Posted by kmitchell on January 07th 2009 to
new media,
representation Tagged
cory doctorow,
creative commons,
identity,
internet,
jonathan harris,
media,
metadata,
new media,
representation,
tag,
technology,
web 2.0 Upfront apologies for the loose, stream-of-consciousness style of this post.
At the ATOM Conference this year, Jo Flack talked about Wordle. Just recently, someone sent me a link to this video, of Jonathan Harris and the ‘We Feel Fine’ project. Both of these illustrate the power of the internet, technology and new media to create something visually beautiful, rich, and complex out of things that otherwise could become transient, ephemeral, random, unorganised and potentially lost.
This here is another form of visual representation on a similar note to We Feel Fine.
Other things that I am considering in the same vein are these:
Museum Box
Visual Search Lab allows searching for photos/images by colour or topic. Also could be useful for showing design principles.
Mark Amerika’s work, such as Filmtext and Phone:me
New technology called “Semantic image labelling”
ACMI’s MAP (Memory and Place) Project and the SCOOT event
The Phone Book project
and my long-time beloved A Softer World.
And while I haven’t read this book, it seems like the logical next step in my thinking process.
Of course in an age of Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, Flickr and phone cameras there are obvious issues of identity and the way we represent ourselves to the world. To me, this is nothing new, and while useful for teaching within the Media curriculum (particularly as there is so much out there and several people have been writing some good stuff for years – Sherry Turkle and Julian Dibbell come to mind) and for getting students to begin to understand the issues that they might go on to further explore within a university setting, there is now another new wave of media forms being produced that we as media educators need to be aware of – the growing changes in the way individuals view and produce media and content on the web, and how that content is represented via a wave of technology and software programs.
In the light of Web 2.0, it is useful to think about how we organise, categorise and represent information, particularly in the way we use metadata to make sense of information and represent it in its smallest parts – topics, themes, and tags that can be used for searching. Such as the ones I use for this blog.
Cory Doctorow likes talking about metadata and other new media related issues, and is a big believer in the Creative Commons movement. His latest book Content covers these issues (note: relevant for new media) and is available for free online as an audio download as well
(He also co-edits BoingBoint.net which is full of bizarre and amazing stuff).
And last but not least, I thought this was a really nice little summary of visual representation and its subsequent issues in the new media, internet-based landscape. It also links nicely with Jonathan Harris’s talks.
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