Each of these snippets (with one noted exception) can be added to functions.php of your main blog theme or you can create a simple plugin.

Swap the BuddyBar for the Admin Bar

If you somehow are still using the buddy bar, try one of the following methods. (You may also need to adjust your CSS slightly to accommodate the differences between the two admin bars.)

Here is the preferred BuddyPress method, which is simply added to wp-config.php:

/*
** Add the following to wp-config.php
** Removes BP admin bar and replaces it with the WP admin bar
*/
define( ‘BP_USE_WP_ADMIN_BAR’, true );

If for some reason you find that the above method does not work, you may try adding the following to functions.php

<?php
/*
** The following removes BP admin bar and replaces it with the WP admin bar
*/
 
function remove_bp_adminbar(){
     remove_action( 'wp_footer', 'bp_core_admin_bar', 8 );
     remove_action( 'admin_footer', 'bp_core_admin_bar');
     show_admin_bar(true);
}
add_action('after_setup_theme','remove_bp_adminbar');
?>

Remove something from the Admin Bar

To remove a menu item, you just need to know its HTML div id. This example removes the WordPress logo and menu. See remove_node().

<?php
/*
** The following removes the WordPress menu and logo
** wp-admin-bar-wp-logo is the div id in the menu HTML but we just use wp-logo 
** see http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/remove_node
*/
 
function admin_bar_remove_this(){
     global $wp_admin_bar;
     $wp_admin_bar->remove_node('wp-logo');
     }
     add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render','admin_bar_remove_this');
?>

Adding something to the Admin Bar

Similarly, you can add a new menu item to an existing HTML div id. Here we are adding a link to create a new category within the +New menu. See add_node().

<?php
/*
** The following adds a link item to create a new "Category" within the "+New" menu
** wp-admin-bar-new-content is the div id in the menu HTML but we just use new-content 
** see http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_node
*/
 
function admin_bar_add_this(){
     global $wp_admin_bar;
     $newcat=get_site_url( BP_ROOT_BLOG ).'/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category';
     $wp_admin_bar->add_node( array(
          'parent' => 'new-content',
          'title' => 'Category',
          'href' => $newcat) );
     }
add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render','admin_bar_add_this');
?>

Make it Easier for Network Users to Create New Blogs

The BuddyPress dev team has added Notifications and some other BP-specific features to the admin bar, but the link to “Create a new site” is still missing as of v. 1.5.3 (UPDATE: actually, this would be a WP issue, not BP; track this issue here). If you have a very active community, especially one that routinely creates new sites (e.g. a university course blog network), they will notice this absence. To add another complication, BuddyPress redirects wp-signup.php to the network homepage, meaning the default WordPress Network mode method for creating a new site is broken (UPDATE: track this issue here). Luckily both of these are easy to fix.

<?php
/*
** The following adds a link to "Create a new site" under "My Sites" menu
*/
function admin_bar_create_blog_link(){
     global $wp_admin_bar;
     $create=get_site_url( BP_ROOT_BLOG ).'/blogs/create/';
     $wp_admin_bar->add_node( array(
          'parent' => 'my-sites',
          'title' => 'Create a new site',
          'href' => $create) );
}
add_action('wp_before_admin_bar_render','admin_bar_create_blog_link');
 
/*
** The following fixes the dashboard link for "Create a new site"
** By default, WordPress sends the user to wp-signup.php to create a site
** But wp-signup.php is redirected to the network homepage by BuddyPress as of 3.1+ and 1.5.3+ respectively
** This just filters that core behavior to use the BuddyPress link instead
*/
add_filter('wp_signup_location', 'bp_blog_creation_link');
function bp_blog_creation_link($old) {
     if (function_exists('bp_include'))
     return get_site_url( BP_ROOT_BLOG ).'/blogs/create/';
}
?>

Feel free to make additional suggestions in the comments.

I spend a lot of time reading and posting (on Twitter and elsewhere) about the politics of the Internet, particularly issues regarding online speech and the open architecture of the web. I am vocal about my positions on many “offline” political matters as well, and try to back them up with action, but there’s something about advocating for the web that feels more communal, more urgent, and maybe ultimately, more effective. I don’t mean this in the illusory quasi-utopian sense put forward by techno-activists in the early days of the web (not that the days aren’t still early), but rather in the very concrete sense that the web’s history, technology and body of stakeholders are unusually harmonious.

Everyone has something at stake

One important (and practically cliche) characteristic of the Internet, as it has evolved in recent years, is that regular users have increasingly become content producers. They have a real ownership stake in the way the web works and the rules that govern it. Linking, sharing, quoting and remixing are fundamental to the web, but also fraught with legalities (legitimate and otherwise), which is why things like CreativeCommons and EFF have sprung up from within the industry to bring some order and balance to online copyright, while preserving and promoting the existing culture of openness. While citizens in “real life” (or whatever), through years of being beaten down, ignored, and propagandized, may be prone to letting harmful and irrational legislation pass unchallenged, those of us who create content on the web frequently respond to power-grabs, injustices and legislative threats with an immediacy that is uncommon offline. This perhaps reflects the “right now” nature of the network. But I think this immediacy is also related to the fact that many of us understand just how fragile the web actually is (technically, legally and culturally), and how easily it could be fundamentally changed or even destroyed by the rash actions of the ill-informed and/or ill-intentioned.

Internet Enforcers

While there is ample room for debate and disagreement over tactics and ethics, I find in web protests like those of Anonymous or the Reddit-led mobbing of Cook’s Source an undeniably populist and democratic spirit. Many -  notably the music and film industries – have complained that the Internet generation has an outgrown sense of entitlement. There may be some truth to that, especially when it comes to pirated content, but all in all, the web’s “power users” have also displayed a very sharp sense of justice, an affinity for the theater of public relations, and a knack for rapid coordination. Imagine the world we might live in were offline political organizing so fast and effective. (There is, of course, the obvious dynamic of anonymity at play here, which is not to be discounted. But one could argue that is equally the case for any sufficiently large protest, on the web or on the street. Anonymity is what makes the mob a mob, and mobs can be blamed for acts of brutality as readily as they can be credited for acts of liberation.)

“Go web young man!” (groan)

While it’s beyond ridiculous to call the web “the wild west” or the “cyber-frontier” or whatever the hell people say or used to say with that newscaster-y blend of vague understanding and condescending doom, it’s still an apt metaphor (or at least one that’s good enough to indulge for the next few sentences).  The web really has always been about opportunity, possibility,  growth, and a great push into the unknown. As with the westward expansion of 19th century America, the web has seen it’s share of gold rushes (real and hysterical), fortunes made and lost, an array of ever-shifting economies, and an embrace of the classically-liberal capitalist ideal that markets (in the modern case: investors, developers, and users) will decide the natural order of things, distant legislators be damned. (Of course, laissez-faire societies are rife with all forms of collateral damage. Perhaps we should begin to regard the 20th century version of the music industry as the wild buffalo of the digital age.) As the colossus crawls west, possibilities emerge for the young and recede for the old. In this dead horse of a metaphor, the web is both the prairie and the railroad, the developers are the prospectors, and users the settlers (California is basically still California). The danger and the promise are one: only the real frontiersmen know how to get things done out in this wilderness of ones and zeros, and yet our so-called statesmen have failed to even commission themselves a Lewis and Clark (to clarify, I’m talking about this horse shit).

Industry is on our side for once

The web/tech industry is historically rooted in openness and decentralization. Reading up on the history of the Internet and the web (see for example Johnny Ryan’s History of the Internet and the Digital Future or James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), you will see a recurrence of geeks (boy, am I tiring of that word lately) pushing back against authority, circumventing military protocol, skirting institutional bureaucracies, and escaping co-optation. The web and its core of makers have always pushed toward the fluid and open, and against the staid and stable. In many tech companies, one can almost detect a sort of institutional joie de vivre. Not to overstate or even fully accept such an assertion (corporations being profit-oriented legal constructs and not actual moral/emotional beings), but it makes sense in light of the fact that these companies are made up overwhelmingly of people who do what they do for a living because they would otherwise be doing it for free. The industry and it’s constituent parts have a shared interest in keeping the web as open as it was when they walked in the front door, and as fluid as it was when they were first seduced by its possibility.

Old media operates on a culture that could not be more opposed to that of the web, which is why they and their frighteningly-effective lobbyists have been cast (rightly) as enemies of the open web. Where the web fosters openness and decentralization, old media culture is one of centralization, hegemonic control, and hair-trigger litigation. For the most part, this is the culture of corporate America as a whole, but even the giants of the tech industry have a stake in maintaining an open, fair and free Internet. On the most obvious level, legislation like SOPA and PIPA present a very real threat to the existing legal and technical foundations of the web, which is why web and tech companies, joining open web activists, have been waging a very public fight against them, even as politicians and old media outlets struggle (or perhaps refuse) to understand what’s actually being proposed. But perhaps less obvious to some is the longer term threat posed by such heavy-handed intervention. It’s not just that SOPA, PIPA, and the like threaten the web of today (curbing speech while propping up the decrepit media titans of yesteryear), it’s that it threatens the web of tomorrow, and a whole range of innovation and opportunities yet unknown. As such, open web activism has yielded an unlikely common interest that includes citizens of every type, free speech activists, software engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lobbyists, universities and massive multinational corporations.

That’s quite an unusual alliance and frankly if we can’t make progress to protect the web with that constituency, then one has to wonder about the entire premise of representative democracy. But I’m hopeful that progress will be made in the coming years, and while attacks may continue, I don’t think the dynamic described above will change any time soon. As we look down the barrel of yet another absurd and borderline retarded election year, it just feels good to be hopeful about something.

These bills are scheduled to come to a final vote on January 24th, 2012. If you haven’t already (and maybe even if you have), visit americancensorship.org, fightforthefuture.org or EFF.org to learn more about SOPA/PIPA and how you can help stop their passage. I know it’s a drag but you should really consider calling your representatives in Congress. Using a telephone.

It’s worth noting at the outset that I don’t know anything about generating ContentDM export files (partially because even the ContentDM documentation is proprietary, or at least hidden behind a login). But I do know that every time someone has sent me a cDM export file, it is in tab-delimited format (UPDATE: here is the Tab-delimited export documentation), which is basically a plain text spreadsheet. I gather these spreadsheets can be produced pretty easily so I think we can start by assuming you already have the spreadsheet and need to prep it for import into Omeka, which will be done in this tutorial using the CSV Import plugin. If you are not already familiar with how that plugin works, check out the documentation page at Omeka.org before continuing.

You probably need to use Excel

First, open the tab-delimited spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. You will later save this file in CSV format. If you prefer using non-MS spreadsheet software, you are probably out of luck. As far as I know, neither OpenOffice/LibreOffice nor Apple’s Numbers have an equivalent ‘Text-to-Columns…’ functionality, which will be used in this process.

Remove unwanted and problematic rows/columns, Rename column headers

Once you have your spreadsheet open in Excel, go ahead and remove any ContentDM-specific administrative metadata, or anything else you don’t wish to carry over to Omeka during the migration. At this point, you should probably rename the column headings to something meaningful. This will help with the crosswalk step later.

Breaking out semicolon-delimited values

Next, you will want to check for columns having multiple entries within a single cell. At the very least, this will probably include the Subjects column (because archivists/librarians are never satisfied with assigning just one subject term… subject classification being the Lay’s potato chip of librarianship). By default, these multiple subjects will be separated by a semicolon (e.g. “Librarianship — Potato Chip Analogies; Librarianship — Puns; Librarianship — Personality Disorders;” ). Instead of copying each one of these entries into a new Subjects column, you can just use the “Data > Text to Columns…” feature in Excel. I recommend using a separate worksheet for this step as the new columns will overwrite your existing ones if you are not careful.

Getting the File Path URLs

So you’ve shaped up all the metadata on the spreadsheet. Now you need to define the path to the item file in ContentDM. This is probably the trickiest part to come up with on your own, especially if you are not so familiar with ContentDM. Basically, our starting point will be the cDM “Reference URL.” Those look something like this: http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/u?/press,59. Assuming you have a whole column of Reference URLs, you need to run a Find and Replace to create your file path (again, I recommend doing this in a separate worksheet so you don’t accidentally overwrite important data). Let’s begin.

UPDATE: in ContentDM version 6+, ShowFile is replaced by GetFile. Adjust the following instructions as needed (i.e. in the first Find and Replace, swap out showfile.exe with getfile.exe).

Start with something like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/u?/press,59

FIND this:
u?/
… and REPLACE with this:
cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/

Next, FIND this:
,
…and REPLACE with:
&CISOPTR=

So now we have something that looks like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/press&CISOPTR=59

This is a working file path that can be used by the CSV Import plugin to ingest the item file along with the metadata record.

In some instances, you might need to tweak this process. For example, if your ContentDM installation includes JP2 or TIF files (or some other unfriendly image format) but you don’t want the hassle of building a custom display wrapper into your Omeka theme, you can append some additional query string parameters to your file URL.

So if you want ContentDM to serve up a JPG instead of a JP2 (or other…) file, add this to your file column
&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0
…using this Excel function (where A2 is the first column/cell in need of appending):
=CONCATENATE(A2,"&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0")

Finally, you need to swap showfile with getimage in the file URL above by running one more find and replace in Excel.

So now, your file path looks like:
http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cgi-bin/getimage.exe?CISOROOT=/press&CISOPTR=59&DMSCALE=100.00000&DMWIDTH=1600&DMHEIGHT=1600&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&REC=1&DMTHUMB=0&DMROTATE=0

This will return a JPG file, which is pretty handy. These additional parameters will vary by installation and file type. I don’t know what all of the parameters are or even what each one does; only that this usually works. Again, this is a case where actual ContentDM documentation would be really handy. UPDATE: Keep in mind that this only works with image file types. For more details, check out the GetImage documentation.

Metadata Crosswalk

It’s usually a good idea to plan out your metadata crosswalk in advance, especially if you have multiple export files (and you should if your collection is bigger than a few hundred items; more on that later). Remember that Omeka – out of the box – only uses the first 15 Dublin Core elements. You may need to add a new Item Type or install Dublin Core Extended in order to find/create an appropriate home for your legacy/custom metadata in Omeka.

Batching

To avoid server timeouts, you should consider breaking your spreadsheets into manageable batches. I try not to import more than a few hundred items at a time, and even then one of the two servers involved is likely to timeout or throw an error or something. Keeping the batches small makes it easier to isolate problems, avoid import errors, and undo problematic imports.

Using the CSV Import Plugin

From here, just follow the standard instructions for using the CSV Import plugin.

Bugs, Known Issues, and Limitations

As of version 1.3, there are still some quirks. For example, your file path – that hideous long URL you worked so hard to create – will become the actual name of your imported/migrated file. In some instances, your files may be ingested sans file extension (e.g. .pdf, .jpg, .mp3), which can cause various headaches (though it’s worth noting that these files will generally display inline on your site, due to the way most Omeka themes handle media files, and will only break down when someone tries to download the file, in which case they would need to manually add the file extension). From time to time, you could have an import that hangs indefinitely, never finishing and never failing — and thus not easily “undo-able” (at least, the “Undo Import” button will not be visible). In such a case, you can manually create that button by entering the following URL pattern into your address bar:

http://[PATH TO YOUR OMEKA INSTALLATION]/admin/csv-import/index/undo-import/id/[IMPORT ID]

– this is on the plugin documentation page by the way, as are several other points in this tutorial.

One of the biggest limitations of the CSV import strategy is that you will probably have issues migrating compound objects and other multi-file items, primarily because of the way ContentDM formats the export file and serves compound objects online and partially due to limitations in the way the plugin works with Omeka. Basically, you need all the files for an item to be in the same row as all of the other item-level metadata (e.g. in columns like “File 1,” “File 2,” “File 3,” etc). And there is currently no way to use the CSV Import plugin to assign file-level metadata. For example, if you had a postcard in your ContentDM collection and it had distinct metadata for each side (say, for front.jpg and verso.jpg), along with general metadata for the object as whole, something is going to be lost in the migration without some serious elbow grease.

The Omeka Dev forums are the best place to report bugs, inquire about error messages, discuss workarounds, and submit patches. The general Omeka Forums are also great for more basic questions; happily, most questions get answered in fairly short order. Please do not post support questions here. Please do, however, feel free to leave general comments, suggestions for improvement, requests for clarification, etc.

IMAGE NOTE: poorly Photoshopped post image contains assets by multiple artists and designers, including the amazing “Bob” sketch from Matt Haley’s unreleased but totally awesome sounding Twin Peaks: Season 3 graphic novel.

The following is from “Cleveland Stories: True Until Proven Otherwise,” a project of the Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. The concept is by me and the illustrations by Gauri Torgalkar (CUDC).  The complete illustrated videogame concept for Albert Porter’s Revenge is currently on display at Cleveland Institute of Art Reinberger Galleries now available in print, along with other great Cleveland stories. Check it out!

Albert Porter is one of Cleveland’s great folk villains. His legend is writ large, but fuzzy, in the city’s history, cultural consciousness, and built landscape. I’ve met few Clevelanders who recognize the name of Albert Porter; those who do invariably hold him in fuming contempt. For many others, those who’ve never heard his name but know his work, he’s “that guy!” — the long-serving Cuyahoga County Engineer (1943-1976) responsible for carving highway overpasses through working class and ethnic neighborhoods; the one who, though it was approved and paid for by citizens, killed the downtown subway; the one who wanted to tear down the Guardians of Transportation — “monstrosities” in Porter’s view; the one who tried to build a highway through the Shaker Lakes, only to be turned back by a klatch of “little old ladies in white shoes” (at least according to the legend, though the truth is more complicated).

Albert Porter is Cleveland’s Mayor Daley (albeit less effective and far less frequently admired): a Democratic party boss, a presidential candidate, a political force seemingly unstoppable, though not immune to his own hubris. His career spanned the post-war decades so formative in the development of US car culture, the proliferation of regional highways, the rise of suburbs, white flight, the stagnation and decline of once-great industrial cities. Albert Porter is Paul Bunyan, looming over the cityscape. His axe, a bag of cement; his blue ox, a Democratic ass; his unconquered forest, a loosely connected expanse of (sub)urban and industrial nodes.

Albert Porter’s Revenge is a video game concept designed to explore not just the legend of Porter, but also the concepts and the consequences of political power, civil engineering and urban design.

The game’s title, intentionally provocative and playful, is meant to convey Porter’s often-threatening demeanor. It is interpretively fluid and morally ambivalent. “Revenge” for Porter comes in many flavors and depends on each player’s perspective and in-game decisions. For some players, revenge may come as historical redemption for a man who, with few precedents to consult, was tasked with basically inventing an automobile-centric transit system for northeast Ohio. For others, Porter’s revenge may come as vicarious retribution against political opponents and environmental obstructionists, seeing, if they wish, algorithmic proof of “liberal” naiveté. Those who participate in the oral tradition that keeps Porter’s infamy alive will simply enjoy lampooning an opponent who was at once untouchable and famously insecure.

The player takes on the role of Albert Porter and has two primary goals: building and improving the Northeast Ohio highway infrastructure, while staying in power for as long as possible. Underlying each of these goals is a complex system of rules, competing interests, environmental, cultural, and economic variables, and metrics of success and failure. Importantly, the rules of the game, as well as key historical conflicts, emerge organically as the game progresses; in an experience mirroring Porter’s own, there is no tutorial, just a vaguely-defined mission based on economic analyses of a given district or region.

For example, one “level” in the game may be to construct an efficient network of roads connecting the east side Heights to the city core, inner belt and outlying highways. The player is free to do so however they choose, but each action incurs measurable consequences. Should the player build through the parklands of Shaker Heights, city leaders and residents in that historic and politically-connected suburb will revolt, threatening legal action, and carrying out high-profile political protest. Pushing on despite resistance involves varying levels of risk. Each district, suburb, or neighborhood has it’s own profile, including descriptive and demographic information and characteristic metrics based in classic role playing games (e.g. Wealth +5, Stability +6, Historical Significance +8, Political Savvy +10, Biodiversity +3, etc.) which the player must analyze to calculate the odds of his or her own success. While building through the Heights is a political challenge, constructing a turnpike through rural areas, for example, may be a political and economic boon.

Like the various municipal and demographic units throughout the region, Albert Porter himself has a profile consisting of similar status metrics, each of which respond dynamically to player actions. For example, successful completion of a large-scale construction project may result in increases in Labor Support, Campaign Contributions, and Political Clout. Conversely, that same project could bring with it decreases in Legacy and Popular Support, as well as other areas of region-wide concern, such as Environmental Health, Economic Health, Cultural Harmony, and Population Stability.

The consequences of key actions will vary to the degree that they have a known precedent in local history, civil engineering, and demographic studies. These consequences will not only impact the player’s profile, but will also be acted out visually in a number of ways. If a highway overpass is constructed through the center of the Tremont neighborhood, for example, players will see the houses and businesses being seized and demolished via eminent domain, and watch as the population moves centrifugally away from the new structure, while the once-singular place will split into two or more new districts, with adjusted physical, cultural, and economic characteristics.

In instances where the player “stumbles across” specific historical events, they will be treated to interactive infographics and situation profiles, “cut scenes” and “boss battles.” Cut scenes will include cinematic presentation of evocative primary source materials (e.g. local newspaper headlines, archival photographs, TV news footage, etc.) that reinforce the historicity of the event. Likewise, players will be able to interact with various other sources of information, including raw news coverage, highway impact studies, oral history interviews, and brief historic essays. In some cases, players will see computer-generated imagery that combines existing or historical landscapes with their own proposed construction plan (e.g. a freeway running though the Shaker Lakes), addressing “what if?” scenarios.

Boss battles may play out according to the historically-informed script or, if the player has built a strong enough profile for him or herself, they may be able to “defeat history” to carry out plans that the real Albert Porter failed to implement. Such battles might include the Shaker Lakes Freeway Fight (wherein Porter takes on the little old ladies and their high-powered lawyers, racking up “kills” of rare birds and other wildlife along the way), the Guardians of Transportation fight (Porter must smash the art deco sculptures on the Hope Memorial Bridge while fending off bespectacled preservationists led by Bob Hope himself, whose father was one of the stone masons on the initial construction and for whom the bridge was rechristened in the 1980s), and the Downtown Subway fight (Porter must balance, perhaps in a motion-sensing minigame, the competing interests of the public with those of Higbee’s and Halle’s department stores; the stores fought tooth and nail to prevent one another from having a stop on the proposed route, ultimately helping to kill the project altogether).

Depending on how the game is played, each player’s in-game choices will reveal important lessons about history (not just facts but it’s value, meaning, and construction both locally and nationally), displaying the trial and error nature of public policy-making, and engaging complex systems of political power, economics, and urban planning. In the end, players will be left with as many questions as answers, addressing not just the above concerns but also revealing their own values.

What are the connections between urban, suburban, and rural areas and how does that impact our infrastructure priorities and outcomes? Is there an environmentally sound way to build highways and other transit infrastructure? Is it somehow better to build a highway through an impoverished and minority-populated urban district than to build the same through a wealthy suburb? (The game, like history, tells us that it is certainly easier, but the reasons why leave much room for discussion). Was Porter, and by extension the player, the victim of an economic and political ecosystem in which there really were few “right” choices to be made. Or was he (both Porter and the player him or herself) just an asshole? This is not a flippant question. If a skillful and conscientious player can navigate this complex of competing interests and interwoven systems, dutifully constructing highways while minimizing harm, then perhaps we may continue to regard Porter as a great villain of Cleveland lore; if not, perhaps we reevaluate his legacy as one of disastrous but forgivable experimentation.

This essay appears in Cleveland Stories: True Until Proven Otherwise (Urban Infill, Volume 4), Kent State University Press, 2011. — available at Amazon.com

Travel and Registration

First of all, I cannot say how important it is to plan your travel in advance. Not only will you save (your organization) a couple hundred bucks with “early bird” registration, you will also have a decent shot at booking an affordable downtown hotel (or other spot, see below). Airfare is also obviously cheaper – by a truly huge amount, like up to 50% – when booked even a month or two in advance. You can save some more money by arriving in Austin a day or so before the conference begins (The conference began on Friday and I got in at 11:45pm on Wednesday night, saving myself a few bucks on travel that more than zeroed out the extra night’s accommodations; this also gave me a full bonus day to pick up my badge, get to know the city and check in with some local friends). I would advise against renting a car for reasons I will get to later.

Accommodations

As I implied above, downtown hotels get to be scarce and expensive during SxSW (aka “south by” to Austinites). Luckily, my savvy travel companion managed to find alternative accommodations via Air B n’ B, a service that facilitates vacation rentals, usually in the form of apartments, condos, and studio spaces. Guests and hosts each have public profiles and ratings, which helps in making a your choice. We managed to house 4 people comfortably for less than $100 per night total (yep, around $25 per person per night).  The location, about 4 miles from the conference center was pretty good; I imagine rates go up the closer you are to downtown, but from what I can tell, they are still really really affordable (at least in comparison to downtown hotels).

Getting around Austin

As I mentioned, our place was a few miles from downtown, but that never became a problem, even without cars.  Bus service in Austin is excellent from what I saw. Plenty of coverage, regular service throughout the day and late into the night, and an all-day pass only costs $2 (perspective for the bus-averse: an all-day pass in my neighborhood is $4.50). The buses go everywhere you want to be and almost as quickly as driving; there’s even a $1 shuttle to and from the airport.  Cab service is also abundant downtown and by call-ins, though it can be pretty hard to flag down a cab later in the evening, when the streets are flooded with drunk people in need of a ride (I’m told getting a cab to the airport from downtown is also sketchy during SxSW, as some drivers prefer the bulk take of quick and dirty fares, and will turn you down or overcharge; in other words, plan to use the airport shuttle provided by CapMetro if you are leaving before the end of the conference).

I did most of my traveling around Austin via a rented bike (most(?) of the indie bike shops, instead of officially renting, will sell you a bike with a “guaranteed buyback” minus a few bucks a day; I got mine from the nice people at Peddler’s).  The city is pretty bike-friendly, though bike lanes do come and go frequently and inexplicably. In some areas (on my route at least), it was preferable to jump onto the sidewalk, but watch out for the telephone poles, street signs, and fire hydrants, all of which tend to be placed dead center in the middle of the sidewalk. It makes riding a bike on the sidewalk sometimes feel like a cross between downhill slalom and taking a motorcycle license exam. The road is usually fine, but I would recommend against trying to “claim your rights” in the higher traffic areas outside downtown.  In any case, riding a bike is certainly a feasible option if you are up to it and the city seems to be invested in making Austin one of the more bike-friendly cities in the nation.

Even being in less than ideal “winter shape,” riding 8-10 miles per day was not only fairly easy, it was one of the highlights of my trip. The average temperature in Austin in March is somewhere in the high-60s/mid-70s. Coming from colder climes, it was nice to spend some time outdoors, not only for the weather and the exercise, but because it really let me get to know the city intimately and quickly, and prevented me from falling into the state of fuzziness that sometimes comes with extended conference travel.

Food, Entertainment, and Parties

There’s plenty to do in Austin, even without a badge. W. Sixth Street, aka “the Drag,” is really the center of the city’s entertainment district, and is really a big part of SxSW activity.  There are tons of bars, restaurants and clubs on the strip, catering to an array of tastes.  In my view, while it was definitely a fun place to hang out during the conference, I would probably find it a bit too fratty and clubby if I lived in Austin.  Try to explore other areas as much as you can.  There is live music happening all over the city and plenty of off-the-grid weirdness to take in (The Capital building is also kind of cool, but, whatever…).  I spent an afternoon on the other side of the tracks (actually the other side of the freeway overpass), hanging around East 6th, which was a little seedier, a little artier, and a little more punk rock, which suits me fine.  I especially liked the coffee shop that served “moonshine” and the caravan of circled up buses-turned-semi-legal-food-trucks (Cock Sparrer was playing on the lot PA, so you know it’s legit).

So far, I haven’t really mentioned anything specific to SxSW; you could do all of this stuff in Austin any time.  But during the conference, there is definitely more going on, and some of it requires a SxSW badge.  I went to two parties (that I know of) that were sponsored by large tech/media companies.  A badge will not only get you in the door, but might also get you some free drinks and swag.  Without planning on it, I managed to see some pretty good bands for free just by happening upon sponsored parties (Ted Leo/No Age/Thee Oh Sees/Mister Heavenly being my favorite lineup). Sadly, I missed the Comedy Death Ray Radio party, one of many awesome looking comedy events I failed to attend for some reason.

My travel companion was (and is) the founder of a tech startup, so he used the parties for more directed networking, while I just kind of chatted up whoever would talk to me, which turned out to be a lot of people actually.  Locals and conference-goers alike were very friendly and quick with the business cards, which still seems a bit foreign to me, but when in Rome and all that. I handed out more business cards in 6 days than I normally would in 6 months (and, by the way, got some nice comments on the style of my cards, which I designed myself for the first time, hooray for me; one guy even said, “this is the best university business card ever” to which I happily explained how I’d gone rogue on the cards, but I digress into shameless bragging). Although I’m not a particularly outgoing person, there was definitely an air of camaraderie that seemed to make walking up to total strangers seem okay.  It might have been all the free booze.

At the Conference

I’ve heard a lot of people rumbling about how SxSW Interactive has become too big, too commercial, how it has lost some of the intimacy and communal feeling that made it so beloved. I can’t really speak to that since it was my first year, but it seemed fine to me – great in fact. I mean, it was a huge conference with something like 30K attendees (not counting the film and music badge-holders, a demographic orders of magnitude larger). So it probably has lost something in the process of growing so large, but whatever; I’ll leave that conversation to SxSWi veterans. My biggest complaint was that, while most sessions were clustered in or around the Austin Convention Center, a few were held so far out of the way on the other side of town that attending them was not an option.

So what did I learn? It’s really hard to say with any degree of detail. I had some great conversations with some really interesting people. I feel like I got in touch with a community and culture that previously seemed almost hypothetical to me. There were lots of panel discussions and speakers, some of whom I had heard of (like Matt Mullenweg, Christopher Poole (m00t), Jane McGonigal, that SCVNGR guy, Jeffrey Zeldman) and others I had not (like people from W3C, and CSS3 and HTML5 working groups).  The sessions were all pretty interesting and impressive in their own rite. I especially enjoyed the librarian meetup, the sessions on educational gaming, and the various panels about the politics and processes behind HTML/CSS standards-making.

I’m not sure about the exact numbers but there seemed to be between 20-40 sessions per slot, meaning there were always hard choices to be made when working out my schedule. Sometimes I picked right; sometimes I didn’t.

Audio from SxSWi

Lucky for me (and you), anyone can listen to pretty much any of the more prominent panels, sessions, and keynotes by scouring through the massive schedule and clicking through to the detailed view. This is great because now I feel no pressure to actually describe any of the sessions. Just check it out yourself. I’ll be digging though this stuff for months.  I just listened to the excellent (and important) Al Franken talk, which I missed the first time around. I’m not so sure how well some of these will hold up without visuals.  Either way, it’s great to have them available.  Here are a few you might want to check out first.

Al Franken: An Open Internet: The Last, Best Hope for Independent Producers

Jane McGonigal: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better

*Panel: The Politics behind HTML5

*Panel: Drawing Back the Curtains on CSS Implementation

More audio at: http://schedule.sxsw.com/

Though we know information work is highly technical, it seems most library and information science programs are not — even when the faculty are involved in cutting edge technical research.  The programs are relatively short, culminating after just 1-2 years — not much time, especially considering that, unlike most other graduate programs, LIS students are generally starting from scratch with degrees in unrelated fields.  As such, the curriculum is broad but mostly shallow, save for some specialized tracks and doctoral programs. The following is my shortlist of abbreviations and acronyms that I’ve come to view as important to my work in public/digital history, digital humanities, and educational technology.  I don’t work in a library exactly, but I know firsthand that many of these are also important in that setting as well.

API
Application Programming Interface
APIs connect different platforms and programs, most often via established functions and methods.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google and many other web services provide open APIs that allow you to embed, feed, and connect with their services on your own site or application.  Operating systems, content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, dSpace, etc.), game engines, and programming languages (Ruby on Rails, jQuery, etc.) all have APIs that allow programmers to tap into, customize and extend functionality.

• API @ Wikipedia

XML
eXtensible Markup Language
XML is the core of several languages, tool, and protocols used in digital archives, digital humanities, and general web development.  In my experience, it is kind of a bear to work with, but is nonetheless worth investigating as it is the basis of RSS, EAD, and TEI, among others familiar to M.L.I.S.s.

• XML @ Wikipedia
• XSLT @ Wikipedia
• TEI @ Wikipedia
• EAD @ Wikipedia
• RSS @ Wikipedia

JSON
JavaScript Object Notation
JSON is a lightweight, language-independent data interchange format, billed as “The Fat Free Alternative to XML.” I’ve never worked with it, but probably will at some point.

• JSON @ Wikipedia

OOP
Object Oriented Programming
Okay, well, I’m listing OOP here as a placeholder for various programming languages, some of which are not, strictly speaking, object-oriented by definition. The point is that, while I was introduced to HTML and CSS for the first time in an elective grad school workshop, there’s really not that much you can do with those tools alone. Static webpages have limited use these days. Most libraries, archives, and digital humanities projects need someone who understands – or better, can do – programming/scripting on some level. The languages listed below are probably the most commonly used in the field, though as more projects start to involve mobile app development, Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android) will also be in demand.

• OOP @ Wikipedia
• PHP @ Wikipedia
• Javascript @ Wikipedia
• Ruby on Rails @ Wikipedia
• Python @ Wikipedia

LAMP
Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python
Basically, a LAMP server is composed of several open source components, including MySQL for database service, Apache as the HTTP server, and pre-installed “P” programming languages (Perl/PHP/Python) running on some variety of Linux operating system. This LAMP “stack” is the basis of most sites on the web today.

• LAMP @ Wikipedia

SQL
Structured Query Language
SQL, and particularly MySQL, is one of the most common relational database platforms in use on the web today. As part of the open source LAMP stack, it is available on nearly all web servers by default and forms the underlying data structure for most open source content management systems.  In recent years, a variety of alternative platforms have emerged under the banner of NoSQL, sparking some amusing yet mostly incomprehensible (to me) debate.

• SQL @ Wikipedia
• MySQL @ Wikipedia
• PostgreSQL @ Wikipedia
• NoSQL @ Wikipedia

DCMI
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
A metadata schema for describing “physical resources such as books, digital materials such as video, sound, image, or text files, and composite media like web pages.” It is often said that Dublin Core is “capable of describing anything, though not particularly well.” Still, a good place to start.  Like the two metadata standards that follow, it is often used in conjunction with some type of XML. I’m listing just a few here but there are many others one might add to this list.

• DCMI @ Wikipedia

METS
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
Another metadata standard “for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library” using XML.

• METS @ Wikipedia

DACS
Describing Archives: A Content Standards
And another metadata standard “for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections.”

• DACS @ Wikipedia

DMCA
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Understanding copyright legislation is essential for many projects in libraries, archives, education and digital publishing.  I name DMCA here mainly because it’s an abbreviation and thus fits into the scope of this post. It is difficult to imagine a web consisting only of the publisher’s own original content. Today we share, link, quote, and remix content created by others as part of our daily routines. Scholars post research material for students; archivists post manuscripts for researchers; librarians share book reviews; students and other user communities contribute to projects by uploading content. While most institutions have a copyright policy, it’s important that it be kept up to date, both for the organization’s protection, but also for the protection of our collective legal rights. If we take a casual view of copyright, we risk legal action on one end and the forfeiture of our power on the other. A large part of DMCA applies specifically to Digital Rights Management software (DRM) and the legality of circumventing it. Archivists of film, videogames, music and other commonly DRM’ed material obviously have something at stake here.

• DMCA @ Wikipedia
• Copyright @ ALA
• DMCA @ EFF

General Resources

• W3 Schools
• Mozilla School of Web Craft @ P2PU

This list may seem overwhelming.  I wrote it and it overwhelms me, even two years out of grad school. And it’s not even comprehensive. But you have to start somewhere.

My progression from HTML newb only a couple years ago to, well, a newb of several additional, more difficult things, came by way of hacking WordPress.  I’m sure this is quite common. There are plenty of other ways to learn a programming language, but from what I can tell the key factors are always going to be necessity and specificity. If your motivation is to complete a specific project (regardless of languages involved), you will be far more likely to succeed and learn something than if you are simply trying to grasp the language itself in an abstract, academic way. I have a book on Objective C sitting on my shelf, but until I need to complete a real life project with Objective C, I probably won’t get much further than “Hello World!.” Find an actual need to develop these skills and you will probably make some progress. If nothing else, you will discover along the way all the things you don’t know, which is also helpful.

Another important thing to remember is that you will almost never be working from scratch. When you plan out a project, find something to serve as a solid foundation.  It may be a document to use as an example, a description of an existing project, an open source code base, or  some other fundamental element that almost fits your needs perfectly, and then figure out what needs to change to make it your own. As you go deeper and begin to produce your own content, this will seem less like copying and more like learning from and contributing to a community of practice.

Just to be clear, I want to close in defense of my education and alma mater (to which I will always be true or whatever). I was taught of these things (well, some of them), but not in any great detail; something that would be near impossible in the context of a broad-based 1-2 year LIS program.  It’s worth noting that I was in a generic public library track and may have learned more about these issues in a more specialized setting.  I also should clarify that I’m hardly an expert in most if any of these topics and languages; there may be some better resources and explanations out there so please share in the comments and/or via twitter.

What was/has been your experience with your MLIS program?  Did/do you feel prepared for a professional position coming out of grad school?  What would you add to this list?

Deco is a free theme for Omeka. Though I started working on an Omeka theme for use by a more general audience and without any particular motivation beyond having a lame sense of fun, as I got going, I realized it might be really useful for the group of social studies teachers with whom I’ve been working this past week. As part of a grant-funded workshop, the teachers needed to start their own WordPress- and Omeka-based websites (for use in their classrooms). As you might expect, none of the teachers had experience with such things. After an arduous 4 hour workshop in which the group got all of their hosting plans purchased and sites installed and configured, we kind of slowly came to a realization that there was still foundational work to be done. Though Omeka is quite user friendly, it’s still best managed (in a self-hosted environment that is), by users having at least some experience with and understanding of web publishing. (omeka.net is a great hosted alternative by the way, and works much like wordpress.com, but for various reasons was not right for our project). And so the scope of this little side project grew as I tried to anticipate some of the problems novice users might encounter.

For one, Omeka’s publicly available themes sometimes seem lacking when combined with certain plugins. Each of the available themes is quite nice on its own terms and perfect for building out by experienced users (in fact, this theme is built on the very excellent Berlin theme by Jeremy Boggs and Ken Albers), but even for those with a moderate amount of design and coding knowledge, changing things up can be daunting, requiring a lot of time querying the forums, and browsing the documentation. I knew that most of the teachers would be using a set of plugins that require additional styling and code insertion and so I tried to prepare the theme with as much plugin-specific styling and conditional templating I could so that they would not have to fool around too much. The most common needs should hopefully be addressed by the core templates and through the many configurable theme options

This is my first public theme and it’s been quite an experience thinking through all the possible use cases. I think I have accounted for the most common possibilities, but it’s possible something could still come up and present a problem: there could be errors to debug, display problems in older browsers, poorly formed functions, etc.. Thus, I’m calling this version 0.9, just to be safe, but I think it is certainly usable at this point. Nevertheless, the usual “no warranty” caveat applies.

Deco theme for Omeka

Designed for: Omeka Version: 1.3

Browser tested in: Internet Explorer 8+, and current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera

License: GPL

Changelog:

• Dec 06 2010 — v. 0.9: initial release
• Jan 15 2011 — v. 0.9.5: updated for compatibility with Omeka 1.3 and new plugin releases, various bug fixes
• March 06 2011 — v. 0.9.6: added html5/flash video support, improved image gallery on homepage (now uses any featured item that has an image attached, randomized display), started cleaning up ugly code, various bug fixes and layout tweaks
• April 27 2011 — v. 0.9.6.1: added deco_display_rss() function to custom.php, fixed bug in Featured Exhibit function on homepage to detect if Exhibit Builder plugin was installed/activated, minor layout tweaks
• June 26 2011 — v. 0.9.6.2: removed show_untitled_items() function due to incompatibility with Omeka 1.4
• August 30, 2011 — v. 0.9.6.3: fixed minor bug in config.ini that was affecting some users

Unique Features:

• Featured Item slideshow on homepage (jQuery, Awkward Showcase)
• Lightbox effect for images on items/show (jQuery, FancyBox)
• Built in support for HTML 5 Video with Flash fallback (VideoJS, Flowplayer)
• “Edit this Item” button on items/show
• Add an RSS feed anywhere on your site using the deco_display_rss($feedUrl,$num) function (uses Zend RSS, note that using this function may lead to slower load times)
• Configurable theme options
  • stylesheet-switching with 4 designs in the initial version (plus a custom.css option for advanced users)
  • user-defined tagline
  • user-defined “About” text on the homepage
  • user-defined number of recent items to display on the homepage
  • toggle lightbox on items/show
  • toggle slideshow on homepage
  • toggle “Random Featured Collection” on homepage
  • toggle images with “Random Featured Collection” on homepage
  • toggle “Related Exhibits” on items/show
  • toggle theme credits in footer
• Built in support for common plugins
  • MyOmeka (user status in footer, CSS styles)
  • Exhibit Builder (CSS styles)
  • DocsViewer (ideal placement in items/show if user does not choose the default embed on items/show option)

Known Issues and Planned Improvements

• ISSUE: Conflict with Image Annotation plugin breaks the gallery and fancybox scripts.
• PLANNED IMPROVEMENT: Additional stylesheet choices (better, more varied)
• PLANNED IMPROVEMENT: Let users configure or at least turn off HTML5 video options in theme settings.

Download Deco, version 0.9.6.4 [GitHub]

On the About page for this site, I kind of hint at why I chose Jefferson’s Newspaper as the title for this blog, but it’s not a complete answer (and in any case, the About page has been long since moved out of view; it’s really only kept around for the sake of provenance at this point).  The gist of that founding document is this: as I was putting together some ideas for a blog, I happened across an interesting quote by T.J. that stoked my imagination; I decided to buy a corresponding domain name.

Here’s the quote:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

–Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.

As we all know, Thomas Jefferson quotes, like the man himself, are open to interpretation – not only because his true intentions cannot always be easily deciphered but because he is often understood and exploited, not as a flawed human being but as an abstracted symbol, a common hero of opposing teams in an endless game of cultural capture the flag.  Putting aside, though, the question of who owns Thomas Jefferson and that the above quote is part of Jefferson’s larger body of evolving and sometimes-conflicting thought on newspapers and the press, we can easily understand his meaning in this instance.

Our man T.J. was saying in essence,

“Look, we have established this kickin’ new form of government based on the notion that citizens know best what is best for them.  Duh.  The government, being composed of citizens, is arranged to be responsive to citizens and their will — even when their will is patently retarded.  Thus, we need to make sure it’s not or we’ll be in for some shit; one way to accomplish this is to make sure citizens are well-informed through an independent press.  Of course, they will also need to be able to read that stuff, so let’s make sure they get some schooling.  Europe was full of illiterate slobs, but we will have to do better to maintain a democracy.”

Of course, Jefferson wasn’t talking about enlightening or educating everyone.  Not slaves or Native Americans, for sure, but also not most white people (women, the landless, etc).  Nevertheless, it’s a pretty obvious quote, by now a cliche: a strong and well-managed democracy depends upon a well-informed electorate.  Currently, our democracy is neither strong nor well-managed. And our electorate? Well, let’s just say things have been better.

Newspapers appear to have outlasted their influence over the mob in this country (and by mob, I mean morons, though only in this specific case… I actually like mobs of smart people, so don’t go thinking I’m against mobbing it up from time to time) and are barely holding onto any semblance of their former relevance. The “real” news media, now basically consisting (in the mainstream) of TV pundits and demagogues, has, with the help of their parent corporations, slowly eroded any democratic tendencies that remained in mainstream journalism at the beginning of this century (which were arguably few to begin with).  While I suspect that Jefferson and the founders had something else in mind for the press — something more like Amy Goodman (civil, erudite) and much much less like Glenn Beck (clownish, fear-mongering), we can see which actually sells.

So looking at Jefferson’s qualifier in that quote — “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them” — it seems Fox News and the rest actually did take it to heart.  But instead of enlightening up in the Jeffersonian spirit (however limited), they have dumbed down to the point of total illiteracy.  Television is a powerful tool of coercion: not only do you not need to be able to read to consume it’s ideas, you don’t even need to be able to think.

And so we find ourselves amid Jefferson’s unwitting “would you rather” game, actually faced with making a decision of sorts.  The Tea Party (and the media conglomerates that drive the their ill-informed agenda) seems intent on gimping the government in favor of unbridled corporate power.  On the other side, we find a government that is — in too many ways to list — truly broken, and increasingly so due in part to the toxic storm that is our present media landscape.  When faced with the choice between newspapers and democratic government, we know — and Jefferson knew — that there is indeed no choice to be made.  Each depends on the other.  While I am no big fan of either our government or our news media, I believe that both can be reformed and indeed must be.  They are our only hope to push back against undemocratic global capital.  But achieving that means educated people across the spectrum of American society and economy standing up and demanding redress.  Not by marching around shouting slogans (though that has its place) or by claiming sole interpretative authority over 200+ year old writings by brilliant but long dead “founding fathers” (though, again, that can be fun if not frutiful).  Our times are novel and I’m not so sure the specifics of the past fit the present, even when the general ideas do.

So the Tea Party can have Jefferson if they want him that bad.  It makes no difference to me.  Jefferson is not the point, and in fact, despite my affinity for many of his ideas about democracy, I don’t even really like the guy.  Nor do I have much respect for the founding fathers as human beings.  As Ice-T said in some interview that I cannot find right now, “[paraphrase:] Fuck the Constitution. It was written by a bunch of slave owners, so obviously they were all psychopaths.”  But I’m way off topic at this point.

In the interest of providing some perspective and wrapping this up, however inelegantly, I offer a fuller quote from Jefferson’s correspondence with Carrington:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.”

Jefferson wasn’t just talking about newspapers or government.  He was talking about education, citizenship and democracy.  About the abuse of power.  About the curiosity of human culture.  About the power of information.  These are not things I talk about explicitly (for the most part) on this blog, but these are the ideas that inform my outlook and motivations.  So if this blog derives from or coincides with Jefferson and/or newspapers, that’s cool, but I think really it could just as easily be called Chomsky’s iPhone or Bakunin’s Kindle or Debord’s Google Reader Account or or or….

Some Background

When Sonny Bono and company enacted the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the entry of new works into the public domain basically froze. Bono and his powerful backers (Disney, Jack Velenti, and other assorted industry shills) pushed this freeze mainly to protect their own interests (but also to come into line with the EU’s even worse copyright adjustments). Representative Bono, formerly half of the craptastic pop duo, Sonny & Cher, would be able to license his one hit song for the term of his own life (which actually ended shortly before the bill passed) plus 70 years instead of the previous 50, ensuring that his descendants will receive unearned income from Viagra (and perhaps flying car) commercials until at least 2068. That’s a 100 year copyright protection; for a younger (and even crappier) artist like Justin Bieber, think more like 150 years and you hopefully realize how absurd this is. And yet Bono, Disney and Valenti felt even this was not enough, and would have lobbied for infinite copyright protection if they thought they could pass it. Valenti, a real turd if you’ve ever looked at his life’s work of killing artistic freedom, famously proposed a copyright term of “forever less one day.” Imagine a world in which nothing is in the public domain. That’s what they wanted. The perpetual monetization of what is essentially public culture. A disaster for humanities scholarship and production, but also for preserving and forwarding our shared culture in the US and around the world. For most, this doesn’t require much more explanation, but Lawrence Lessig’s recent TEDTalk on “remix culture” is a nice place to continue thinking about it.

So What Does This Have to do with Metropolis?

So, Metropolis. I’ve seen Metropolis (usually in bits and pieces) several times. It’s available on VHS and DVD, streams on YouTube and elsewhere on the web, is screened in galleries and museums; I even saw it used as the visual backdrop to a hip hop show (DJ Spooky circa 2000, who played his set in front of both Metropolis and Society of the Spectacle, among others, as I recall). While I’m not by any means an expert on the film’s history or impact, I can say with some certainty that it is among the most important films ever made, possibly the best loved silent film and one of the first sci-fi stories ever put to celluloid; a simply stunning piece of visual art. Unsurprisingly, it has been referenced, re-mixed and re-interpreted widely over the past 83 years.

Metropolis, while flourishing mainly in marginal “film geek” and “art school” segments of society, is about as ubiquitous as a silent film can be. This ubiquity owes not only to the films quality and lasting appeal, but also to its unbelievable availability. In addition to relatively frequent free and public use, I’ve seen it for sale for about the cost of a postage stamp in at least a dozen different versions (different music, mainly, including one version featuring a terrible Freddie Mercury song) and stores. Like other public domain titles (Metropolis entered the public domain in 1953), it is manufactured and distributed around the world by small companies that put little effort into quality control or maintaining the original artistic vision. With the 2010 release of The Complete Metropolis, which is digitally remastered and includes some lost footage, as well as an updated performance of the original musical score, the film is now getting a definitive treatment by film preservationists.

If we consider Fritz Lang as the author, under the current copyright regime, this film would not have entered the public domain until 2046; if we consider it a corporate authorship (and I’m not sure whether an individual or a studio actually owns a film’s rights, especially one from 1927), that date could be as late as 2071. Luckily, the copyright expired in ’53 under an older but equally confusing regime and was not renewed (a subsequent court challenge to reclaim the film’s copyright failed, despite the fact that the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act restored copyright to many works that might have entered the public domain). So the question is this, in which scenario would this silent film be poised to flourish in a widely anticipated re-release 83 years later: the one in which the film built up a huge following through ubiquitous and varied availability and remix, which also allowed the film to be pieced back together from archival quality prints held around the world? Or the one in which the receivers of a defunct German film company tightly controlled the film, restricting use and distribution, and most likely burying it altogether? My assumption (in my view, quite uncontroversial) is that whomever would have controlled the copyright of the film would not have kept it in print at all, let alone promoted it widely (though admittedly, perhaps the film would have lived on in Germany either way).

What do we have if nobody can get their hands on Metropolis until 2071? Basically, we have an historical artifact. That’s all well and good. I happen to like things called “artifacts,” but I also happen to think of those things as distant and dead (at least when I’m not wearing my history hat). As it turned out, in Metropolis we can see a living culture, a film carrying its influence across the first century of international cinema, a film whose importance and adoration is not so much being asserted with the re-release, but being reinforced and celebrated. There is a continuity that benefits our understanding of film history, of popular culture; it enriches our appreciation of the film and ensures its continued existence far more fairly and organically than any legal right. Paradoxically, if Metropolis were not in the public domain, The Complete Metropolis would not stand a chance of existing, let alone generating a profit. The widespread and generation-spanning love and appreciation of the film came largely out of it’s free-ness, which is why we’re willing to pay for it.

Post Script

I’ve recently entered the tangled web of copyright hell by way of a local history-based documentary film project, in which students and others use archival and oral history assets to construct short films for the web. I’m not talking about serious filmmaking here, but largely amateur/educational creation. We don’t need Donald Duck in our documentaries but we do need access to more footage and images than you can imagine to construct reasonably interesting short films, and most of that material, it turns out, is copyrighted. Sometimes it is held by large corporations (which equals two possible outcomes: “No” or “Pay us your whole budget for this thing we forgot we owned”); other times, it is under the control of the original creator (some who feel their work is too important to ever allow anyone to see or use it); most frustrating, some of it is held in archival collections where conservatively-interpreted pre-digital accession contracts basically ensure that the footage will never again see the light of day (“in-house screening only” both ignores the way research is conducted in the digital age, and also the way content is consumed by the public; neither group is likely to dig through a low-profile archival collection in order to wait hours while library staff finds the film projector that will inevitably be crammed into a 1 person “private viewing station.” And of course, when they leave they will only have some notes and their memories to show for it). These approaches might work to the benefit of the copyright holders and maybe even creators if they were MGM and I were Errol Morris, but they are not and I am not. For most works, particularly those archival items held at small institutions, copyright essentially becomes moot because no one gives a damn, no one knows it exists. But still, we hide it away, we consult our lawyers and our contracts, all parties turn out their empty pockets and walk away, less than satisfied that “at least it’s being preserved.” The question remains, “For who? For what?”

Given that one of my primary occupational roles is providing tech support, I offer the following question in part as preemption in my own self-interest but also in the interest of exploring the scope of instruction in the digital humanities (or the “digital” anything for that matter): Should Your Syllabus Include a Note on Web Browsers? If you teach an online class or a class with a significant online component, the answer might be yes.

Whether you are using BlackBoard, a blog platform, or a “proper” CMS, if your course site is doing anything remotely interesting, one of your students is probably using a browser that is not up to the task.

I get questions all the time about browser-related issues and even when I do instructional sessions and warn against using certain old browsers, the questions still roll in. My first troubleshooting question is invariably “what browser are you using?” If the answer is Internet Explorer, that’s usually the last question, followed by many “informative” statements of (arguably) questionable relevance and utility. If nothing else, my mini-rants leave a student with — if not a full understanding of the problem — at least a sense that the “blue e” on their desktop is called a browser, that it’s used to “open the Internet,” and that there apparently are multiple options from which to choose. For many this is a revelation of no small impact.

While not the higher order stuff we (think we) should need to teach at a college level, understanding browsers can still be an opening to understanding lots of “entry level” issues in new media and web publishing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more all rely on the surprisingly fragile ecosystem created by both the browser and the coder (even when the coder is a giant billion dollar company like Google, who themselves have given up on supporting old browser tech). If you plan to even broach the topic of web development and design, the browser is the natural place to start. Even if you just want your students to be able to use and evaluate web sources and digital projects, using an old browser is going to work against your sanity and their success.

Browsers are also an obvious choice for opening up discussions about open source technologies. Firefox, Chrome/Webkit, and Opera are great examples of a movement by which users have become creators/participants, and technology can — through small but scaled contributions — be bent to our will, rather than the other way around. If you are using Drupal, WordPress, Omeka or some other open source web publishing platform in your class, or if your students use open source desktop software like Audacity or GIMP, this is a natural connection. Open source is the key to so much recent innovation in education, academe and on the web more broadly, that if you don’t think being an open source advocate is part of your job, perhaps you should ask yourself why not.

Savvy students and instructors may intuitively understand that they can improve their online experiences by seeking out new approaches and alternatives when problems and questions arise, and that recency and novelty are actually important in technology, but this is by no means a norm in any non-tech sector of our culture. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you pretty much stick with what you do know — even if it sucks. I recently questioned a colleague for requiring that assignments be “prepared in MS Word”; if the end product is in the right format (.doc in their case), why require a specific software that comes with specific costs and benefits. Let students choose what software to use and note that there actually is a choice to be made (yes, OpenOffice, iWork, GoogleDocs, and more all export into Microsoft formats if desired), instead of hiding a broader question (what software to use) inside of an unnecessarily absolute decree (buy and use Word) that addresses a specific problem (students turning in papers in unreadable formats) but ignores the bigger context. This is not Microsoft hate (I like Office and, surprisingly, even Windows7), but a serious question about how we prepare students for careers that will invariably involve software and hardware choices (if not by them, than for them). So maybe your students won’t be designers, programmers, IT specialists, or whatever, but they will be consumers of technology and perhaps digital creators of another kind. Scholars and writers (not to mention managers, etc) still need to be versed in the basics of technology so they can understand the options at their disposal, the forces that shape their world, and the language with which to convey their needs and ideas (try asking an 80 year old to describe the usability and effectiveness of a piece of software or a website; these are learned skills). Connoisseurship has its utility.

Security is another issue that needs little description here. Basically, keeping your browser, your OS, and all of your other software updated will go a long way in preventing spyware, viruses and generally poor performance.

A “note on browsers” doesn’t directly address all of the issues above, but it’s potentially a start and it probably can’t hurt.

Even if you are not interested in any larger questions about digital literacy or open source advocacy, or it simply does not fall into the purview of your course, you still might want to include some kind of note on browsers, if only to reduce time spent troubleshooting and haggling with tech-averse students. So with that in mind, I offer the following:

Prefab “Note on Browsers”

This course requires extensive use of the Internet, including websites and other online resources that may require the use of a up-to-date, standards-compliant web browser. Web browsers are free to download and may be installed on any computer in a matter of minutes. Acceptable browsers include the most recent versions of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. To ensure that your browser is updated to the most recent version, open your browser and go to Tools >> Options (PC) or Help >> Check for Updates (Mac), or download the latest version of your browser choice at http://www.browserchoice.eu

A randomized list of browser choices:

www.browserchoice.eu
This is actually the same interface that is shown to new computer buyers in the EU, where it was decided that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was anti-competitive and potentially harmful to innovation.

IE6 No More

www.ie6nomore.com
A nice little script you can drop into the header of your site so that users of IE6 and IE7 will get a warning reading “For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser” with links to upgrade to the latest version of IE or download an alternative. Don’t forget to update the code when IE9 comes out in late 2010/early 2011 to be sure your students/users are taking advantage of Microsoft’s promise of greater support for existing and emerging HTML/CSS standards.

Browser-Update.org

www.browser-update.org
I haven’t used this script yet; it looks similar to IE6 No More but apparently checks for outdated versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Billed as an “an initiative by web designers, webmasters and bloggers who want to bring the web further and help their visitors.”

NOTE: The images above are from the very awesome looking Harmonia Pastelis Icon Pack by Teekatas

Following on my previous entry on adding an image Lightbox to Omeka, today I’ll run through the steps it takes to get a featured image gallery running on your Omeka homepage. I searched for awhile to find a gallery plugin that a.) looks good, b.) works well and c.) is not too complicated for me to figure out. Fitting the bill nicely, I found GalleryView, a fairly lightweight jQuery plugin with lots of options for your tweaking enjoyment. It’s a bit more challenging to implement than Lightbox and requires a fair amount of CSS knowledge to prettify, but this should help you get started.

Step One: Download and Install GalleryView (and edit the GalleryView CSS)

Download the GalleryView package and place it in your theme’s /common/ directory. Be sure that you have placed the whole shebang directly inside the /common/ directory and renamed the outer folder galleryview (if you use the default galleryview-2.1.1 name, you’ll need to adjust the scripts below to match). Go into your theme to common/galleryview/galleryview.css and edit the first id, changing it from #photos to #featured-gallery (or something else if you prefer, see below for details).

Step Two: Edit your Header (Scripts and Configurations)

The code below will work as is if you are using the popular Berlin theme, but if not simply replace the word berlin below with the name of your Omeka theme. Be sure the paths below match with where you actually placed your files in the previous step.

*** To save hours of confusion, watch out for typos and try using your browser’s “view source” feature to ensure that your links are reaching their destination.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/berlin/common/galleryview/galleryview.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/berlin/common/galleryview/jquery.galleryview-2.1.1-pack.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/berlin/common/galleryview/jquery.timers-1.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/berlin/common/galleryview/jquery.easing.1.3.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
		jQuery.noConflict();  
		jQuery(document).ready(function(){
		jQuery('#featured-gallery').galleryView({
			panel_width: 425,
			panel_height:430,
			filmstrip_position:'bottom',
			show_captions: true,
			pause_on_hover:true,
			transition_interval:5000,
			nav_theme:'light'
		});
	});
</script>

That final, multi-line script above initializes GalleryView and contains your configurations. You can change them however you like according to the GalleryView documentation, but here I’m setting the dimensions, timing, theme, etc. There are a couple other things worth highlighting here if you are not familiar with JavaScript. First of all, the string containing #featured-gallery is setting up the gallery to run automatically on images displayed in the html div with the id of “featured-gallery” – you can change this to whatever you like, but remember that it needs to match the outer div on your index page in the next step. Also worth noting, the script generally runs on a generic placeholder function called $, but in order to get around the conflict with the Prototype library (which also uses $ as a generic placeholder), I’ve included the jQuery.noConflict() line and replaced $ with jQuery.

Step Three: Edit your Index Page (Looping Items and Calling GalleryView)

The code below uses a custom loop to retrieve the images. As noted, the outer div uses the id “featured-gallery”, as well as a required class, “galleryview” — #featured-gallery is the only id or class that you can change below!

	<h2>Featured Items</h2>
	<div id="featured-gallery" class="galleryview">
	<ul id="gallery">
		< ?php 
		//this loops the 5 most recent featured items
		$items = get_items(array('featured'=>true, 'recent'=>true), 5);
		set_items_for_loop($items);
		while(loop_items()):
		?>
			< ?php $index = 0; ?>
			< ?php while ($file = loop_files_for_item()): ?>
			    < ?php if ($file->hasThumbnail()): ?>
			    <!-- this makes sure the loop grabs only the first image for the item -->
			        < ?php if ($index == 0): ?>
		    	       < ?php echo /*Image URL*/'<li><img src="'.item_file('square thumbnail uri').'"/>'; ?>
		    	    < ?php endif; ?>
			    < ?php endif; ?>
			< ?php endwhile;?>
			< ?php
			echo '<div class="panel-overlay">';
			echo /*Item Title*/'<h3>'.item('Dublin Core', 'Title').'</h3>';
			echo /*Item Description Excerpt*/'<p>'.item('Dublin Core', 'Description',array('snippet'=>175));
			echo /*Link to Item*/ link_to_item(' ...more ').'</p></ul></div>';
			?>
			< ?php endwhile; ?>

I’ve added some comments inline with the code above to describe what it’s doing, so if they make sense to you, you can probably figure out any changes you might need (for example, looping more or fewer images meeting whatever Omeka-friendly criteria you like).

*** I’m using square thumbnails in my loop because they’re easy, but you may need to adjust the max thumbnail size in your Omeka settings to avoid blurry images.

Step Four: Season to Taste

Though the example above works pretty nicely “out of the box” in a two column homepage theme, the GalleryView documentation contains a list of configuration options, so you will probably want to fool around with those, as well as your CSS, to integrate GalleryView properly into your theme’s overall aesthetic. You might also want to customize the loop in Omeka (personally, I’m not a huge fan of the one used above, but haven’t figured out a better one just yet).

Hope this has helped a few folks out there who, like me, are working near the edges of their skill set. As always, feel free to share your comments, questions, suggestions, critiques, etc. I’ll try to keep this updated as needed.

By the way, I’m planning to release a new Omeka theme that incorporates both Lightbox and GalleryView, as well as some other fun stuff, so stay tuned.

Today I think I’ll share a few email excerpts to illustrate some of the more annoying aspects of my job, each of which involves public school district IT Departments acting in ways that are (in my very partial and partially-informed estimation) either a) lazy, b) incompetent, c) draconian or d) all of the above. If I come across as a curmudgeon in the process, it’s because I am. Still, it’s important to note at the outset that I understand the challenges faced by the well-meaning folks charged with managing school (and perhaps also business/enterprise) IT. They do so with many skills I do not come close to possessing and under tremendous pressure to meet legislative and policy directives, but are often lacking in the money, staff, and training required to keep up to date with the demands of acting as local gatekeeper and eternal overlord of the internets. Nevertheless, in my brief experience thus far as a member of the ed. tech community, I have yet to meet a school IT coordinator (in public primary and secondary schools, that is, and not in higher ed where the environment is a bit more competitive) who was what I would call “in touch” with the latest goings-on in education/technology/educational technology. In any case, I hope this comes across as constructive. That is my sole intention, to save the fucking children.

Issue number one: filtering. CIPA basically requires that school districts filter their internet access as a means of protecting children from pornography and other sundry objectionables across this big bad internet. I actually do not generally disagree with this, though I do make some obvious qualifications. For one, filtering should not be any broader than what is actually needed. Unfortunately, this is a tall order. Google Safe Search might provide some indication of how this works and doesn’t. Safe Search is essentially the same kind of filtering algorithm that a school might employ through purchasing a third party application. Try googling “firefighter” with safe search turned off and see what kind of image results you get. Firefighter is a pretty innocuous term and one that a kid is pretty likely to be interested in at some point. But without some kind of filter, even Google cannot avoid returning some questionable material on the first page. But turn safe search turned back on (set to moderate or even strict) and the results are generally more wholesome, right? Actually, no, they’re pretty much the same. Take a look yourself. This is not a jab at Google, just a quick way to point out that algorithms – even the best of them – are not infallible. They make mistakes. So instead of endlessly refining their algorithms, third party filtering apps take a hammer to the web, locking down students’ web experience and blocking content on the broadest of terms in an effort to overcome their own inherent limitations.

Which brings me to my second qualification, that filters should be locally configurable. If a teacher or student needs access to a site that is blocked, there needs to be a mechanism for whitelisting it and/or adjusting the parameters of the filter. This seems not to be the case for many districts. For example, as discussed in the email below, on several occasions lately, I’ve been told by teachers and other education professionals that some of the educational and professional development sites I’ve created and/or maintain for work are actually not accessible by educators in their classrooms or in the school building. One teacher was told by their IT department that it’s because “the site is a blog and blogs are blocked.” Sometimes that is true (the site is a blog), and sometimes not. I’ve never looked into the blackbox that is an internet filter but my assumption is that to determine if a site is a blog (whatever that actually means these days), this school’s filter detected that the site in question used WordPress (we use it a lot as a CMS and for course blogs) and thus came to the conclusion that it =blog and is therefore somehow unsafe or inappropriate for minors. Don”t believe it? Check out this “tutorial” about protecting children from blogs from a filtering software company.

So, anyway, on with the email excerpts.

…By the way, it’s pretty unsatisfactory that a district would block any of our sites. Presumably they do this automatically (i.e. they use 3rd party “child protection” software without retaining any control of their own) by deciphering which platform is being used (WordPress, Omeka, etc.). We’ve had similar issues with the [OMITTED] site. Frankly, I think it’s time that teachers forced their districts to adapt to current web publishing models rather than letting some outdated software make decisions for them. Considering that we use the same kinds of software that the NYTimes and other major sites use, this is clearly an injustice for students and teachers alike (if not for small “publishers” like ourselves) and also gives school IT admins an unearned sense that they’ve done their job. But I digress…

And another (regarding the blocking of a Google Docs data collection tool)…

[OMITTED] may have some responses recorded on paper that she will send me if/when she gets them (one of the teachers had Google blocked in their district for some inexplicable reason so they did them on paper).

That’s right. Google is blocked. The problems with this are so glaringly obvious that I will move on.

On to the next problem, not one that is unique to school IT, but nevertheless a problem at schools and far beyond. Yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to write (part of) a blog post about how I hate Internet Explorer. And yes, particularly the 6th version of it, which I’m required by Internet Law to mention was released about a decade ago. And so on. So… Issue number two: IE6.

The following was to be a public response to a very polite and well-meaning message from a user who, judging by his email address, works in government and academia, informing me that a particular site is broken in IE6. I’ve gotten similar messages for sites we manage that are created both in house and by well-regarded professional designers (i.e. it’s not just my sloppy design). In the end, my response was not posted, owing to the better judgment of a colleague to whom I sent the message first. They decided it was not necessary and, I think, maybe it sounds a little defensive. Nevertheless, I think it’s an important issue and one that should not be taken lightly.

Thanks for the feedback. We get such messages from time to time, so please allow me to explain what we are thinking about this issue, which is somewhat more complicated than it may seem to some folks.

I cannot speak for [OMITTED], but our view [...] is that we can realistically only expect to support modern browsers in our smaller projects. Internet Explorer is not a modern browser, though the latest version (8) has made significant strides and is fully capable of rendering the new site visually and functionally. We serve a message to users of older browsers that they need to upgrade. If they choose not to, they will at least be aware of the source of their frustration. It is ours as well.

We make this compromise for a couple of reasons that I think are well-considered. For one, it is extremely time-consuming to debug for old versions of Internet Explorer and we value lower-cost projects. Second, if we “dumb down” our work to be 100% backwards compatible, we are cheating those visitors who use modern software and want a more modern experience. We cannot provide that service at our usual (very low) cost of publishing. Third, we believe that the time has come to give up on outdated browsers. Google and other major publishers and service providers have already made the decision to drop support for IE6. Microsoft does not even stand behind it’s older software in this regard and has expressed regret that it is still in use.

Finally, we trust that users are fully capable of taking responsibility for their web experience. Browsers are free. They are easy to install. New ones work better, look better, do more and provide greater protection against malware. The best browsers include auto-update features so you never have to worry about getting left behind. We understand that many work environments lock their employees into using the outdated software required to access their older enterprise systems. This is an unfortunate reality but one that we cannot control, trusting that market and research needs, as well as increasingly vocal employee dissatisfaction will take care of this over time. In the meantime, we always design for the latest version of IE, as well as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. This covers the great majority of users, including those that we track on our own analytics.

This is not to say that we do not continually look at this policy. We always appreciate feedback of any kind and if we are shown over time that we have erred in this approach, we will certainly do our best to adapt.

The question to my mind is, do we need to support every piece of hardware and software ever released (a decade is a long time for a piece of software, especially one that is freely replaceable), or should we focus our energies more wisely on following web standards and providing a better experience for users who employ appropriate software. You can’t open an iWork .pages file with Electric Pencil (or so I assume). You can’t play Modern Warfare 2 on an Atari 6400. If a site requires Flash, you either install Flash or you don’t use the site (or wait until you get home and use a laptop instead of your iPhone). I am okay with these limitations. How did Adobe and it’s publisher-users get consumers to agree to the Flash arrangement at a 90+ percent rate of adoption. I don’t know but it wasn’t by creating alternate, crippled, backward compatible versions of every Flash site (though as an iPhone user, sometimes I wish that were the case).

But these are essentially questions for designers and content creators, not for IT professionals. The questions for IT are different. The goal of IT, at schools or elsewhere, is to serve their communities’ needs while maintaining the security of both the users and the broader infrastructure. So why in the hell do many schools insist on continuing to run outdated browsers like IE6? If the answer is that they keep running IE6 because they need it to access other outdated enterprise systems, then they have doubly failed in their mission.

If the transition away from outmoded tech has been neglected due to financial constraints, then I don’t want to see that school running MS Office or BlackBoard or maybe even Windows. If money is that tight, I want to see OpenOffice.org. I want to see Linux Ubuntu. I want to see Moodle (or something better, but equally free). But I have not seen that happening. At a recent ed. tech conference I attended, the same teachers who were locked into shitty IT environments were all atwitter about tablets and clickers and robots and so on. The tech coordinators and district admins I met were most interested in gimmicky proprietary gadgets and LMSs that provide no justifiable value proposition. And meanwhile, the students can’t even access Google? The modern, connected, social web is off limits. The sites that get through are broken and dysfunctional due to outdated hardware and software. Where is the creativity?

I’m not trying to trash anyone, really (especially not an entire profession), but there is a cultural problem that is so readily apparent in how our schools deal with technology that I find it hard to be polite. Ditching IE6 is not going to change that culture, nor is better monitoring of filtering systems, nor new iMacs or clickers, nor anything else you can buy. And this doesn’t even begin to address the question of how/when/if we actually give students real tech instruction and who is qualified to do so. It’s not me. For the most part, at this moment, I’m just an onlooker to this mess. I don’t work in a public school district and I’m not a teacher and I’m not really in IT. I work in a university and deal in the (digital) humanities. I have autonomy (sometimes) and access to money (sometimes) and people that can help me (sometimes). But mostly, I try to be creative, I try to keep up to date, and I try to always be learning something new and useful so I can always be doing something new and useful. Take that for what it’s worth.

By now, everyone has heard about the latest round of FaceBook updates. Without a doubt, some of the changes are really cool and lots of folks will love the way that certain websites will seamlessly adapt their content to suit their tastes and preferences (based on FaceBook profile information). After all, who doesn’t want more relevance on the web? We can also expect just about every major content provider to be adding a “Like” button to their sites within a matter of weeks. I just tested it out on TechCrunch and it is in fact the best social sharing widget I have ever used. On the other hand, as with most FaceBook updates, those concerned with openness and privacy have some legitimate concerns. Rather than paraphrasing what others have already summed up very well, I instead offer a short reading list for those who are interested. Make an informed decision.

• Facebook f8
• Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World (Wired)
• Are Like Buttons Evil? The Open Web Reacts To Facebook’s Not-So-Open Graph (TechCrunch)
• With Open Graph, Facebook Sets Out To Make The Entire Web Its Tributary System (TechCrunch)
• Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy (Mashable)
• Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button (arnab.org)
• How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization (EFF)

As we have seen before, there is always an off chance that FaceBook will adjust their policies in response to outcry from their user base. However, given the current size of their user base and the amount of money FaceBook stands to make from this (in the high krajillions, according to analysts), I really doubt they are losing sleep about a micro-exodus of privacy activists and open web nerds. However unlikely, things can change. So I leave the “Probably” as a qualifier just in case. Also, I have to admit that I am accustomed to the convenience and utility of FaceBook as a way of casually keeping in touch with people you might never hear from or see otherwise. So it’s possible I might just sanitize my profile and stop using FaceBook altogether but keep the account active so I can receive the occasional message from or hunt down (stalk) a casual acquaintance or old friend. Generally speaking though, I think FaceBook as I knew it is over. Knowing what I know, and knowing what they know, I no longer feel comfortable signing into or socializing on the site, and that is not likely to change.

UPDATE:
I took the plunge and deleted my profile for good after letting it sit unused for a couple weeks. Below are a few more of the articles that contributed to that decision, which was made easier still by the fact that I was late to join FaceBook to begin with and always found it kind of annoying and ripe for drama in the same way as MySpace (in fact, after leaving MySpace ahead of the exodus, I tried to get everyone to follow me to Twitter, skipping Facebook altogether, but to no avail). Nevertheless, Facebook did/does have its uses and was occasionally really fun and entertaining. I must admit that leaving it behind leaves me feeling a bit disconnected from some casual friends and acquaintances. The good news is that it looks like a real open alternative may be emerging in a new project called Diaspora*.

• Facebook’s Gone Rogue: It’s Time for an Open Alternative (Epicenter Blog | Wired)
• Facebook and Radical Transparency: a rant (apophenia)
• Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook (NYTimes)

]]> http://jeffersonsnewspaper.org/2010/why-im-probably-deleting-my-facebook-acount/feed/ 2 http://jeffersonsnewspaper.org/2010/unpacking-my-record-collection/ http://jeffersonsnewspaper.org/2010/unpacking-my-record-collection/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:30:52 +0000 James Calder http://jeffersonsnewspaper.org/?p=715 Collecting Records and Walter Benjamin

I recently picked up a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. I was completely struck by the first essay, “Unpacking My Library”, where Benjamin discusses book collecting. And while I myself take pride in my ever growing personal library, I almost immediately began to translate all his references to books as pertaining to record collecting. Not only this, but Benjamin’s words somehow summed up, far more eloquently than my own I might add, why, despite my professional stance that everything should be digitized and widely disseminated, I don’t and never will own an ipod. It made me rethink a few ideas I’ve become accustomed to, things like ownership and physicality, that have become essential to my work as a Digital Humanist. So, I thought I’d share…

Let me start by quoting part of Benjamin’s conclusion,

“…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”.

While this statement would possibly seem insignificant enough to your average person, “ownership” is an extremely weighted word for the Digital Humanist. Putting it simply, Digital Humanists hate ownership. Often, this disdain is directed towards corporations and their claims to proprietary software. This is easy enough, especially with the aggressive (unethical?) business practices of companies like Blackboard. The music industry, with its severely outdated business model, is another common target.  Many Digital Humanists go further though. They challenge their colleagues and institutions, especially universities and museums, to give up traditional rights to scholarship, educational content and primary sources.

However, we can think of ownership from another side. What about an individual’s ownership of something? Now, as I’m pretty sure not all Digital Humanists are total Communists (just kind of), I think most are comfortable with the idea of an individual owning possessions like a house, car, whatever. Its more intellectual property rights, especially of digitized intellectual property, that irk us. Because Digital Humanists have created this distinction, most of us can live in relative peace with the belief that its okay for us to own all sorts of things, but Microsoft needs to stop charging people for software. It works for me at least.

There are some cases, however, where this distinction begins to blur, and I think music is an excellent example. I’m not necessarily talking about the consumption of music here, but the collecting of music. Lets return to Benjamin’s idea of ownership. I’ll throw another quote at you because I genuinely like how he writes:

“Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections [as the Digital Humanist knows very well] … the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it looses is personal owner”

Think about that for a second and let me pose a question: do you own the songs on your ipod? I mean, not legally, that all depends on how you acquired them. But, do you feel ownership of them? Is that Vampire Weekend (or whatever the kids are into these days) mp3 yours? Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t really feel like a song on a copied CD is mine, let alone an mp3 file. Even if some feel that they do in fact own their mp3 files, looking deeper into Benjamin’s essay, I think I can demonstrate why this definition of ownership is inadequate or at least very distinct from the ownership I am trying to describe. Let me explain.

The Thrill of the Hunt

I really miss hunting for records. Don’t get me wrong, I still go to the record store to look for things, but its just not the same when what I’m looking for could just as easily be bought online while I’m watching TV. Especially for the collector of underground music, the joy of finding something you’ve sought for literally years is pretty hard to describe. However, guess who describes it perfectly?

“I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old birth is its rebirth”

In explanation of this rather odd statement, Benjamin explains how, for the collector, the acquisition of an item quite literally fulfills that item’s destiny, which is of course, to become part of your collection. All of that item’s history, from its production, to its past owners, real or imagined, becomes an additional property of the item (think of it like invisible metadata that exists in the collector’s head). Honestly, it sounds dumb, but I have to admit that I’ve shared this extraordinary feeling. Putting all real probabilities aside, it truly seems like destiny when you uncover that record that you’ve been searching for, perhaps for years, in the used bin at some crappy record store you dragged your girlfriend to on vacation. Every crease on the album sleeve, every marking, all the writing, it all stays with you, forever becoming part of a collection that includes but is not limited to the music itself. Basically, it all adds up to much more than the music itself.

Physicality, Ownership and the Digital World

The point of all this nonsense, besides that record collecting is cool, is that while the digital world has not necessarily changed music itself, it has certainly qualitatively changed the collecting of music. Physicality is one aspect of this, as the physical marks on something like a used record can perhaps be used to conjure up a richer history of that item, which, as Benjamin suggests, adds to the many joyful histories contained within in a collection, inseparable but distinct from the music itself. However, I would argue that physicality, while perhaps the most obvious, is not the most important factor. For instance, back in the days of peer to peer file sharing, I certainly felt Benjamin’s “thrill of acquisition” when finding an album after countless unsuccessful searches. I believe the more essential element is that “ownership”, in the Benjamin sense, is directly dependent on a meaningful acquisition. One that produces “profound enchantment” and a literal sense of destiny.

Its interesting for myself, as a Digital Humanist, to consider that part of Benjamin’s “ownership” as defined in his quotation, cites public ownership in direct opposition to this personal ownership that makes collecting so desirable in the first place.  Its easy to see why this is so, if only because widespread availability would necessarily lesson the difficulties and joys of acquisition. Thus, some of my most cherished goals of dissemination and the eradication of the ownership of digital “property” also contribute to the deterioration of a different kind of “ownership”, that of an individual to that personal, intangible, yet very real aspect of his or her collection. In this case, its music. But perhaps the example can be applied elsewhere. When I reflect on all of this, I realize that receiving information of any kind, academic for instance, is not necessarily so different from listening to a record. Its certainly more than just memorization, critical thinking, or other mental processes normally associated with learning. In fact, my “collection” of academic knowledge has been dramatically enriched by everything else that took place while in school, at conferences, or in the archive. From the thrill of putting on those white gloves the first time I handled historic photographs to the memories of my music professor’s leather pants and rants about punk music (“Roots of Rock and Soul”, a legendary class). Of course, I’m not saying Digital Humanists should abandon our, in my view, very essential goals. Its just that, thinking of Walter Benjamin’s library and my record collection, I think its also important to remember the central importance of the process of acquisition, not simply the content acquired.

Recently, I had a conversation about blogging with my partner, who is a Montessori teacher.  Often times as we share a ride home from work, she will discuss some aspect of her work day that leaves me impressed with her knowledge and insight about teaching and child development.  More than once, I have suggested to her that she start a blog to share that knowledge and more than once she has shot down the idea, citing a number of reasons, my favorite of which goes something like “the thought of writing about work when I’m not at work literally makes me sick to my stomach!  Really sick!”  This got me to thinking about why I blog, often about things related to my work, and led me to come up with a typically offhanded formulation about why others do the same.

So what it is that distinguishes myself and others from the non-blogging majority?  I propose three basic prerequisites to blogging: time, community, and hubris.

Time

The first is pretty obvious so I will assume that time does not need much explanation.  Unless you are a professional blogger, you do it in your free time, and most of us don’t have enough of it to spend addressing a largely imaginary audience.

Community

Assuming one has time, I think you still need to feel like you are addressing or contributing to a community, broadly defined.  When I blog, I usually imagine it will be of some use or interest to someone.  Sometimes I know exactly who I am speaking to.  If I write a tutorial about WordPress or Omeka hacks, for example, I know I am speaking to others who, like me, are hacking their way through a particular project, often piecing together information from forums, Google searches, colleagues and friends.  I feel like that is a community (intermediate-level web developers?) of which I am part and whose needs I understand.  I cannot emphasize how important that community has been to my ability to work, and in writing a tutorial I am attempting to carry my weight and give something back.  In some ways, this is a reflection of my own belief in DIY and the punk rock spirit, two other topics (or is that just one topic?) that I’m likely to write about based largely on the idea that they are communities I value and to which I try to contribute.

Hubris

Okay, I know hubris is maybe a strange choice of words, but it got you reading this, right?  And I think it suggests a broad set of characteristics or personality traits that contribute to the “blogging state of mind.”  Twitter and other micro-blogging services typify this impetus in the extreme.  Look at any group of seasoned twitter users and you will see links, links, links, along with a smattering of reviews, smarmy comments, mini-editorials, and self-promotional status updates.  That’s what makes the form annoying/overwhelming for some people, but it’s also the essence of its greatness.  Blogs leave a bit more wiggle room for complexity and nuance, but suggest the same motivation.

Further, it may be no coincidence that librarians and developers love (micro-) blogging.  The fact that I am nominally both, I think, has much to do with why I blog (here, on Twitter, and elsewhere).  As a librarian, I value information and seek to share it with others.  It’s a big part of who I am and if I’m honest with myself I have to admit it’s because I’m kind of a know-it-all.  Most librarians are to varying degrees, though it doesn’t always show because we tend to be a mild bunch.  I like knowing I can find the answers to a wide array of questions and can synthesize them into something vaguely coherent.  It’s very much a desire to be helpful, but it also takes some hubris to assume the position of oracle.

There’s an interesting post over at Full Stop Interactive that describes the Myers-Briggs personality type of hackers and developers in much the same way many have described librarians: an apparently paradoxical mix of utopian ideology and sensible shoes practicality that brings forth the opinionated, the didactic, and the resourceful.  Despite what you think of Jungian psychology, it seems safe to assume that, while MBTI cannot fully classify the wholeness of personality, it seems to be onto something when you look at aggregate career-specific data.  Again, these two groups that often overlap and interact share personality type indicators and common interests that might contribute to their general blogginess.  I would never suggest these are the only two groups that blog, nor the only groupings of personality to succumb to the siren call of the know-it-all culture.  What my blog post presupposes is that those of us who blog share something in common with one another and maybe with one of these groups. With my partner, the non-blogging Montessori teacher, I share many things in common but apparently not the traits that lead to blogging, whatever they may be.

There you have it.  My cockamamy theory about blogging, complete with bloggerific abruptly non-conclusive ending.  What do you think?  Am I onto something?  Have you read or heard anything similar elsewhere?  Or is it total baloney?

Image Credit: made using Big Huge Labs’ Motivator

Yes, I know it’s 2010 (pronounced “twenty-ten”), and I know that nostalgia for the analog age is a 30-something cliche, and I know the cassette has become a sickening node of ironic culture.  But for just a few minutes, I ask you to set aside your pernicious Family Guy-inspired liking for hackneyed 80s references to consider the cassette as it should be understood: as a lost assertion of our basic rights, a technological and social artifact,  and a symbol of friendship, grassroots culture and low-fi audiophilia.
I’m not really going to get deep into the history of the cassette but I think it’s worth noting that tapes “changed everything” as they say.  Music became smaller, more portable, cheaper (actually, freer), more contentious, more ubiquitous, and both more and less intimate.

When considering cassette media, we need to ponder the hardware that was used to play it.  The cassette gave us The Walkman and the “boombox” – two devices that couldn’t be more different.  One, the Walkman, was meant to shut out the world, to bring the music closer, to retire into the imagination and the inner world of musical sensation.  The other, the boombox, or “ghetto blaster”, was meant to bring imagination and musical sensation into the outer world.  The Walkman is an extension of the teenage bedroom, domain of the vinyl LP.  The boombox is an extension of the club, the car, the party, and perhaps the penis – a manifestation of action, performance, and bravado.  Think Radio Raheem when you think boombox.  Whatever you do, do NOT think Lloyd Dobbler, that sappy new romantic who reappropriated his boombox as a two-way Walkman. The boombox was urban, evolving into the “system” – the window-rattling audio menaces one might encounter when stopping your car next to a ’91 Civic with gold spinner rims.  The Walkman was suburban, evolving into the iPod – a tiny, consumer-fetishized personal technological wonder.  Culturally, I think these two very conflicting devices actually worked in tandem to create an atmosphere in which divisions of youth (and sub/counter) culture  became more distinct, more visible, more confrontational and also more accessible – a commodity-identity that could be easily recognized and digested and therefore easily bought and sold.

Still, the cassette was a continuation, as were its followers.  Like a vinyl album, it retained the “flipside.”  This was an essential component of musical media that was not removed until the birth of the CD,  a small (i.e. cassette-like?) disc (i.e. album-like?) media which was capable of high fidelity sound (i.e. album-like?).  The displacement of the CD by the mp3 removed the physicality of all prior formats but combined the reproducibility, portability, and low-fi impermanence of the cassette with the single serving goodness of the 7″ vinyl single/EP.  It was not until fairly recently that mp3 recordings began to match the high fidelity of CDs and vinyl LPs, and even still the mp3 is most often consumed one song at a time (rather than by the album).  The introduction of both the cassette and the mp3 format launched the recording industry into a hissyfit panic that some people might copy content instead of buying it, and both technologies came along right at a time when mainstream record labels were putting out the kind of banal garbage that helped make that true.

But even though the early mp3 resembled earlier formats in some senses, in others it was music/youth culture’s waterloo – the end of an era in which music was an all-powerful, awe-inspiring, cultural force; a refuge that was both in plain sight and deeply underground; equally technical and nebulous.  It signaled the beginning of a new era where music became a capitalist accessory, a component of yet more shallow spectacle, an economic asset used primarily to sell physical and sensory widgets.  Sure, we can look back to the late 1960s and see similarities in the commodification of hippy/beat culture, but nobody was using The Velvet Underground to sell car tires, mainly because ad execs (not to mention the general public) didn’t know who the VU were. (Yes, that linked ad is from 1993 – roughly “the year punk broke” to name another watershed moment – yet it still illustrates the music as advertising appliance approach that has become even more common since the late nineties/early aughts.)  Now, anyone with an internet connection can find, read about, and download that Moss Icon EP I searched for across several months within a matter of seconds.  When a thing becomes too easily accessible, it loses its value.  If diamonds grew on trees, nobody would be interested, except for their industrial value.

Which brings me back to the point of this little rant.  I am deeply sad, forlorn even, that music is meaning less to me these days.  Perhaps it is age, but I think it has even more to do with the ritual, culture, and physicality of the cassette, as contrasted with modern equivalents, which are far more casual, and it is on that theme that I shall continue to opine without further asides.

The mixtape, an icon of 80s and 90s culture, was (and is for some purists still) a deep symbol of friendship and even love, representing a ridiculously large commitment of time and energy.  I have given and received mixtapes that went through so may edits and overdubs that in the quiet between songs you could hear layer upon layer of other songs, some that didn’t fit the mix, some that made the cut but were moved elsewhere in the order, and others that were simply taped over for lack of a new and truly blank cassette.  Labels and covers were almost always handmade, with evidence of their own revision and improvisation.  I once received a mixtape recorded over a factory-issue Best of Chicago album that belonged to my friend’s father.  She just popped the overwrite-protection tab and taped right over “Saturday in the Park”, confirming that all was well in the world.  Unlike the burned CD, a sterile object of disinvestment only Stanley Kubrick could love, a great mixtape was a palimpsest of aural, cultural and emotional information.

Although the dubbed cassette was not as personalized as the mixtape, it could still be deeply personal.  The dubbed cassette was the lo-fi copy you got from your friend who had an album you didn’t own yet, or maybe had never even heard of before. My first dub was Appetite for Destruction (side A) and Eazy Duz It (side B).  The height of my dubbing excess came about a decade later, when I spent roughly a week digging through a new friend’s collection of obscure oi!, streetpunk, and viking rock, dubbing each album and transcribing the songs onto little pieces of notebook paper that I folded into the tape cases to serve as makeshift liner notes.  I honestly cannot imagine listening to any of that music on any other physical format and even though I would have loved to find my own original copies of some of that stuff (for bragging rights), part of me was always okay with just having the scammed copy.  A few years ago, my tape deck (a wood paneled top loader with 4 level sliders on the top) broke for the last time.  I put those tapes, and dozens more, out on the street in my densely populated urban neighborhood, hoping someone would find and cherish them.  Without my noticing, it rained heavily that day, soaking the box, the labels, and the covers.  Nobody, save for the garbage man, ever came for them.  A shameful moment indeed, but instructive.  The dubbed cassette was both a second class citizen and an object of desire and affection, the Sally Hemmings of your record collection.  It represented the inferior but also the exotic.  It was special and prized but also kept to the side,  segregated from your more conventionally desirable items, except for those moments when you were alone, when you traveled, or when you wanted to impress your savvier friends with your more obscure tastes.  In the end, unceremoniously abandoned.

I could go on some more about the importance of the cassette to DIY and punk culture, but I’ll leave that alone.  I could also talk about taping crappy pop songs off the radio so I could lip sync to them in my childhood living room, or how I once faced two single-deck boomboxes at each other in order to make a copy of Licensed to Ill, but I don’t want to spread the schlock too thick here.  Instead of grasping at the sky in agony over my lost passion for music, I’ve decided to reinvest myself in vinyl and try to set aside times to just listen to music – not on my phone, not while I’m walking down the street or in the elevator, but listening to music while I’m… listening to music (okay, I might read a magazine, but an analog one for sure).

As Steve Albini put it back in the day, “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

Note: I “dubbed” the above image from the Internet and photoshopped in what may well be the real title of a real tape I may or may not have made for or received from a friend circa 1989.

Step One: Get the Lightbox Package

The first step is to get the latest LightBox 2 package here, where you will find a quick explanation of how it works and how to get started.

Step Two: Modify and Upload the LightBox Package

Once you have the package, make sure it’s in a folder called “lightbox” and upload it to your Omeka theme directory inside the “common” directory where your header and footer files are located. Take the image files and copy them to your theme’s “images” directory.

Inside common/lightbox/js directory, find the file called “lightbox.js” and set your configurations. This is where you set your lightbox behaviors (overlayOpacity, animate, resizeSpeed, borderSize, etc.) and also where you tell LightBox how to find the images and labels to display Close and Loading. When setting the former, you can fiddle with the defaults to get the style you need, it’s pretty easy to understand. For the latter (image locations), you can use either a relative or a direct URL. If a relative location (e.g. ‘../images/loading.gif’) does not work for you, try using the direct URL (e.g. ‘http://www.yoursite.com/omeka/themes/themename/images/loading.gif’). My impression is that Omeka requires the direct URL for some reason. You could probably leave the images in the “lightbox” directory and point to them there as well.

Step Three: Modify your Omeka Theme Header

Add the script to your theme header (be sure to modify with your actual theme name):

<!-- Start Lightbox includes -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/lightbox.js"></script>
<!-- End Lightbox includes -->

Pretty basic.

Also, you’ll want to either copy the LightBox CSS styles into your theme’s stylesheet or move it to the theme styles directory and link to it in your header. Either way, be sure to double check that your images are properly linked. I find that having the LightBox styles included in a single stylesheet is preferable, but if you want, you can use something like this after moving lightbox.css to your theme directory:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Step Four: Modify Your Omeka Items-Show Page

This is where I got hung up. The site I was working on has multiple file types — not just images, but also audio and video. I was lucky enough to find a starting point on the Omeka Dev Google Group as well as on the Omeka Forums, but the code was written for item pages with a single image file. Since I’m not great with arrays, it took me a while to come up with the imperfect code below.

	<!-- The following returns all of the files associated with an item. -->
	<div id="itemfiles" class="element">
	    <h3>Files</h3>
		<div class="element-text">
		    < ?php 
		    if (item_has_thumbnail()) 
					{
					echo '<p><em>Click the Image for Full Size</em>';
					echo display_files_for_item(array('linkAttributes'=>array('rel'=>'lightbox[group]'))); 
										}
			else
				{
				echo display_files_for_item();
				}
			?>
 
		</div>
 
	</div>

This script will test if the item has a thumbnail (i.e. “is it an image?”). If it does, it will display the files as square thumbnails and give them ‘rel=”lightbox[group]“‘ – clicking on images with the “lightbox” relation in the URL will prompt the light box; if there are two or more images associated with the file, the ‘[group]‘ part will kick in to add the Next and Previous buttons. If the item file is not an image, the script calls the generic Omeka function display_files_for_item(), which will automatically call the media player (for audio and video) if needed.

A pretty easy process when you have it all right in front of you. Hope this will be helpful to someone out there.

NOTE: I’ll continue to update this post with any improvements. If you have a problem, fix, or improvement to share, please add it in the comments or catch me on Twitter (@ebellempire). I’ve also cross-posted this tutorial in the documentation wiki at Omeka.org, so feel free to contribute there as well.

I recently set up an installation of WordPress MultiUser (WPmu) + BuddyPress for the History Department where I work. We have a number of different user groups on the site, including Courses, Workshops, and Projects. Eventually we will also have Personal sites (for students, staff, and faculty in the dept.) and perhaps some small organizations and campus groups. Right now the site is small, so it would be reasonable to manually create and maintain a topical directory. As the site grows, however, this could become a burden to say the least. Nobody likes to do that kind of crap – not even graduate assistants. So with the help of an outdated plug-in and a couple of tiny hacks, I easily created a directory of Blogs by Topic so I never need to hand code the directory. Read on to find out how.

To begin with, I’m using Deanna Schneider’s very handy Blog Topics For WPMU. Basically, Blog Topics creates a field in the relevant Settings, Registration and BuddyPress areas in which your users choose from a drop-down of admin-defined topics. They cannot create new topics, they must use the ones you set, so keep that in mind. The Site Admin can manually set the Topic for any blog at any time; this might be necessary if you already have a handful of blogs on your site (or you could demand that your users do it themselves because this is all about being lazy). Some users might misfile their site in the wrong category, but you can always go in and edit any blog’s Topic; they probably won’t even notice.

You might be wondering why I would write a tutorial for installing a plug-in. Well, I’m not sure if the plug-in code has some deprecated elements or if it just doesn’t play nice with the new BuddyPress theme structure, but it’s actually a bit more complicated than just installing the plug-in. For whatever reason, the documentation for this plug-in is pretty weak and some of it just doesn’t seem to work without some tweaks. That’s where I come in to sum up my hours of frustration with what now seems like an obvious process.

Here’s the drill…

1. Install the plug-in in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it on your parent site. The plug-in comes with a nice little widget for your MU child sites, but it won’t help you here so consider it optional.
2. Inside the wp-content/plugins/blog-topics directory, you will find the file cets_blog_topics_page.php (a WordPress page template). Copy this file to the root of your site’s parent theme file. If you are using BuddyPress 1.1, that means themes/bp-sn-parent.
3. Now, take that file and mess it all up according to the instructions below. Unfortunately, in the plug-in’s current state (v. 0.3.2), the default file just doesn’t work, but after digging around in the code, I found some functions that work quite nicely and can be easily integrated into your BuddyPress directories. Again, you will need to save this to the root of your theme.
4. Create a page called Blog Topics Directory (or whatever) and apply the Blog Topics Page template you just created.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Blog Topics Page
*/
?>
< ?php get_header(); ?>
 
	<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
 
		< ?php do_action( 'bp_before_directory_blogs_content' ) ?>
 
		<div class="page" id="blog-page">
 
			< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
				<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php the_title(); ?></h2>
 
                                <!--using anchors for long lists, or you could use something fancier to browse topics-->
 
					<ul id="topic-list">
					<li><a href="#topic1">Topic 1</a></li>
					<li><a href="#topic2">Topic 2</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic3">Topic 3</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic4">Topic 4</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic5">Topic 5</a></li>	
					</ul>					
 
<!--add the numeric Topic ID according to the models below-->	
 
<!--topic1-->
<a name="topic1"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('1') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('1'); ?>
 
<!--topic2-->
<a name="topic2"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('2') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('2'); ?>
 
<!--topic3-->
<a name="topic3"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('3') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('3'); ?>
 
<!--topic4-->
<a name="topic4"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('4') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('4'); ?>
 
<!--topic5-->
<a name="topic5"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('5') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('5'); ?>
 
 
 
 
			< ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
 
		</div>
 
		< ?php do_action( 'bp_after_directory_blogs_content' ) ?>
 
	</div>
 
< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
< ?php get_footer(); ?>

You could probably find any number of ways to integrate this into your theme’s Blog Directory. Although I might eventually change it, right now, I’ve just added a link to the Blog Directory sidebar which users can… use… to Browse Blogs by Topic. If it helps, here’s a link to the site where this code is being used. Again, it needs some tweaking but this should get you started. Hope this quick fix has helped.

If you’re wondering why this post has a giant image of Brak (among other notable “buddies”) at the top, or if you just need a break from all this BuddyPress nonsense, you might need to listen to this…

Brak sings Yeah Buddy (via brakbuddy.ytmnd.com)

“The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation” – Debord & Wolman, A User’s Guide to Détournement (1956)

I’ve been thinking about the Situationists for about a decade now, after learning of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in some Propagandhi liner notes (I think) about a decade ago.  Sadly, after all that time, I’ve developed no great insights as to what the hell they were talking about.  I mean, I get the gist if that counts for anything, but I think to really grasp what they’re really getting at, one needs a graduate seminar and plenty of contextual knowledge.  Nevertheless, the shit is damn brilliant and informs my worldview in many ways (most of which are surely based on misreading).  Since presently, I do what one might call information work, and as a result have become heavily invested in the web and social networking, I’ll use this post to share some cool films by the Situationist International (SI), and briefly look at how the SI’s  ideas of spectacle, détournement, and separation apply to the social web.

Social networks as commodified existence…

I’ve always felt a certain ambivalence toward the Internet, particularly as it has become the prime mediator of social and professional interaction.  Obviously, we have experienced some real and perceived benefits due to our increasingly rapid adoption of technology (defining “technology” is problematic in many of the same ways as “information,” but let’s put that aside and assume I mean computers and electronics and stuff).  We have increased economic opportunities (for some), more free time (theoretically), greater safety and efficiency, instant production and communication without regard to geography, and access to unbelievable amounts of information.  But we can just as easily indict technology for it’s less benign social, political, and economic effects.  A short list of technology’s less celebrated effects might include: modern global warfare, loss of personal privacy, environmental devastation, and political (as well as social, economic, and cultural) hegemony — all brought to new heights by liberatory (at first glance) technology such as industrial automation; steam, electrical, and combustion power; the telephone; modern media; and any number of innovations in digital computing.  Of course, what we currently colloquially refer to as “technology” — the Internet — is equally hailed in alternation as a force for democracy and a catalyst for democracy’s demise.  Obviously, both are true in their own argumentation, but miss the larger point altogether.

With the relatively recent explosion of Web 2-point-oh!, social networks, etc., we see something notably different than what was experienced with earlier technologies.  Machines, electricity, cars, televisions, and the like, were all transformative and initially liberated in some sense; addressing (and inventing) needs, and conferring legitimacy and status to their early consumers.   In those regards, the Web is not different.  Where it departs from previous innovations is that it goes beyond creating, serving, and reinforcing consumer identity and consumer culture into actually displacing and disappearing the consumer as he exists in reality.  Debord identified this tendency in …the Spectacle as it relates to earlier (1960s) cultural conditions, but it is ripe for application to the 21st century, with it’s ravenous tech fetishism and fascination with identity construction and maintenence through social networks.

As you may have guessed, I recently picked up Society of the Spectacle for some rereading and found that basically the entirety of the first chapter is as effective a deconstruction of 21st c. new media culture as it was of television, films, and advertising in 1967.  Here’s a sample…

1

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

I could continue quoting ad nauseum (actually, you may already be throwing up), but I’ll leave it to the reader to read more if they choose.  In the end, I’m still not sure where I stand on this.  I like the internet.  It’s amusing and often useful.  And as a worker in information and technology, I am actually not alienated from my own work.  More than ever, I have a high degree of control over the products of my labor. While I see the potential harm of these evolving conditions, I mostly see them in the bizarrely onanistic tweets/status updates of others.  I, naturally, am able to rise above the unreality of mediated life — so much so that I’m thinking about purchasing an island timeshare in Second Life to serve as respite for my World of Warcraft guild.  This, of course, would be done as an act of serious-parodic détournement (not to be confused with shallow irony), and thus would not be lame.

Détournement…

So, what is détournement?  A quick but insufficient answer might be found reference to hip hop, web mashups, Marcel Duchamp, or Adbusters. “In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original” (Wikipedia).  A common example (though I’m not sure it was ever actually produced) would be to take the footage of The Birth of a Nation, and replace the text panels of that technical masterpiece with new music or text which would change (or détourne) the original meaning, from an egregiously racist historical lie, to something that crafts from the film’s intellectual content and technical strength an effective (and modern/correct/relevant) moral-political statement.  As Debord & Wolman point out (1956), if such a project merely attempts to negate the meaning through irony, counter-argument or comedic juxtaposition, it misses the opportunity and the point.  The best example I’ve seen, which serves as a better instruction than I can write, is René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks?.

Film: Can Dialectics Break Bricks?: René Viénet, 1973: via U B U W E B

I’m not a great fan of the Debord films, though they do nicely illustrate, literally, the idea of the spectacular as it permeates our collective media life.  As with social networks, academia and high culture, the images Debord détournes in Society of the Spectacle are, individually and collectively, simultaneously useful, beautiful, and inspiring, as well as banal, authoritarian and vacuous. Like all cultural products, their meanings are contextual and constructed and can serve many masters at once.  The same is true of new media products, services, and cultural tendencies.

Film: Society of the Spectacle, parts 1 & 2: Guy Debord, 1973: via U B U W E B

Although new media culture has some very deep differences from traditional media culture working in its favor (openness, decentralization, interactivity), it’s yet to be seen how that will change over time.  Likewise, will the ubiquity of web-mediated social interaction continue on its current trajectory (whatever that might be is actually unclear), or will it evolve into new and unexpected forms?  I’ve got this idea that the (social) web is the perfect vehicle for détournement, though I’m less convinced it’s a worthy venue for cultural resistance.  Any thoughts?

1. The homepage needed to look “homepagey” (i.e. not “bloggy”)
2. Client needed room for a short introductory text, which could be edited/updated on the fly without disrupting the homepage layout
3. The homepage needed to highlight the many features on the site, so that users could quickly scan the page, see what the site had to offer, and quickly find the latest update in each area.

This quick tutorial will share some code for reproducing something that meets all or some of those criteria. You don’t need to know much code to complete this tutorial, but a little helps. Once you create and implement your homepage template, you will need to use CSS to add styles and adjust the layout.

The Basics of Creating a Homepage Template

This is pretty well-documented elsewhere, but here’s what you need to know on the most basic level. If you are using a prefab theme, find that theme’s page.php file. Now take that file and make a copy called homepage.php (or really, whatever you like). Next, add the five lines below to the very top of the page (before the header and sidebar calls):

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>

Now, when you edit or create the page you want to use as Home, you can choose the Home Page template and set it as the static homepage for your site in Settings >> Reading. But this won’t get you far. As is, this template just replicates the behavior of any page on your site. That’s not very exciting. Instead, let’s try adding some dynamic content to the template.

Note on custom theme_excerpt() function used below

Before you get all crazy and just copy-paste from the homepage code below, note that I am using a custom function to generate post excerpts. To use that function you must first create a file called functions.php and add the following code:

< ?php
function theme_excerpt($num) {
	global $more;
	$more = 1;
	$link = get_permalink();
	$limit = $num+1;
	$excerpt = explode(' ', strip_tags(get_the_content()), $limit);
	array_pop($excerpt);
	$excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt).'...';
	$excerpt = preg_replace('`\[[^\]]*\]`','',$excerpt);
	echo '<p>'.$excerpt.'';
	$more = 0;
}
?>

This will get you a more flexible excerpt function than the default WordPress one, the_excerpt(). I think I stole this from the Feed Me Seymour theme. You can call the function with theme_excerpt(n) where n is the number of words in the excerpt.

I’m going to break this up into sections, so if you are copy-pasting, you will need to copy all the sections below or pick and choose carefully, otherwise you might end up with some unclosed tags.

Preserving the Page text
Most of the text in a dynamic homepage is generated from feeds, posts, and database queries (i.e. not by adding it manually to the page called Home in your WordPress page list). In some cases, your Home page could be totally blank when accessed from the default page editor. However, you may want to give yourself the option of manually adding and updating text somewhere on your homepage. In the example below, we keep the WordPress page text intact by calling The Loop.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>
<!-- get the header and sidebar... though sometimes you might want to leave the sidebar out of a Home template.  It's here just for the sake of illustration--> 
< ?php get_header(); ?>
< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
<div id="content">
 
<!-- Homepage text from the page editor using 'The Loop'-->
         < ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<div class="post" id="main-entry"><div id="in-border">
 
			<div class="entry">
				< ?php the_content(); ?>
			</div>
				  < ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
		</div></div>
</div>

An Internal Category Feed
Below we have the latest one post from the ‘News’ category. You can repeat this with other categories as needed. This is especially useful if you use the Category Visibility plug-in or some other means to hide/show certain category posts in certain areas of your site. In a recent project, for example, we created additional page templates for displaying posts in certain categories (Calendar Events, Timeline Events, Lesson Plans), but excluded them from the blog loop.

<!-- An internal feed.-->
<!-- The latest one post from the 'News' category -->
<!-- You can repeat this with other categories as needed.  -->
 
 
<li>
<h2>News</h2>
         < ?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=news&showposts=1'); while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
 
                <!-- Link to the 'News' category -->
    		<div class="post">
    		<div id="link-contain">
                <p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/news">All News &raquo;</a></p>  
                </div>
 
    		<h3>Latest News</h3>
 
                <!-- The post title -->
		<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to < ?php the_title(); ?>">< ?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
			<div class="entry">
                <!-- The post excerpt using custom function from theme/function.php -->		
				< ?php echo theme_excerpt(30); ?> 
			</div>
		</div>
  < ?php endwhile; ?>
</li>

An External Feed
This code uses the WordPress core functionality that brings feeds into your Dashboard. I’m just pulling the title and link here, but you can do more. This is especially useful if your site incorporates another platform besides WordPress. In the example below, I use a feed from the Omeka platform (omeka.org), which I had tucked into my root directory, masquerading as a native section of the site.

<!-- An External Feed  -->
<!-- This is especially useful if your site incorporates another platform besides WordPress.-->
 
<li>
<h2>Collections &amp; Exhibits </h2>
    		<div class="post" id="omeka-feed">
    		<div id="link-contain"><p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/omeka">View the Archive &raquo;</a></p></div>
			<div class="entry">
             <!-- This code uses the WordPress core functionality that brings feeds into your Dashboard-->
             <!-- I'm just pulling the title and link here, but you can do more-->
			< ?php  
			require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');  
			$rss = @fetch_rss('http://www.myurl.org/omeka/items/browse?output=rss2');  
			if ( isset($rss->items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {  
			?>  
			<h3>Latest Additions</h3>
			<ul>  
			< ?php  
			$rss->items = array_slice($rss->items, 0,7);  
			foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {  
 			?>  
			<li> 
			<a href="<?php echo wp_filter_kses($item['link']);?>">
			< ?php echo wp_specialchars($item['title']); ?>  
			</a>  
			</li>  
			< ?php } ?>  
			</ul>  
			< ?php } ?>  
			</div>
 
		</div>
  < ?php endwhile; ?>
</li>

A Special Plugin Feed (Simple:Press)
Lots of plugins generate their own feed. Here we have an internal feed from the Simple:Press forum plugin (simplepressforum.com). Such plug-ins generally use custom functions, such as the one below, the rules for which are defined in the plug-in documentation.

<!-- An internal feed from the Simple:Press forum plugin (simplepressforum.com)-->
<li>
<h2>Discussions</h2>
    		<div class="post" id="forum-posts">
    		<div id="link-contain"><p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/forum">View Forums &raquo;</a></p></div>
			<div class="entry">
			<h3>Latest Topics</h3>
				<ul>
				< ?php sf_recent_posts_tag(3, false, true, true, true, 0, false); ?>
				</ul>
 
			</div>
 
		</div>
 
</li>

Listing all Pages
Normally, you should list all your pages in the header navigation, but in this case I had too many pages to list there, some of which didn’t belong in the navigation. I listed only the pages that were not part of the header navigation or the footer (About, Contact) in this section. You can find more info about wp_list_pages() here.

<!-- List all parent pages and first level of child pages -->
<li>
<h2>More</h2>
 
    	<div class="post" id="more-list">
			<ul>
			<h3>< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2exclude=1,2,3,4,5,6') ;?></h3>
			</ul>
	</div>
</li>

If you are copy-pasting, don’t forget to add the footer to end your page

< ?php get_footer(); ?>

Of course, there are plenty more tricks out there. Frankly, these aren’t that special, but they seem fundamental. If this helps you, let us know in the comments.

Let me clarify a few understandable journalistic mistakes here, since I frequent the liberal terror underground (also known as Ikea).

1.  “Sources indicate that graffiti left under a downtown bridge was put there by G-20 protestors… [video shows graffiti reading "We the People..."]“

That was me.  It actually said “G-20 is a total dick, dude” before we changed our minds and went with an obscure quote from noted Anti-American radical, the US Constitutional Convention.

2.   “A fire at a local park was reportedly started by protestors staying in a tent… [video shows extinguished campfire hole]“

I’m not sure how they figured it out, since I left no apparent evidence, but that was also me.  Camping is one of the most extreme of all seditious acts, and provides a great ambience for toasting vegan s’mores and planning future acts of librul terror.

3.  “A young man, who did not want to be identified, says he’s been told protestors are renting South Side homes…. [video shows a conspicuously disguised hippy-surfer type listlessly exclaiming 'people are gonna die.']”

That was actually me, incognito of course, dressed as “a total duder from Portland.”  I will just say it now, I am an agent provocateur for the Securities and Exchange Commision.  The disguise was chosen by my case agent, who has been watching a lot of John From Cincinnati.

4.  “Sources indicate protestor advance teams have been spotted by police taking video and photographs of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Omni William Penn Hotel, City Hall, County Courthouse, Fort Pitt and Liberty Tunnels… [video shows rapid fire montage of these and other buildings]“

After some extensive investigation, it appears this one was just Japanese tourists.

5.  “Sources indicate highly-organized protestor advance teams are mapping out possible attack points…”

The sources actually differ here, which was not disclosed by the crack team of KDKA investigative journalists.  While some observers report that the Anarchist Black Cross was behind this nefarious “mapping,” key detainees have claimed innocence, insisting they are geocaching enthusiasts caught up in the haze of espionage.  Others still insist that it was actually a roving band of GIS hacks building a geolocation iPod app for the PA Board of Tourism.

6.  The part about “stockpiling human waste.”

That’s totally true, but unrelated.

In all seriousness, our media continues to plumb the depths in pursuit of the ever-growing simpleton demographic.  My special lady fired off a nice letter to KDKA that sums it up nicely. If you are so inclined, you might do the same.

Dear Marty Griffin,

A friend of mine sent me link to your report about protesters at the G20 summit.  I must say that you made your channel and it’s staff look foolish and anti-American.  The tone of the entire piece treated protesters like terrorists.  Peaceful protest is LEGAL and it is a truly American act.  I am very curious as to how rigorous the source and fact checking was on your “feces throwing” accusations.  The graffiti you showed was a quote from the preamble of our constitution yet you treated it as if it came from some terrorist manifesto.  You gave no evidence that what was obviously the remains of a basic camp fire came from radical, pyromaniac agitators.  I am sick and tired of the scare tactics used by so many local news channels both in my hometown of Cleveland and in Pittsburgh.  You show little respect for your audience and appear to take for granted the freedom of speech that keeps you and other more serious journalists in business.

My experimentation with these concepts and methodologies has been occasional up until this year.  I’ve used primary source documents in class before and typically in a constructivist fashion.  Combining web 2.0 would allow students to publish their final products on a public medium.  I decided to start a Myspace page to serve this purpose. I know, I know, Rupert Murdoch has already purchased my soul and sold it to Bernard Madoff who in turn sold it to some Mormons in a bizarre pyramid scandal.  I’d estimate that about 60-70% of my students have Myspace pages and about half of those use Myspace seem to use Myspace as their primary internet activity.  In fact, about two years ago, a community center up the street from the high school had a computer lab where Myspace use was so rampant the center had to make certain times “Myspace free.”  In other words, the site seems extremely popular amongst my student population.  Regardless, I figured Myspace would be an easy way to trick kids into thinking I was playing in their world in hopes of greater participation.  And it worked…. kind of.

We had been studying the Civil Rights movement, and I really wanted students to figure out, using primary sources, how de-centralized the movement was.  I wanted them to grasp how normal folks, including students in high school like them, were moved to courageous action.  Young people are increasingly aware of leaders beyond Martin Luther King Jr. but knowledge of groups like SNCC is sparse.  I wanted to encourage my students to see beyond the master narrative of “I have a dream” speeches to understand just how involved folks their age were in this push for freedom.

Students were divided up into groups of three to four and given six front pages from 1957 editions of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.  They had to use articles from these newspaper front pages to write a three paragraph blog entry on the Little Rock Nine and post it alongside their peers’ on my Myspace page. The results were an interesting mix from fairly terrible to pretty interesting.  None were shockingly brilliant, however.  This is not surprising though.  My guess is that few, if any, history teachers in these students’ classrooms have encouraged them to look at primary documents, decode them, and then “publish” a written recreation of their contents.  Take a look at your old college essay on the Vietnam before you’re too critical of these kids.

Nonetheless, there were some apparent obstacles that need to be considered for future activities of a similar nature.  First, the use of the articles as not just primary sources but the only sources they could use proved difficult and problematic at times.  Some groups really struggled to put together a coherent narrative beyond essentially cutting and pasting interesting facts from the newspaper.  Some failed to even do this chronologically.  One group stated, “After 8 Africans [sic] entered the school across the street. They tried to call other students to join them but they were pushed back by guards.”  This was after they already mentioned the students entering the building and members of the 101^st helping them.  While this might be intellectual Viagra for a few choice grad students looking to deconstruct the Western obsession with chronology as history, any educator would see it for what it is: an inability to properly read the articles together rather than as separate documents.

Additionally, several groups included sentences like, “As six negros tried to enter NLR high white students pushed them back because they did not want them at there school.” Frustrating grammar and spelling errors aside, I’m hoping you noticed the antiquated term “negro” in that depiction of the Little Rock Nine.  Seeing as how the kids in this group are all Puerto Rican and not rednecks, they were clearly just adopting the language of the 1957 Arkansas Gazette journalists.  While most groups did not make this mistake, it’s clear that more work needs to be done on the interpretation side of using primary sources.  Thinking historically does not necessitate using outdated language.

Another component that troubled me was the discussion of violence within the narratives.  Clearly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the Little Rock Nine case is aware of the intense mob violence that accompanied the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.  Some students failed to grasp the level of violence through these primary sources though.  “That caused a big chaos because at lest 100 parents of the students and other adults lined up on the side walk in front of the high school an hour before classes recessed for the noon hours.” [sic] There is no mention as to what these students and parents did once they lined up in front of the school and this is where the blog entry abruptly ends.  Lacking detail is to be expected, to a degree, in an assignment like this, but this clearly lacked understanding.  Did this group really go away thinking this racist family picnic mob was there to simply “be heard?”

The issue of responsibility also arose in the blog entries.  One group placed the white riots squarely on the Little Rock Nine’s boldness. “Due to court orders Faubus removed the National guard. After they were removed, the African Americans tried to enter the school causing the white young students to form a riot.” [sic]  Perhaps this is splitting hairs, but there is no discussion of white racism being the source of these riots in this entry.  I doubt the group of students, a racial mixture of whites, Puerto Ricans, and Arabs, meant for it to read this way.  The difficulty comes into getting students to grasp that how they phrase things is perhaps more important than what their intentions are.  This is an integral part of thinking and being able to write historically.  When others read your interpretation of the past they do so with their own understanding, not yours.  Getting students to convey their analysis of something as complex as the Little Rock Nine case is difficult but they should be encouraged to do so as clearly and thoroughly as possible.

One group attempted to retell the tale through the modern civil rights narrative which goes something like: “Black Americans worked hard to be recognized for their contributions and are now allowed the same opportunities as whites today.”  It’d be interesting to see if this was sparked by group members comparing their experiences today to that of the Little Rock Nine but alas, this was not the assignment.  The group concluded that “the students were allowed to go to the school with problems but at the same time they wre getting an oportuinty in life because some people dream of an opportunity while orthers wake up and work hard for it,” [sic].  I read this as an attempt to fit African-Americans into the American ethos of “hard work = success”, which is essentially what many watered down versions of the Civil Rights movement have become.  This view lacks a historical understanding of the barriers of white supremacy and the struggles of grassroots organizing.

Clearly there is much work to be done here.  Students need to engage and investigate primary sources much earlier on in order to be more comfortable and familiar with interpreting them.  Perhaps they also need a little more scaffolding to get to the point where they can take on similarly styled projects.  Nonetheless, the students did work with primary sources and did produce a piece of historical work on the topic.  Like getting President Obama to publicly condemn Cambridge police officers for acting “stupidly,” it’s a relatively small victory but an important one.  In doing so the participating students gained a greater understanding of the importance of historical interpretation, grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement, and their role in deciding what matters from the past.

BackStory:  BackStory is one of my favorite podcasts in any genre.  “On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths.”  In addition to the hosts’ impressive knowledge, the show has NPR quality production values and a great sense of humor and relevance. The show is a product of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who produce a couple other shows (which I’ve yet to hear) through their VFH Radio project.

StuffYouMissedInHistoryClass: This one is produced by HowStuffWorks.com, which initially made me a bit skeptical.  I was quickly won over though.  Historians Candace Gibson and Jane McGrath investigate “the stories behind the lines of your textbooks.”  The topics range from esoteric (e.g. the history of happiness) to  topical (“Historically inaccurate movies”) to explanations (“How the Marshall Plan worked”) and conversations appropriate for younger students (“Did Betsy Ross really make the first American Flag?”).

BingeThinkingHistory:  While the previous two podcasts are conversational and focus on American history, this project – a one man show by Tony Cocks -  is oriented toward British and European history.  Since I know very little about European history, I am both intrigued and confounded by the subject matter.   Luckily the host has a dignified English voice and a knack for telling history in a narrative, documentary style that makes good use of music and background audio (e.g. the sounds of battlefield artillery).  So I like it, even though I don’t really know what he’s talking about.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a wide selection of “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history”, which they release as audio podcasts.  My first impression of the project site was that this would be a stuffy, old-school academic series wherein pokey old coots discussed their own greatness by way of displaying their mad lecture skillz.  I also thought it would cater primarily to college students and other academics.  In fact, there are some really interesting and informative lectures here, and it serves as a really great resource for pretty much any group above maybe middle school.  I noticed a handful of  high school teacher comments on the project site, reminding me that some teachers actually challenge their students to do real historical thinking.  Imagine that.

HistoryPodcast/HistoryOnAir … “Jason Watts is the host of History Podcast and an amateur historian. It should be noted that he is not a professional.”  That’s what it says on the site, but ignore that (or sit and quietly appreciate it).  Jason does a good job of documenting his sources and telling historical stories, and has been doing it since 2005.  This is actually a nice little operation, and it looks like Jason is beginning to use video and visualization tools so this is one to watch.  Users can submit topics, ideas, and even scripts for new episodes.  Also of note is the provision of transcripts and citations for each episode, which is handy for students who might want to explore a topic in more detail.  There’s also a big list of additional podcasts you might want to check out.

So there’s a brief list.  I actually have a backlog of additional podcasts in my iTunes library that I haven’t had time to review, so I may add more to this post or continue the topic in a new post as I find more quality podcasts.   Please use the comments section to suggest some others you like.

Like any zealot, I spend weekends, evenings, social engagements, and holidays ranting about the things that really get on my nerves.  Today, July 4th, a day commemorating the birth of our glorious nation, I spent the early afternoon orating on the relative merits of the LMS in hopes of fomenting revolution.  I am currently taking an Information Architecture course, ironically offered only through BlackBoard, the arch-nemesis of all that is righteous and enlightened in higher education, a blithely tyrannical George III to Web 2.0′s promise of digital democracy, a naval blockade on usability and information seeking behavior, an unjust tax levied on the collective sanity of the student body.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, you say?  Well, what did you do to celebrate America today? Eat some hotdogs?  Listen to some Lee Greenwood tunes?  I think it’s clear who the real patriot is.  Hit the break for the full thread.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the neutral, and the obsequiously monarchical.

Click on the image for the full size view or scroll down for the transcript…

Click image for full size view

1. ME: Can we discuss the IA of Blackboard?  I’m not trying to complain.  I understand why it is useful for instructors, but it is pretty rough on student users (poor organization, poor labeling, poor navigation, seemingly no interest in student information needs/behaviors, etc.).   I think it might actually be an interesting case study.  Then again, I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Groom lately
2. STUDENT:I couldn’t agree with you more. Clunky and awkward at best isn’t it?
3. STUDENT:I agree, it could use a little better organization. Sometimes there are 2 left-hand navigation menus, that’s unusual.
4. STUDENT: Very good observation, because I was thinking about that when I first used the site. So context is covered, and content is covered, but it could be more USER friendly. This site is built for knot-item seeking. Once you learn the system, you can get to where you need to be and use the system.
5. INSTRUCTOR: It’s interesting to see what both student and faculty users have to say about Blackboard. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is thrilled with it. Here are a couple of items that might shed some light on why Blackboard is designed and arranged the way it is:1) The students don’t get to see this, but there are actually three sets of users who can interface with Blackboard: Course Designers, Instructors and Students. Depending upon roles to which you’ve been designated, there are three different “tabs” one could access: Build, Teach, and Student. Students don’t see these tabs because they only have one role — Student. All three roles/tabs have access to the same “Course Tools” (the first set of left-hand navigational choices). However, the next set of tools change depending upon the roles to which you have access. If you access the class as a designer, the bottom navigation is labeled “Designer Tools” and has a set of links unique to that role, if as an instructor, then “Instructor Tools”, if as a student then I believe it’s “My Tools.” Without knowing about the different roles, I can see how two, separate sets of global navigation would make no sense.2) Another part of Blackboard I think most users struggle with is the idea that the Course Tools don’t offer much other than a *completely* different way to access the content than offered through the Course Content home page. In building a class, the designer chooses the tools on the left, builds the assets, and then sets links to these assets in other places. Learning modules are sets of topical, sequential links to assets created using the other tools. Sound counter-intuitive? It is if you approach the course design and layout with a web/hyperlink mentality. And there’s the problem. This is elearning. We use the internet to access the training and we, as users, expect it to follow modicums similar to that of sites on the World Wide Web. And this is a fair expectation. However, Blackboard is instead arranged to give users access to the same material in a number of different ways, which is a good idea but read on.So based upon what we’ve been reading, why might users get frustrated with Blackboard. The first one is that even though it is a good idea to offer multiple roads to the same content, there is *no predominate organizational scheme*. Should I primarily use the global tools on the left because they never change? Should I navigate the course like a web site simply from the Course Content page? What is the main road? What if I’m serendipitous? How lost and confused could I become? Also the labels, while familiar, English words, may not be self-evident in their meaning. What is a “Learning module?” Where will that take me? I imagine that assignments will be part of the course content, but I’ve got this other button labeled “Course Content”, why should I choose one over the other?The good news is that the next iteration of Blackboard is seeking to address a number of these issues. Which is a good thing considering over 70% of all universities in the United States use Blackboard as their learning management system.
6. ME: There are many reasons why BlackBoard works for instructors and those listed are all relevant. I have designed courses, modules, and quizzes, and tracked student submissions, etc. in BlackBoard during my time as a graduate assistant for a professor who taught some “elearning” type courses.Aside from automating some administrative tasks (gradebooks, adding/tracking users, etc), I don’t see anything in BBs repertoire that justifies it’s poor usabiity and it’s high subscription cost to universities. For something so costly, you would think they would have invested in some user studies and maybe a post-1998 design upgrade. As far as I can tell, 95% of BBs functionality could be duplicated in WordPress (with a few plug-ins and maybe some creative use of GoogleDocs) or some other free/open source system. Of course, the university would have to support this with staff (maybe one guy and a server) and some minimal training for admins (probably less than what it takes to learn BB) and they would come out ahead over time (if not monetarily, then in staff development). Likewise, I’m not sure any LMS can devise a “learning environment” that suits real learning needs when they necessarily design around the generic admin/user. Plus, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are actually more engaged and interactive when they know they are working in the “open web” and not inside the BlackBoard blackbox.So I clearly have issues with BB that go beyond IA, but considering that I’m typing right now in a very tiny text box (maybe 80px high) with a broken editor (at least, using Firefox) inside a pop-up window, dreading the occasional BB-induced browser crash, etc.; the poor design just amplifies all the other issues I have with this system.I work in part as an educational technologist for the History Dept. (or at least for a few courses and workshops), so I know how hard it is to support unique projects and design around technological deficits (in software, user/admin ability, etc.), but I think we can do better than this.And again, I am not directing this at CSU (where I happily work) or the professor (who has limited, if any, choices when it comes to online course platforms). For anyone who is interested in exploring this topic, you can find some good debates online, many of which center around this guy:Jim Groom, Ed-Tech at Univ of Mary Washington, and inventor of “edupunk” movement. See his blog (http://bavatuesdays.com/) as well as interviews and stories in NYT and Chronicle of Higher Ed, among others. He of course is not the only person to voice dissatisfaction with BB, but he is by far the most visible.Sorry if I got carried away on this little side-topic, but I have seen many bright young minds crack under the weight of BlackBoard Happy 4th!

Yes, that’s true.  I even got a Master’s Degree.  Now, I like history and other humanities for lots of reasons, not just because they’re sometimes kind of metal, but I figured that with my first post on this site I’d return to my roots and original reasons for liking history.

Strangely enough, this post will sort of fit in thematically with some of my others that are in the works in that one of my goals for this site is to highlight artists that I find interesting, under appreciated or just plain awesome.  So, get ready for some awesome medieval and Renaissance artworks.

Also, just to be clear, by metal I mean like fucking metal man.  Like with guitars and stuff.  Got me?

Gustave Dore

Gustave Dore is really metal (he’s also from the 19th century, so, not medieval at all really.  still super metal though).  I can appreciate the intricacies of Gustave Dore‘s etchings on a purely artistic level.  However, I can appreciate them much more on a purely metal level.  I’d say his interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is my favorite.  For instance, Dore’s depiction for Canto XXVII shows the “Sowers of Dischord”, poor damned souls that they are, ripping themselves apart as their innards spew out.

Even his work on the Bible is pretty metal.  This really brings the up the question, unanswered by many except for maybe Zao, as to why is it that the Bible and Christian imagery in general is so metal?

I guess my first answer would be that both share a strange preoccupation with the Devil.  In fact, looking at Dore’s work on the Divine Comedy its interesting to note that the majority of his etchings deal with the Inferno, as opposed to Purgatory or Paradise.  I think this has much to do with the fact that hell, being what it is, would be the easiest to represent visually.  Theologically speaking (if I were a medieval Catholic, or I guess the 19th century Dore too), evil/hell/satan could all be represented visually because evil/hell/satan were all tied to a notion of physicality, just like the human body (which was also treated with mistrust).  The mind or spirit (like Paradise or God), on the other hand, were more ephemeral and, specifically, they were decidedly non-physical.  This is all due to some big theological debates that led to a body/spirit = evil/good stance by the Catholic church.  In any event, this theology would make it easier to picture or create an image of a monstrous horned demon than something of the “divine realm”.  Before I get on some crazy tangent about dualism (boy could tell you some tales about the Cathar heresy) or even iconography, lets see what all this has to do with metal.

First off, I honestly have no real idea, but lets just muse for a second.  I guess I’d say that metal, being really serious rock music, is concerned, as all great rock n roll is, with the human body and all of its more natural yet frowned upon needs and wants.  By this I guess I mean drugs, sex, moving around a lot in an aggressive yet not necessarily coordinated manner, and loud noise.  Given this, metal’s choice of Christian imagery is actually a pretty appropriate way, in my opinion, to enter such a debate.  If satan=body, that makes him a pretty obvious rock n roll choice.  I mean, why attack the 70s, 80s or 90s establishment when you can attack the historical root- the ancient and medieval church.  I mean, they’re the one’s that started all this anti-body, anti-sex, anti-cheap fun riff raff to begin with right?

As a side note, isn’t it kind of weird that a society would set itself up where its easy to visualize pure evil, but pure good is, by definition, not visually accessible?  Just sayin’.

Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch (yes, I had to copy and paste his name) is probably the most metal of all medieval artists.  Yes, he is in fact from the medieval period, albeit kind of late.  Again, I’ll just flat out admit that I have no idea what his paintings are supposed to mean exactly.  You would really think he was on drugs, although I’m guessing that he actually wasn’t, being the good Catholic that he was.  But man, there’s all sorts of flying fishes, flowers coming out of people’s asses, a demon that’s literally shitting people into a hole.  Its very intense and very metal.

Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, similar to Bosch in many ways, should also be mentioned here, although many of his most metal works are both very similar and of lesser quality than Bosch’s.  The Triumph of Death is an exception to the last statement.  I will also say that his depiction of the Tower of Babel (a copy hangs in my study) is quite epic, which is another aspect of metal.  Epicness (?) is really important to metal, as it was to people during the medieval period.  It’s important to lots of people though, but it seems to me the further back in time you go, the more epic the stories are.  Maybe that’s another reason for the Christian imagery.  I mean, depending on who you talk to, the Bible is and is not many things.  I would say, however, that few could deny that the Bible is quite epic.

Caravaggio

Caravaggio was also pretty metal, although he’s more Renaissance than medieval.  Also, a lot of his paintings aren’t that metal, to tell you the truth.  I’ll give him credit for the Medusa head (Greek mythology is also kind of metal), as well as the possibility that he murdered someone.  I don’t know, I’m not in love with the guy, but I’d feel bad leaving him off the list.

The Black Death

One of the most metal topics in medieval art was the Black Death, Bubonic Plague, the Plague (all great metal band names btw).  Its just a metal topic, I don’t know.  It’s so metal its even kind of hard to explain.  Hope you’ll enjoy a few examples.

The Point?

Obviously, there’s really no point to this article, I just thought it would be fun.  If anything, I hope to turn people on to some great artists, especially Dore, Bosch and Bruegel because while each is totally famous, sometimes I think that they don’t get enough exposure, especially to certain audiences.  Also, its an interesting historiographical framework.  I mean, we (historians) have imposed plenty of other subjectively constructed frameworks on the past (nation state, progress narrative, anything really- just read Hayden White, you’ll see what I mean), why not do something more fun.  If not metal, how about Radical History as in like surfer radical, not politically radical.  Think about it, it could be kind of postmodern or at the very least historical events would be connected only in the most nontraditional fashion.  For example:

1965- Snowboards are invented- way radical.

1993- Bill Clinton, who loved weed and saxophones became president- totally radical.

1994- My friend Doug ate 6 burritos in one sitting- most radical.

See what I mean?

I must also admit that this article had absolutely nothing to do with Digital anything, and for that I’m sorry.  I have no problem if anyone wants to make a mash-up of Gustave Dore’s artwork to metal music.  Maybe his interpretation of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner with Iron Maiden’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner?   Just a thought.

Next time: I much more serious article on d.a.levy and new media.

Related Reading: Wikipedia: Dualism (sorry for all the wikipedia links by the way, i promise better research next time)