Month: August 2004

Digital Scrapbooks

Diriks Family Scrapbooks is a Norwegian digitization project that has tries to preserve some of the scrapbook feel in the interface to the collection. While the site is in Norwegian, and hence I am not sure what the text says, the interface is interesting and, of course, scrapbooks are a less-practiced domestic art that has features we now find in blogs. Does it make sense when digitizing the scrapbook to keep the two-page spread interface? Are scrapbooks and chapbooks similar to blogs? This came from a Humanist post by Espen Ore.
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Women in Computer Science

Undergraduate Women in Computer Science: Experience, Motivation and Culture is a report on a study of women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. While it is only a preliminary report it strikes me as balanced and interesting. Their initial findings include some reflections on what got men and women into CS – a number of male students talked about the computer as a toy or game that they got caught up playing with in an undirected way. Female students, by contrast commented on what they wanted to do with computing.
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Silly Sound Sculpture

Celebrating the Olympics with sound art. Athens Olympics Inspire Artist’s Computer-Based Sculptures is a fawning and rather silly article from the Associated Press about a Greek sculptress who has created, in celebration of the Olympics, art based on digitally visualized sounds. (See SonArt Olympics for the web site on the travelling exhibit.) Whatever your opinion of the art, there is a strange confusion to the layers of representation – sculpture that draws on graphical representations of digitized (sampled and quantized) words connected to Greek and Olympic themes!!!!
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I’m Back

Dear readers, I’m back from vacation. In order to entertain you, I personally visited a number of sites of interest around new media and communications technology in Eastern Canada. The beaches of PEI had nothing to do with the research expedition!

Post-Post: Stamp Communication and Rex Murphy

Rex Murphy (surely one of the best ironic columnists around) has a column in The Globe and Mail on Ouellet’s stamp is cancelled which starts with the inscription on the Central Post Office building in New York which we all know the start of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” What is interesting is that this is an adaptation of Herodotus and Rex reminds us that communications technologies often present themselves as heroic and honourable when they are launched. Surface mail today seems outdated and far from the heroic braving of the elements.
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