Sabine Scholl: Book Interface

Sabine Scholl has a simple and interesting interface to her personal site which looks like a very tall book that you can scroll up and down. I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is a visual joke on flipping pages and scrolling up and down to the site. All the links are just to anchors further down the “page”. This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.

Jason Lewis: ActiveText

At the Textologies workshop organized here at McMaster by Travis Kroeker and Andrew Mactavish, I saw a neat project, ActiveText that was demonstrated by Jason E. Lewis at Concordia. ActiveText is a C++ library that can be used to make active text. Jason has gotten it right – the objects he handles go from glyphs up to passages. They can have behaviors so that segments of text are activated. See the animation.
Continue reading Jason Lewis: ActiveText

Mind Mapping

At the Burlington Art Centre I attended a day-long workshop on “The Art of Change” where the “mind mapping” software Mindjet: Mind Manager was demonstrated. Mind mapping apparently was invented by Tony Buzan as a way of unleashing the potential of the mind. See, Buzan Centres – Mind Mapping – Mind Map Definition. The presenter oversold mind mapping and it is not clear that visual thinking software running on a small screen is preferable to a good big peice of software or whiteboard, but at its heart mind mapping seems to be hypertext for thinking – drawing graphs of ideas. What is is strange is how this business technique has spawned software similar to what has come from the hypertext community, software like Storyspace, which bills itself as serious hypertext for writers.
Continue reading Mind Mapping

Next Generation foundation and the Map of Creativity

The Next Generation Foundation has a Flash based site that is interesting both for its design and content. This organization was set up by the CEO of Lego and, for an organization focused on “creativity” has a stiffling “Terms of use” (see the link off the main page.) The foundation focuses on children’s play and creativity. To get a sense of their mission (to sell more toys?) read the bizarre “Manifesto and Call to Action” by Seymour Papert. Here is a quote,

There exists today an unprecedented opportunity for synergy between the goals of parenting and the goals of industrial entrepreneurship, between spiritual concerns about the meaning of life and political concerns about the policies of nations, between the cultivation of the arts and the preparation of young people for the workplace.

One neat feature they have is an interactive Map of Creativity which has a circular interface for navigating projects that recommended as innovative and helping children play.
This came StÈfan’s blog

China and cyber dissidents

The Globe and Mail has a story about how Cyber dissidents rattle China’s thought police. The story features the “Stainless Steel Mouse”, a 24-year-old woman Liu Di who was jailed for a year for her online activities. What is scary is how many people China purportedly has monitoring the net. It is also scary how technology companies have worked with the government to develop online surveillance tools. China may prove the Internet is as easy to patrol as the streets. The story is by Rod Mickleburgh, Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, Page A16.

Data Privacy and the Patriot Act

The Globe and Mail has a story U.S. Patriot Act could affect data on Canadians, B.C. privacy head says by Rod Mickleburgh (Saturday, October 30, 2004 – Page A13 ) about a report by the BC privacy commissioner that concludes that if BC outsourced their health data management or storage then the FBI could get access to that data due to provisions in the Patriot Act. Basically the Patriot act gives US agents the right to ask US companies for access to data they store even if protected by another countries’ privacy regulations. This is likely to affect US companies bidding on services abroad. I suspect we are going to see a slow move among countries to avoid dealing with US telecommunications and data management companies.
Continue reading Data Privacy and the Patriot Act

Artists in Canada

Hill Strategies Research Inc. – An arts research company has put online a study about the Artists in Canada that shows that Victoria and Vancouver have the highest concentration of artists. There seems to have been 29% growth in the area over the 1991-2001 decade compared to a 10% growth in the labour market. Could the arts be going up as computer science tanks? I found this on Straight.com: Arts Notes.

StÈfan Sinclair sribbles and muses

scribblings & musings @ sgs online is my colleague StÈfan Sinclair’s new blog. (More properly it is a blog he has had for a while which he is bringing out into the open.) Readers of my blog will recognize StÈfan as one of the people who introduces me to neat stuff.
StÈfam recently joined McMaster so I am fortunate to also have him as a colleague. Check out his blog and his neat HyperPo project.

Jerry McDonough: METS

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a hub standard that links metadata and files. Jerry McDonough of the New York University Libraries presented on METS at the TEI Members’ Meeting. He showed a neat use of METS to joint an MPEG video clip to a TEI transcript, but the heart of his talk was about the proliferation and interaction of standards like TEI, EAD, METS, IMS, and so on. There is a temptation to think that with a bit more a standard like the TEI can embrace (swallow) other standards giving us one instead of many. He argued that a) we don’t technically need to merge related standards, and b) it is not right to do that. He pointed to the politics and histories of these groups/standards. We need a sociology of standards.
Continue reading Jerry McDonough: METS