences are the consequence of any number of factors, including culture, gender, life experience, subject matter, social or subject domain and the like. Every meaning exchange is cross-cultural to a certain degree." -from Kalantzis and Cope's Multiliteracies website

Here is a short list of resources:
The Center for Digital Storytelling
Multimedia Storytelling
What are multimodality, multisemiotics, and multiliteracies?
(Ben Williamson, Futurelab)
Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation, and New Media
(Gunther Kress)
New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education
(Mary Kalantzis & Bill Cope)
Multiliteracies
The Multiliteracy Project
Multimodal Writing
http://multimodalwriting.com/
(new website, under development)
Multimedia Blogging
(a post from 2004, worth reading for historical context)
Thinking about multimodal assessment
(Digital Writing, Digital Teaching)
Standards related to digital writing
(from Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis...)

I conclude this text-based post with a promise to incorporate more multimedia experiences in my upcoming posts....stay tuned.