Theoreti.ca – Page 251 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Tool and Technology

The third chapter in Abstracting Craft on “Tools” has definitions of technology and tool suited for discussing software and computers as craft tools. Some of the key terms he covers are:

Tool, Technology, Instrument, Probe, Mechanism, Machine, Engine, Power, Technique, Medium, and Artifact

“A tool is a moving entity whose use is initiated and actively guided by a human being, for whom it acts as an extension, toward a specific purpose.” (p. 68, McCullough).
Continue reading Tool and Technology

Gender Guessing

The Gender Genie will try to guess the gender of an author based on 500 words of text. It is a form of playful text analysis based on an algorithm developed by Koppel and Argamon.
Continue reading Gender Guessing

Flash Tapestry Tale Construction Kit

Historic Tale Construction Kit is a Web application which you can use to make a tapestry tale. Very neat.

Textism – Image Shows

Textism: Photos: is a collection of small image shows that are simple and clean. I like the way he sets up these shows. Beautiful. He has a photographic “found alphabet” of letters from farm images.
Continue reading Textism – Image Shows

Dodgeit

dodgeit – free. receive-only. email. no set up. rss. This is like the skiprock idea, but better. You can get your e-mail as an RSS feed.

Abstracting Craft

Malcolm McCullough is the author of Abstracting Craft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) a great book on craft in the digital age.

ï¿Š
Continue reading Abstracting Craft

Pansophica

Pansophica is software that searches the web and generates an interactive visualization of the words and the pages.
Continue reading Pansophica

War Against Grammar

The War against Grammar is an essay by David Mulroy, but is also the name of a book by Mulroy (Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 2003?) in which he documents how grammar was driven out of the curriculum and what can be done about it.
Continue reading War Against Grammar

Interaction Design, Winograd

From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design is an article by Terry Winograd that appeared in Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing. In it he points out how we have gone from computing as calculation to computing as communication and media.
Continue reading Interaction Design, Winograd

Graffiti Archaeology

graffiti archaeology is a brilliant site done is Flash that allows you to navigate different moments in the sam wall as painted by graffiti artists. It has a nice timeline feature, and a great way of representing the collage of images that make up a wall along with what has changed over time.
Continue reading Graffiti Archaeology