Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Media

Media

new media and technology, copyright, media theory

new media and technology, copyright, media theory

A Better Pencil

November 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

A Better Pencil is a study that traces the relationships between writing and reading and the technology used as the medium of communication – from the invention of writing, the development of the printing press, then the typewriter, to the modern computer.

It’s a book about how the digital revolution is impacting our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies of the word differ from what came before.

A Better Pencil - book jacketIn this sense Dennis Baron has produced a similar work to that of his namesake Naomi Baron’s Alphabet to Email though his emphasis is less on historical development and more on exploring topics related to the issue. In fact I was rather glad he didn’t take a strictly chronological approach, which would have delayed annoyingly any revelations he might have about electronic writing. But the problem with his thematic structure is that many of his observations are made over and over again, each one of which he seems to imagine to be the first.

The one basic argument which he repeats is that each development in the technology of literacy was at first introduction regarded with suspicion. Even writing itself, which it was thought (by Plato) would lead to the decline of human memory. Then printing, which some people opposed on the grounds that it would lead to the dissemination of new ideas and the loss of respect for the authority of the church – and they were right.

What he’s doing in fact is looking at commonly held notions about computer technology and trying to dissipate widespread fears and misconceptions. Will computers lead to a decline in literacy. Answer – No. Will they rot our children’s brains – no. And so on.

The idea that some people are suspicious of technology is examined at some length by a study of the Unabomber – the technophobe terrorist who was ironically caught out only when he published his manifesto. The story is well told, and it’s entertaining enough – but it tells us almost nothing about writing or technology that we didn’t already know. However, this is a book that becomes more interesting as it goes on.

There’s quite a good chapter on the history of the pencil (much of it taken from the work of Henry Petrowski) that throws up quite a few interesting observations. He argues for instance that writing in pencil lacks status because the pencil post-dates the pen in historical development. Its traces can be wiped out of course, yet some pencils do not have erasers – for very good reasons. Joiners don’t want to leave graphite smears on their work, and golfers should not alter their scores.

It doesn’t take us much closer to electronic writing, but there’s a very amusing chapter on handwriting in which he exposes the bogus claims of graphologists (sloping left script = suicidal tendencies: that sort of rubbish). He makes the more serious point that people repeatedly claim current handwriting practice is a falling off in standards from some previous golden era in which everybody wrote in beautiful copperplate script. This too just isn’t true.

Once he gets to word-processors all his lines of argument begin to come together. Anyone who has followed the development of writing with a PC will be fondly reminded of the early frustrations as he describes his experiences using VAX, WordStar, and WordPerfect. As he rightly claims, all new developments in writing technology seem to slow down the writing process when they are first introduced.

He looks at the conventions, plus the advantages and disadvantages of all forms of on-screen writing – email, web pages, Instant Messaging, and blogs. Each of these has so rapidly replaced its predecessors that the conventions often change with the matter of a few years. Something hip with the kids one moment becomes old hat the next – particularly when adults get involved. That’s happening on Facebook and Twitter right now.

Most of these are new opportunities for self-expression rather than new writing technologies – though he might have included text messaging as an almost coded form of communication. Wikis are also new in that they are anonymous user-generated writing in which individual contributors sacrifice notions of personal authorship for the sake of a common good.

He ends with a look at what he calls the ‘dark side of the web’ – the world of hate groups, email scams, and political censorship. I was glad he didn’t let the illustrious Google off the hook for the way in which they (and MSN) have capitulated to China, the world’s leader in state-sponsored cyber snooping (with an estimated 30,000 people employed in spying on their fellow citizens). And they’re not alone: Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Burma (Myanmar) are doing the same thing.

One of Baron’s other central arguments is that revolutions in our writing behaviour take place when the technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough to put new tools in everybody’s hands. Things are moving so fast in digital technology just at the moment that it’s hard to keep up or predict what might happen next. But this survey is an excellent account of the status quo at 2008/2009.

A Better Pencil   Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Better Pencil   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Dennis Baron, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.259, ISBN: 0195388445


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Computers, Electronic wrriting, Technology, Theory, Writing skills, Writing Theory

Alphabet to Email

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

scholarly study of the history of writing and technology

What is the relationship between writing and technology – including the means by which it is produced? Is there a difference between writing with a quill on velum, a pen on paper, or onto a hard disk using a word-processor. Naomi Baron certainly thinks there is, and she brings considerable erudition from what seems to be an Eng. Lit. background to explore the issues. She begins with a pithy analysis of twentieth century theories of the relationship between the spoken and the written language, then goes on to show how the text as an object evolved – from scroll to codex to printed book, and the effect that this had on both the process of production and consumption of the text.

Alphabet to Email Taking the UK as her model, she traces the development of literacy in the UK from the eighth century, showing how literacy is linked to technology. She then discusses the development of the first writings in English up to the birth of print, pointing out that not all writers (including Shakespeare) embraced the technology of their time. Aristocrats writing in the early Renaissance thought it was vulgar to have one’s work printed and published. This leads into the history of notions of authorship – showing how plagiarism, quotation, and copyright are quite modern concepts. There’s lots of historical depth in her examination of the subject, and thought-provoking ideas emerge on almost every page. This is a serious, scholarly work, but readers eager for the email element promised in the title will have to be patient.

The next part of her study deals with the political, legal, and commercial history of book production and its effect on determining authorship and ownership of text. En passant she covers issues of literacy and how it is to be measured, the sociology of reading habits, and then the history of dictionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the centre of the book, there’s a a lot on the history of the English Language and its development, spelling reform, the history of writing as a physical activity, and the rise of prescriptive grammar and ‘received pronunciation’ in the eighteenth century.

Then suddenly there is a chapter which seems to have come from nowhere. It explores the development of educational theory in American Universities and the rise of the ‘English Comp’ class. She gradually makes contact with what is supposed to be her subject when a consideration of online and collaborative writing – but by the time we get to the development of the WELL and Netscape it’s rather difficult to see where her argument is heading, though she does come back to authorship, ownership, and copyright in an age of compositional hypertext.

Then it’s back to classical Greece and Rome for a chapter on punctuation, retracing our steps via the Renaissance in a consideration of the relationship between writing, punctuation, and how the language is spoken. This section ends with a glance at the punctuation of email – which at least brings the promised subject back into view.

There is then a chapter on communication technology – from the semaphore and the telephone through to email. Are we there at last? Unfortunately not, for having arrived at this point, her discussion expires into very distanced, sociological, and general observations. There are some interesting questions explored. Must we answer email as we feel obliged to answer the phone? But this is a question of etiquette, not writing. There is very little on the most revolutionary writing tool – the word-processor – no analysis of concrete examples, and there are no insights offered which a regular emailer would not come across several times a day.

Her writing is fairly lively, though given the subject matter she occasionally makes some surprising gaffes – ‘who was the audience?’, ”nearly almost’, and ‘Piaget, the Swiss philosopher-come-mathematician’. The study arrives with a good bibliography and a full scholarly apparatus, though there’s an annoying system of notation which sends you through two layers of bibliographic reference to check her sources.

The value of this work is in its historical depth and the connections she reveals between the words on the page and the means of getting them there. She’s at her most interesting in the Renaissance, but she doesn’t in fact have much to say that’s new about electronic writing. Apart from observing that the online world presents new problems for those who communicate by writing, the most useful parts of her exposition are concerned with the distant past, not the present. Nevertheless, anyone interested in the relationship between writing and technology will probably want to read what she has to say about these issues- if only because she covers such a broad historical span.

© Roy Johnson 2001

Alphabet to Email   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Alphabet to Email   Buy the book at Amazon US


Naomi S. Baron, Alphabet to Email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading, London/New York: Routledge, 2001, pp.336, ISBN: 0415186862


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Alphabet to Email, Electronic Writing, Language, Technology, Theory, Writing

Anime

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Showcase of the latest digital animation – print and DVD

Don’t be misled if you see this book in a shop. It’s a dazzlingly attractive publication – an elegant catalogue of full-colour screenshots housed in a translucent plastic case. But the heart of the production is a huge collection of animated graphics on the enclosed DVD. These are movie clips, motion graphics, linear narrative sequences, interactive web pages, and vector presentations – some as long as promotional videos. They range from avant-guard art-school productions – fuzzy, out-of-focus, and granular – to slick commercial projects by some of the best designers in this new field.

AnimeQuite a few of the most stylish examples are rendered in the manner of French bandes dessinées and graphic novels – hard outlines, block colour, and a predominance of black and grey highlighted by occasional dark brown, blue, or citron. I’ve watched them over and over again, and I’m still amazed.

There’s lots of deliberately jerky editing, overlayering, jumpcuts, and out-of-focus images set to the rhythms of stripped-down, heavily sampled techno-music – sometimes drum-and-base dance style, and occasionally ‘ambient’ sound.

A lot of them are in what Web designer Curt Cloninger in his recent Fresh Styles for Web Designers calls ‘Drafting Table/Transformer’ style – the kind of things that look like docking station accidents in outer space. Others favour the ‘Mondrian poster style’ – screen filled with block colour in muted tones, and pared down text in lower-case sans-serif font.

There are lots of recurrent images and themes – architecture, motorways, metal fabrications, skyscrapers – and the spirit of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner hangs over the majority. It’s a great pity there isn’t more technical detail on how these pieces were made – though Flash seems to be the prevalent technology.

Most of the movies seem to be from the ‘Yellow Submarine’ school of graphic design – lots of semi-surreal cartoon figures morphing in and out of each other. There’s also a popular streak of sci-fi comic book characters and their icons brought to life.

For me, the simplest and the shortest pieces are the best. There are two wonderful movie title sequences designed by YU + CO for ‘Mercury Rising’ and ‘Lost Souls’. These are in black and white, and they are largely composed of motion typography with a moody soundtrack. They show how a simple combination of image, movement, and music can create stunning effects.

This is not just a book with DVD attached, it’s an outstanding DVD gallery of motion graphics with a first rate printed catalogue. There is an amazing amount of visual stimulation material here for those studying or working in the digital arts. Anybody who is interested in graphic animation and the latest developments in Web technology should see these works.

© Roy Johnson 2001

Anime   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Anime   Buy the book at Amazon US


Robert Klanten (editor), Anime, Die Gestalten Verlag, 2001, pp.192 pages ISBN: 3931126722


More on design
More on media
More on web design


Filed Under: Graphic design, Media Tagged With: Anime, Graphic design, Media, Video animation, Web design

Blogging and Social Media

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

exploiting the technology and protecting the enterprise

This is a guide to blogging and social media with a difference. It’s aimed at professionals in business who might not have thought of using such communication techniques before. In fact it’s written by people with a background in law – which doesn’t at first seem like a zappy, media-conscious line of work to be in. But the first half of the book explains how blogs work; it outlines the plusses and minuses of blogging; shows you how to set up your own blog; and how to write and run it. The advice is clear and realistic.

Blogging and Social MediaYou’ve got to be prepared to work at it; success doesn’t come easily; you can make money, but don’t expect too much; and if you’re in a serious business, take care what you say in your postings. It strikes a good balance between enthusiasm and the need for clear-headed guidance. The advantages for the business user are potentially enormous – because if you’re writing about something you already know well, blogging is fairly easy. It’s free, and you can write new material whenever you feel like it. There’s a tremendous potential for niche markets: if you are an expert in second-hand motor parts, the migration of birds in Europe, or planning application procedures for new motorways – you can be number one in your field without problems.

Even if you are constrained to write about your firm’s business in waste management you have the chance to link up with others in the same field. You can create networks, develop banks of resources, post bulletins, capture the contract opportunities in your area, and make a name for yourself and your firm.

You’ll be doing this even though you are only dealing with issues you would be handling normally – with the difference that you are doing it as part of a social network. And that’s the essence of what this book has to offer: it is showing you how to link up with other people who share your interests.

After blogging come the variety of social media which have mushroomed in the last few years. There are services such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter which started out as networking sites for teenagers but developed very rapidly into large scale communication tools. Each of these seems to have developed its own special audience. MySpace for instance is the premier site for musicians who upload recordings and promotional videos for their performances. Twitter on the other hand has been embraced by media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian – even though messages posted to the site are limited to 140 characters (like a text message). Similar opportunities exist at uploading sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

They then cover the new generation of online office applications. These are word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and accounting software – such as Google Docs and Zoho.com – which don’t run on your own machine but which you access (free of charge) via the Web. These have the immense advantage that you don’t have to pay for upgrades to the latest version.

There’s also an excellent chapter on podcasts, giving instructions on how to make them and examples of how they might be useful in business. And once again, full details are given of all the free software you might need.

They then go deeper into the details of how companies might use these services internally – using what has come to known as an Enterprise 2.0 approach. Finally, and understandably since the authors all come from a legal background, they outline the law as it relates to the use of social media, covering copyright, trade marks, passing off, and brand names, defamation, privacy, and data protection. A number of complex cases have arisen as a result of bloggers writing about their bosses and the companies they work for. It’s a risky business – so beware!

© Roy Johnson 2008

Blogging and Social Media   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Blogging and Social Media   Buy the book at Amazon US


Alex Newson et al, Blogging and Other Social Media, London: Gower, 2008, pp.182, ISBN: 0566087898


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media Tagged With: Blogging, Blogging and Other Social Media, Communication, eCommerce, Social media, Technology

Blogging genius strategies

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

web log writing techniques and software

Web logging, known as blogging, is an easy way of updating a web page via a browser without the hassle of launching an FTP client or HTML editor. Some people claim that the blog is an entirely new form of communication – and Biz Stone is one of them. Blogging genius strategies is written from the perspective of a breathless young enthusiast, and yet the guidance he offers is perfectly sound and well organised. He starts off by telling you how to establish your blog – which is what most people will want. He shows how to log onto the most popular site of all – Blogger – and establish your Web presence. It’s rather like the world of email and newsgroups ten years ago. (That’s about a hundred years in Internet terms.)

Blogging genius strategiesEveryone is posting their diaries, rants and raves, and creating gonzo journals with links to everything that’s hip. He gives an overview of major blog service providers – Blogger, Moveable Type, Diaryland, and Radio Userland. Then, assuming that you are keen to make your blog visually attractive, he throws in a little HTML coding advice. This shows you how to add colour, text manipulation, and layout variety to your pages.

In fact for the more adventurous he even goes as far as Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScripts – then on to the serious business of making money from your blog. How can this be done? Well, via micro-payment systems, affiliate programs such as Amazon’s, and even advertising – though I wouldn’t hold your breath on this last one.

There’s a chapter on arranging archives of your blogs, which can be done on a weekly or monthly basis. Then it’s on to group blogs, blogs which invite comments on themselves, and even corporate blogs.

You can add search engine features, and he also shows you how you can increase traffic to your blog. This goes from making connections at Google to trading links with like-minded bloggers. If that’s not enough, you can even syndicate your blog.

In the latest part of his advice the blog is elaborated and extended until it becomes, logically enough, a Web site. In fact he then goes on to discuss software applications which can download selected blogs you wish to read in the form of daily emails.

Since Biz Stone went on from writing this book to become one of the key players at Twitter – so he knows new media when he sees it. He takes the subject of blogging seriously, and leads you through all the basic elements to get you started, then on to the more advanced techniques which allow you to turn your blog into a modern communication art form. Why not start now – Its all free!

© Roy Johnson 2002

Blogging genius   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Blogging genius   Buy the book at Amazon US


Biz Stone, Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2002, pp.309, ISBN: 0735712999


More on creative writing
More on writing skills
More on publishing


Filed Under: Creative Writing, Journalism, Media, Publishing Tagged With: Biz Stone, Blogging, Computers, Journalism, Technology

Content Syndication with RSS

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Sharing headlines and information using XML

Content syndication means making headlines and information from one web site available for distribution to any others that want it. This is done technically by using RSS, which stands for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. If you need to go all the way, RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. Ben Hammersley first of all explains the separate standards which have arisen, taking them in chronological order.

Content Syndication with RSS Then he describes the software which has been written both to generate RSS feeds, and to receive and read them on screen. There’s also a short XML tutorial, as well as a list of useful sites and resources. Unfortunately there are two camps of competing standards, each with two current versions – rather like the early days of the browser wars.

Fortunately he covers them all in his description of how to use RSS and what it does. The separate standards are complex in their differences, and he obviously belongs to one of the rival camps promoting them; but he is even handed in his treatment, and gives them all comprehensive coverage.

Much of the book is rather technical, with pages full of coding; but anyone familiar with HTML or XML will feel pretty much at home.

He gives fully written out examples of pages in each of the standards. As in strict XML, there is a complete separation of style and content. This is because the recipient might be reading the news feed as part of a blog, on on a PDA, or even as a text message.

RSS is sprouting all over the Web at the moment. Wherever you see one of the small buttons saying “News Feed” or “XML Feed”, you have the ability to receive information from that site. And of course it’s all free.

This publication is aimed at web developers and web site authors who want to share their site with others by offering RSS-based feeds of their content. It’s also for developers who want to use the content that other people are syndicating. As usual with O’Reilly publications, the presentation is impeccable.

© Roy Johnson 2003

Content Syndication with RSS   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Content Syndication with RSS   Buy the book at Amazon US


Ben Hammersley, Content Syndication with RSS, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2003, pp.208, ISBN: 0596003838


More on technology
More on digital media
More on online learning
More on computers


Filed Under: Computers, Media Tagged With: Communication, Computers, Content Syndication with RSS, RSS, Technology

Content: Copyright and DRM

December 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

Cory Doctorow is a young Canadian freelance writer and web entrepreneur who lives in London. He’s an editor of Boing-Boing and former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he writes science fiction novels, and he gives his work away free of charge – yet makes a living from his writing. How can it be done? That’s one of the things he explains here. Content: Copyright and DRM is a collection of speeches, essays, and articles he has produced in the last few years, proselytising in favour of open source software, against digital rights management (DRM) systems, against censorship, on copyright, and in favour of the free exchange of information, unhindered by state controls or commercial prohibitions.

Content: Copyright and DRMAt their most fervent, his arguments come across like those of a students’ union activist – but he’s brave. He speaks against Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an audience at Microsoft. The reason he’s a successful journalist is that he understands new media technology, and he has a gift for wrapping up his arguments in a vivid and succinct manner:

Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

He has a racy and amusing journalistic style. He writes in short, almost epigrammatic statements with a no-holds-barred attitude to any potential opposition.

As Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of [embarrassing] information off the Internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.

Some of the items are quite short – quick reprints of web pages from the Guardian technology section – but they are all pertinent to the issues of creativity and new media. Why for example does the best eCommerce site in the world (Amazon) want to control what you do with your Kindle downloads? Doctorow argues that these are short-sighted policies which prevent the spread of information and the creation of new developments.

He’s gung-ho about the business of eBooks and eCommerce. He makes his books available free as downloads on the Internet, confident that this will result in more sales of the printed book. There’s no actual proof that it results in more sales – but he’s happy with the results, and so is his publisher, and the publicity gives him income from other sources, such as journalism and speaking engagements.

Having said that, more than 300,000 copies of his first novel were downloaded for free, resulting in 10,000 printed books sold. As he argues, that’s like thirty people picking up the book and looking at it in a bookstore for every one who made a purchase. But the thirty pickups cost almost nothing, and I think many authors would be very happy with sales of ten thousand.

[It should be remembered that the average full time writer makes approximately £3,000-5,000 a year – and if you look at that in terms of a forty hour week, it’s less than £2.50 per hour.]

The sheer range of his subjects is truly impressive. There’s a chilling insider report from a committee discussing DRM, an essay on a sub-genre of science fiction writing called fanfic, and even a satirical piece calling into question the limitations of meta-data.

He’s at his strongest on the subject of copyright – and that includes the rights of the person who buys the book, the film, or the MP3 music file. The author has the right to be paid for selling it to you, but you have the right to do with it (almost) whatever you wish.

He has any number of interesting things to say about the nature of eBooks – from their apparent problems, their multiple formats, and their malleability, to the issues surrounding copyright. And the encouraging thing is that he writes not just in theory but as a working writer who is exploring the eBook business and what it can do – for both authors and readers.

If you want to know what’s happening at the sharp end of digital publication and new ideas about the relationships between authors and their readers – do yourself a favour and listen to what he has to say. You might not agree with it all, but it will give you plenty to be thinking about.

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon UK

copyright   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008, pp.213, ISBN: 1892391813


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Journalism, Media, Open Sources, Publishing, Theory Tagged With: Business, Copyright, Digital Rights Management, DRM, e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources, Publishing

Design for Multimedia Learning

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

software and media for creating learning programs

In the rapidly developing world of IT and multimedia, it’s strange to be reviewing a book published three years ago – and probably written at least a year before that. Some of the programs discussed by Tom Boyle in this survey will by now be ‘legacy software’ – but the fact is that some of them are still being used. His book is in four parts. The first provides a critical review of work in the field – from resource-based learning, through simulation and virtual experience to guided discovery learning.

Design for Multimedia Learning This includes consideration of programs such as Speakeasy, the Web, DOVE, Braque, and CLEM – [CORE Learning Environment for Modula-2]. The second part deals with conceptual design – the devising of the deep architecture of the system. Part three deals with presentation design. This covers screen layout, media integration, and the design of individual media – text, graphics, sound, and video. One of the virtues of the book is that it is so wide-ranging. It deals en passant with programs such as Toolbook and systems such as HTML – which was sill being viewed as a rather limited option in the mid 1990s.

Boyle covers moving objects and sound – both of which are conversely viewed rather sceptically in Web circles as distractions bordering on the unnecessary. However, there are circumstances in which these features are necessary. One of the examples discussed and illustrated is a training program showing how to install a hard disk in ‘Build Your Own Personal Computer’. There are other disciplines in which digitised video is essential. A colleague of mine is currently grappling with comparable issues in a teaching hospital, where video clips of operations are put on CD-ROM as seminar support materials.

Part four deals with project development, evaluation, and delivery of teaching programs. It’s all written in a lively and informative style, but the question remains, ‘Are such books superseded by the rapid development of software?’ My answer is ‘No – on two grounds’. First, it’s good to have a historical record of software development. Just as people are now beginning to collect and archive old computers [some of them less than twenty years old] so a well-documented account of the programs which were written for them will become increasingly important.

The second reason is that some of the basic design concepts and the architecture of these older programs may well appear to have been superseded by recent developments. But anyone who uses something as common as a word-processor knows that more features do not always result in improved functionality. At any time, some of these older approaches could be resuscitated for the simplicity and elegance of their design.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Design for Multimedia Learning   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Design for Multimedia Learning   Buy the book at Amazon US


Tom Boyle, Design for Multimedia Learning, London: Prentice Hall, 1997, pp.240, ISBN: 0132422158


More on online learning
More on technology
More on digital media
More on web design
More on computers


Filed Under: Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Education, eLearning, Media, Multimedia, Online learning

Digital Art

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated survey of contemporary digital art forms

Digital technology has revolutionized the way art is now produced and viewed. Traditional forms such as painting, photography and sculpture have been transformed by digital techniques. Entirely new forms such as software art, digital installations, and virtual reality have emerged, and they are now collected by major museums, institutions, and private collectors. Christiane Paul’s book surveys the developments in digital art from its appearance in the early 1990s right up to the present day. It’s difficult for books like this to keep up with what’s being developed on the Internet, but she makes a good stab at it. She starts out with a rapid survey of the period 1940-1990, in which the foundations were laid. Then came the world wide web, which opened up the Net to Everyman.

Digital ArtAfter this comes her first main section, which deals with the digitisation of the two-dimensional surface. This yields computer-generated images which look like paintings, photographs which look like web sites, and collages which look like a combination of both – some of them even digital images which have been transferred onto canvass, to complete the illusion. There are lots of examples, all of them illustrated in full colour. It’s a visually rich book.

Most of the time her exposition is clear and straightforward, but now and again it does keep slipping into the style of Art School gobbledygook to which commentators on modern art seem irresistibly drawn:

Suggesting antagonisms, the project explores the concept of different poles in dataspace and the ways in which various forms of information can materialize in a dynamic matrix.

Whilst it is unfair to judge these complex works from a text description of them on the page, plus a screenshot, it seems that many of them go down tempting but false avenues of discovery and innovation.

Randomness, interactivity, or simultaneously viewing events from different points of the globe have no intrinsic connection with art – though it is understandable that people should want to exploit such possibilities. ‘Allowing the viewer to select/mix/choose’ is a false avenue.

Works of art are almost always the finished products of one person which we are invited to contemplate. Exploiting the possibilities of the Web and Flash animations seem much more promising routes to me. Time will tell.

Real artists will be grappling with these new digital possibilities right now – musicians making symphonies in their back bedrooms, Flash animators making the next generation of films.

The last part of the book deals with the various forms in which digital art is popularly manifest – artificial intelligence, telepresence and robotics, data visualisation and mapping, hypertextual narratives, and of course gaming.

She includes an excellent lists of artists’ web sites, digital arts organizations, networks, museums, and festivals, plus a select bibliography.

Despite any reservations I might have expressed here, this is an extraordinarily wide-ranging and thorough investigation of what is going on in digital art right now. She discusses all the key artists and works, as well as issues such as the collection, presentation and preservation of digital art, the virtual museum, and ownership and copyright. Very good value.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Digital Art Buy the book at Amazon UK

Digital Art Buy the book at Amazon US


Christiane Paul, Digital Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2008, pp.256, ISBN: 0500203989


More on art
More on media
More on design


Filed Under: Art, Media Tagged With: Art, Digital art, New media, Technology

Digital Art History

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Teaching and learning art using IT

This is a collection of academic conference papers which look at the ways in which digital art history and the use of computers is affecting the ways in which art is both taught and studied. The papers cover issues such as the storage, access, and searchability of images; ownership and copyright. iconography and classification, and the analysis of art works using Computer Aided Design. There’s an account of a multi-media project for instance, Colour and Communication in 20th-Century Abstract Art, which teaches issues of tone, tint, and hue by making comparisons with music which are included as audio files alongside interactive exercises.

Digital Art HistoryNext comes a web-based project called The Cathedral as Virtual Encyclopedia – a virtual panoramic tour of Chartes cathedral. The really interesting and ambitious feature here is that the authoring team, lead by Stephen Clancy, have been digitally manipulating the panorama shots using Macromedia Director to produce a thirteenth-century version of the tour.

This is followed by an account of creating a multimedia database of the source materials archived by Georg Morgenstiern, professor of Indo-Iranian languages at the University of Oslo, Norway. The resulting collection of photographs, sound recordings, and movie clips can be seen at www.nb.no.

There is a short encomium for computer gaming which could safely have been left out of the collection. More interesting is an account of experimental new media art at the University of the West of England in Bristol – though the emphasis is on problems of curation rather than the ‘exhibits’ themselves. This is also true of an essay on the creation of a visually searchable database of images at London Guildhall.

The centrepiece of the book shows how computer graphics and visioning techniques can be used in the scientific analysis of paintings. Once the examples have been digitised using CAD software, new versions can be generated from different points of view; partly occluded objects can be completed; shapes and objects can be analysed; and a 3D version of the scene can be generated.

They show an amazing three dimensional reconstruction of Masaccio’s Florentine fresco, The Trinity. This paper is the work of three scholars in art history and engineering science working collaboratively at the University of Oxford and is probably the highlight of the collection.

As an e-learning author myself, I would sometimes have welcomed a little more technical detail, but there’s certainly enough here to stimulate anybody who want to see what’s possible in harnessing the power of IT to the teaching and learning in visual arts.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Digital Art History Buy the book at Amazon UK

Digital Art History Buy the book at Amazon US


Anna Bentkowska-Kafel et al (eds), Digital Art History, Bristol: Intellect, 2005, pp.118, ISBN 1841501166


More on art
More on media
More on design


Filed Under: Art, Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Art, Computers, Cultural history, Digital art, Digital Art History, Education, New media, Online learning

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 5
  • Next Page »

Reviews

  • Arts
  • Biography
  • Creative Writing
  • Design
  • e-Commerce
  • Journalism
  • Language
  • Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Media
  • Publishing
  • Study skills
  • Technology
  • Theory
  • Typography
  • Web design
  • Writing Skills

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in