The Language Tools that Google offers now can allow one to surf a site translated. See Video Pool. They have links on their home page that will show you the site translated into other language.
Continue reading Automatic Translation
Slide Shows with Javascript
Dynamic Drive- Image Slide Shows is a set of different ways to do slideshows with Javascript. Some cool examples.
Continue reading Slide Shows with Javascript
Googlism
Googlism is a term coined by a site that uses Google to gather information about people, places, and events. You enter a word and it returns selected phrases that describe that person. This strikes me as an example of smart text analysis and aggregation.
Continue reading Googlism
3D Timelines
Temporal Modelling is a project led by Johanna Drucker looking at ways to model time. At McMaster we are getting some 3D environments and visualization expertise and I would like to try developing a 3D time visualization environment.
Continue reading 3D Timelines
Matrix Timeline
History Matrix is a massive timeline project by Shiralee Saul. It weaves all sorts of timelines together into a matrix of events. It is not complete and there are parts that don’t work, but it is ambitious and thought provoking.
Internet History
Hobbes’ Internet Timeline – the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history is a great history of the Internet with both a timeline, graphs, and bibliography. It was last updated in July of 2003.
Interactivity and Graphic Design
Theories of Interactivity is an essay on Approaches to Graphical User Interface Design that looks at different way of approaching design, including a brief history, interactivity and Aristotle.
Continue reading Interactivity and Graphic Design
Dead Media
Dead Media Project is a project inspired by Bruce Sterling to keep track of media that are no longer used. They have a timeline and notes.
Continue reading Dead Media
Cybernetics and Interactivity
Computers and the development of Interactivity is a great essay on the history of computers from the perspective of interactivity. An important strand that gets attention here, but needs more work is the theoretical developments of cybernetics (control and response) as a foundation for studying interactivity.
Hypertext and Analysis
Is hypertext a fundamental concept in the theory of digital media? My first view on this was that it was not – hypertext was just an important form of interactivity that built on ways we connected ideas and text in the print world. It does, however, seem to be the key form of interactivity for so much digital media, especially the web.
An stronger view would be that hypertext (defined as a work that chunks information into nodes that are linked) is an important primitive to digital media. If we consider the layering of information where information on the computer is gathered in ever larger chunks – then hypertext is the chunking at the cognitive level and the link is the basic way of connecting such chunks. The argument is the reverse of analysis – digital media is analyzable in the sense that it has to be stored as digital codes (codes that are distinct as digits are.) We then build up from the primitive codes more complex entities, whether it is vectors, fields and records in a database, elements in an XML file and so on. A hypertext node is an entity that makes cognitive sense – a chunk that is more or less comprehensible by itself. It also has, for historic reasons, a relationship with the screen in that such nodes tend to be a screen sized chunk – that which can be held in view (and mind) at a time. Such chunks can then be woven into larger wholes which we will call works. The primary human way of connecting them is by authoring links.
Continue reading Hypertext and Analysis