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Spring 2002

This evening, we'll try out the Java Script demonstration to get a taste of these tools. Complete directions for using Dreamweaver's Java Script capabilities can be found in Tower starting on page 405. You can read specifically about rollovers and image swaps on page 426. (5/1/02)

In answer to our inquiries about the problems some of you had with making your forms work last week, Andy Manteuffel, the campus CGI programmer, wrote the following:

I took a look and if you remove this bit of code from the form tag, your form should work just fine:

enctype="multipart/form-data"

This bit of code is apparently doing something to the data that is confusing the cgi.

Hope this helps,
Andy (5/1/02)

This evening, we'll workshop the Client Projects using the Visiting Day format we used for the last project. (4/24/02)

Tonight, we'll continue work on the last two assignments:

The Client Project
The Analytical Essay (the "Reading Digital Culture" project) (4/24/02)

By Monday, April 29, by 6 p.m., please post a BETA version of your Client Project to your "www" folder and post the URL to the discussion area of the Discussion Board titled, "URLs of Client Projects." Then, on Wednesday, May 1, we'll workshop the Client Projects using the Visiting Day format we used for the last project. (4/24/02)

This evening, we'll be learning about creating forms in Dreamweaver. Here are some items we'll use:

my sample form, a survey for this class.
UMD's directions for using "Generic Mail CGI," which is the "forms handler" we have available on the university server.
The Tower book's section on forms, which begins on page 377 (4/24/02)

Journal Entry #13. Audiences for your client's site.

First, take a look at the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival Web site. How many different audiences are being addressed and appealed to on the front page, and with the various links and pages?

In your journal, list the some audiences you might expect at your client's site, and the scenarios by which these audiences might find their ways to the site. What are their different values, tastes, needs and purposes? From your analysis of these audiences, begin to think about site design: map the pages and links of your client project. What verbal labels for the links would appeal to these audiences and be understandable to them? Think about page design: what are some recurring elements, designs, layouts, images, words you'll use throughout to unify the pages?

Journal Entry # 12.

Visit the weather.com site
Make a cluster on the three topic questions that comprise the analytical essay: 1) body vs virtuality 2) traditional vs. virtual community/identity 3) information vs. experience, knowledge
look for connections and dynamics and write notes on the cluster.
look back at the critics in Trend for some critical ideas
Make an entry each in the areas on the discussion board (4/17)

Journal Entry # 13 Kroker and Weinstein questions.

What are the characteristics, values and goals of the "virtual class"?
What are the ethics that Kroker and Weinstein are calling for? What are they needed?
What ideas and values do Kroker and Weinstein associate with "the body"? (never assigned)

Look at your Glocalization Project and answer the following questions. On your sheet of paper, just list the numbers rather than rewriting the quesitons. Consider this a "freewriting" (thinking or exploration on paper) rather than a formal self justification or defense:

What is the 'scape (the theme, belief system, issue, interest or passion) that connects your local topic to a non-local audience who will never set foot in Minnesota?
What are the emotional and/or intellectual values (the tastes, ideals, beliefs, heroes, sense of respect or "cool") of the "inhabitants" of this 'scape (this deterritorialized belief world)
What images, words, phrases, linked text, colors or other design elements that are you using to appeal to the values held by this audience? Are there images, words or designs that don't?
How might the words, images or design be better aimed at the tastes and values of your non-local audience?
What about the first page announces (or could announce) that your site is more than just a local-promotion site for people in the area or who plan to visit (4/10/02)

This evening, we'll be providing one another feedback and discussing the the BETA versions of our Glocalization Projects. Please see the format for this "Visiting Day" style of workshop. The URLs for the projects can be found on the discussion board or at the Glocalization URL page (4/10/02)

Please read the directions for how we'll workshop our Glocalization Projects next Wednesday, April 10. You should post a BETA version (functioning draft) of your project to your "www" folder and then e-mail the class the URL by Monday, April 8 at 6 p.m. As the directions explain, you will be responsible for responding to half of the projects in the class between Monday and Wednesday at 6:00 p.m.

This evening, we'll also attempt to log into our Discussion Board for the first time to have an online discussion about Sherry Turkle's essay "Who Am We?"

Take a look at the commentary on Peter Elbow's ideas of the Believing and Doubting Games from the Ideas site. Then we can apply Elbow's techniques to Sherry Turkle's article:

Find an idea, statement, question or example from Turkle's that you might normally have a hard time accepting or understanding. At the Discussion discussion called "Turkle discussion," briefly quote or summarize that passage and then try to play the "believing game" with it: look for other supporting examples or ideas from the article, and/or include your own ideas, experiences, questions--all as a way of "trying the idea on for size."
Next, read over the postings and choose one from someone else (who is playing the "believing game" with Turkle). Click the "reply" button at the top of that message and then write a response in which you're playing the "doubting game." Try to speak to the specifics of that person's ideas and examples. Try to play the game of "self-extrication" from a writer's underlying assumptions and conclusions. (Keep in mind you are not criticizing the writer or even Turkle, just trying out what Elbow calls the "dialectic of propositions"
Finally, look back at any responses to your original message (or some other thread that interests you) and post a message in reply that says what you really think, having played both sides of the question.

Here are the locations of the New Media Writing Projects. Please double-check your URL to make sure it is correct and functioning and e-mail me with any corrections or updates.

This evening, we'll be focusing on the Glocalization Project and on the concept of the "'scape." Each of your Glocalization projects should associate a local landscape with a deterritorialized 'scape, and appeal to a sense of identity beyond our locale.

Questions we'll be asking ourselves about some sample sites and our own project ideas:

What landscape and other 'scape are being associated here?
What identity is being expressed or appealed to?
How do the site's links, labels, graphics, tone, etc. help to bring together a local landscape, a non-local scape, and a sense of identity that's somehow connected with both? (3/27/02)

Search engine: google.com (3/27/02)

Be thinking about the Student Web Contest as you work on your projects, particularly the Client Project at the end. The Web site you'll find at the link above concerns last year's contest, but there will be a new one for 2002-2003. This year, our own Mark Paschke won one of the awards for his site for Map Design and Graphic Methods. Contratulations, Mark!

Your New Media Writing Project Web-sites are now due to be posted by Thursday (3/14) at midnight. Send me the URL by e-mail when the site is up and functioning.

You will also need to get to me the print materials by Friday (3/15) at noon: the hard copy of your original paper with my markings/comments, and your self commentary.

Please do not e-mail me these materials electronically. I would like them in a hard copy, stapled together with the commentary on top.

You can drop these print materials in my office mailbox in Humanities 420 (office hours, 7 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.) anytime before the deadlines on Friday, or hand them in at the beginning of class on Wednesday evening.

Introducing the Glocalization Project.

Journal Entry #9: Thinking about the Glocalization Project Idea.

Choose one of the examples on the Glocalization project assignment page and visit it. Consider the following questions in a long, informal paragraph:

In what ways does that site about a local place appeal to a non-local audience who might never actually visit that place?
What larger ideas, values, concerns, passions, identities (i.e., "scapes") does this place represent?
How does the site suggest a connection between these larger ideas, values, etc. and the details of the place?

Question for debate: Herbert Schiller (Trend 159) sees the political influence of the Internet as a tool in the struggle between national governments (particularly the US) and transnational corporations, with the national government declining in power. Mark Poster (Trend 259), on the other hand, sees the Internet as a space where a new political system (a "cyberdemocracy") might emerge in that new "public sphere." Is the Internet best understood as a tool or a space? Who do you think is right?

"Subjectivity" (definition)

pertaining to individual experiences rather than objective understandings
being made subject to, governed by instititutional forces
referring to the self

This evening we are going to design a flow chart and write a set of navigation labels for a Web site called the Completely Unofficial Guide to Your First Year at UMD, which will be created by an independent organization called Students for Students. See the Labeling and Granularity Exercise page for more detail.

Notes: A good labeling system for navigation:

presents a limited number of choices
uses representational rather than non-representational language (Gone with the Wind).
is consistent in the level of granularity (Childhood, Adolescence, Last Night, Adulthood)
is consistently parallel gramatically ()Try it Out!, Bob Eliott, FAQ, Cool Stuff
uses the language of the user, rather than of "insiders" or experts (on a medical site for patients rather than doctors, cancer vs.oncology )
avoids possible synonyms or overlap (global vs. international)

Pine and Gilmore's book The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage.

The 3-5 page paper version of your New Media Writing Project will be due Wednesday, February 27.

Journal Entry # 5: What does the "information economy" that Manuel Castells talks about have to do with you? your future profession? your professional life to come? How will your work be different from your predessors as a result of not just of surfing the Web, but the structural transformations in the economy that Castells describes? (See also Journal Entry list)

Here are some links to use in our class meeting on Wednesday evening, February 20:

Henry Jenkins' home page
UMD Center for Economic Development
Peter Morville's article on the ethics of labeling and granularity

Sample Web pages for site-design analysis (2/20, from the Internet Scout Report):

Please check the list of home page locations to make sure your URL has been received, and that the link is working. If you don't see a working link by your name, please e-mail me the URL.

This evening we'll introduce the New Media Writing Project.

Invention activity: clustering (Journal entry #3)

On a blank sheet of paper, scatter a word or two indicating the following topics that are familiar or significant to you

two places
two people
two events
two food (dishes)
movies, shows or albums
classes or books in your field (?)

Draw a little circle around each word or phrase to bubble them. Then make links and bubbles for more words, ideas and associations that you can connect to these bubbles to make a sprawling cluster.

When you're done, write down at the bottom of the page (or on the back) one or two statements that might make topics for the New Media Writing Project

"...Representation lives between imagination and reality, serving as a conductor, amplified, clarifier and motivator." (Brenda Laurel in Trend 112)

A professor of Victorian literature and art history at Brown University George Landow runs the Victorian Web project.

Journal entry #4: Look at Landow's Victorian Web and his article in Trend (98). What's so great about hypertext, according to Landow? How does the Victorian Web realize (make real) that ideal? What's insufficient about written, printed text? Are there places where you think Landow's being too optimistic about hypertext (considering how the Web is actually used)?

By next class meeting, please purchase somekind of inexpensive, flat binder (not the big three-ring ones!) to organize and keep your in-class writings. We'll call this your "Journal," though you won't be expected to write anything personal in it. I will give you a journal-entry number for each writing we do when I assign it. If you put any of your own notes or reflections in it (having to do with the class), please label them A-Z.

Before Monday, when your page is due to be posted to the Web, you'll want to look at my directions for using Dreamweaver or WS-FTP (a free, downloadable program) to transfer your files from your disk to your folder on the Web server.

This evening, we'll be looking at a summary of your proposed criteria to revise and select the 12 most useful and important. Toward this end:

In a Word file or an e-mail to yourself, make a list of 12 criteria including the name of your classmate who suggested it or provided a good example. Copying and paste the actual words of the criteria into a Word file or an e-mail to yourself (if you can't read Word files at home).
Underline the criteria that are expressed as effects, rather than features. Saying that a home page should be "eye catching" tells us what the viewer's reaction is, but not what's actually happening on the page itself. Same goes for "not annoying." Underlined criteria are things we should talk about and try rewriting.
Type matching symbols (#, &, @, etc.) in front of pairs of criteria that are perhaps contradictory or in conflict. (If criteria 2 and 5 on your list are possibly in conflict, for example, type a $ in front of both.) Saying a page should be "simple" and "interesting," for instance, could be a contradiction--not an irreconcilable one, but something we'll need to solve in practice. Again, the pairings indicated by these matching symbols mark something worth thinking about together.
As we talk about the criteria, try rewriting them or expanding them to improve them. By Thursday evening at class time, please e-mail me your final twelve criteria, fully rewritten in a message titled "5230 final criteria." Also, print this list out and put it in your journal as #2.

Let me also put on the table my own list of criteria that I've used to evaluate a similar assignment in the past.

You can quickly reduce GIF or JPG images using the free online "Crunchers" from Spinwave. See my Internet Resources page for more such links.

By next Wednesday, February 6 at noon, please e-mail to the class alias a message that contains the following:

the list of criteria you developed for evaluating personal Web pages during our discussion of Nielsen and Heimon on January 30
for each of two or three of the criteria, include a URL (that is, a Web address, being sure to include the "http://" at the beginning) for a page that exemplifies that criterion, or shows what opportunities are missed when one ignores its wisdom
for each of the URL's, also write a brief comment telling us specifically what to look for when we click the link and view your example.

These are the sample personal Web pages you collected and that we used on the evening of January 30.

Stelarc is an Australian performance artist whose work explores the interaction of the human body and machines, including information technologies.

We're going to use Heim and Nielsen--especially the tension between their different ideas of the Web--to create a list of criteria for judging the effectiveness of a personal home page…and of the personal home page that we'll create for the first assignment.

On a piece of paper, make two half-page entries (free writing, thinking on paper):

1. About Nielsen: what did you find most surprising, most helpful, or most controversial?

2. About Heim: How might his philosophical analysis of digital culture inform what we do on our personal Web pages. (Heim gives us the "big history" of what's going on with digital culture starting with Plato.)

This page will be the central point of arrival and departure for the class each day. I will continually replace the content here with the most current news and reminders. Older "Today's Special" items from throughout the semester will be archived at a page available from the link below.

Please read the syllabus and take a look at the schedule for January, particularly the first assignment, Personal Home Page.

To get a sense of the issues raised by Web design, compare the following:

Compare these five terms

Society
Nation
Economy
Community
Culture