Author Archives: ryan valley

Final Assignment: Browsers of the 1990s

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For my final assignment, I researched Web browsers from the 1990s.

I thought it would be fitting to make it into an interactive web based medium where you can somewhat see what the early PCs and browsers felt like. The first section sets the context with the development of the Internet and early Web, before taking you on a tour of browsers through the 90s and the “browser wars” between Microsoft and Netscape.

I made the animations in After Effects and built the interactions in Articulate Storyline.

I hope you have as much nostalgic fun exploring this as I did making this: Browsers of the 1990s

Task 11: Algorithms of Predictive Text

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My predictive text microblog:

“As a society we are going to have to do this for the first time and then we can decide what to do with our own projects”

The only places I have seen sentences like this are in computer generated or predictive text situations, it feels like it is missing some important piece of context that it is alluding to. Somehow it still does sound like an aspect of my voice. Perhaps I speak too ambiguously with my friends? Interesting to reflect on.

Task 10: Attention economy

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This was absolute hell to endure! What an infuriating task. However, it is clear in making the point that “dark patterns” (Brignull, 2011) are manipulative and exploitative of our psychological tendencies. I nearly gave up multiple times, unsure of how to actually proceed while being bombarded with irrelevant or confounding information.

Notably, I found that high contrast colours, buttons, and pop ups were especially distracting and enticing to click on regardless of their text content. A useful exercise for building more self awareness about dark patterns used in web design and how manipulative they actually can be.

 

References

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

Task 9: Golden Record Curation Network

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Palladio produces a network of nodes, showing the connections between songs and song choices in our cohort for the Golden Record curation task. This analysis demonstrates some of the limitations of decontextualized data, it is difficult to make meaning of the data in Palladio, certainly it would be useless to anyone without access to, and background in Task 8. It is an undirected, weighted graph as referenced in the Week 9 materials (Systems Innovation, 2015).

However, if compared to search engine data as referenced in this week’s module, this data could be used to validate correlations and patterns among users in our cohort, analyzing our behaviours and preferences in this activity in relation to other online behaviours such as searches, website visits, and ad clicks.

It is also possible to imagine a world where over time this graph collected more and more data, and was then able to create more accurate and useful graphs, mapping out detailed connections between users and their behaviour. This is closer to how contemporary search engines and social media use big data.

References

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 18). Graph Theory Overview. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/82zlRaRUsaY

Task 8: Golden Record Curation

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Keep

  1. Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
  2. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
  3. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
  4. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
  5. Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
  6. Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
  7. Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
  8. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
  9. China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
  10. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

 

Cut

  1. Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
  2. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
  3. Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
  4. Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
  5. “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
  6. New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
  7. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
  8. Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
  9. “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
  10. Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
  11. Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37
  12. Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
  13. “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
  14. Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
  15. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
  16. Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
  17. Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round,” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17

 

Reflection

Deciding which music will represent human life is certainly a difficult task, and one which is impossible to accurately portray through only 10 songs. My approach involved trying to include the broadest range of instruments while also demonstrating how we use our voices musically. I tried to avoid considerations such as geographic location and cultural or historical context as much as possible to avoid getting paralyzed by analysis as I do not believe it is possible to convey these dimensions in only 10 musical choices. This meant that I needed to choose which message I wanted to send, my message is simply that we communicate in a variety of ways, including music, and we use tools (instruments) to extend our capabilities.

Task 7: Mode-bending

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This project was challenging, notably in that my goal was to explain the contents of my bag in under two minutes so as to keep it short enough to keep someone’s attention. I realized that I do not always speak unscripted as quickly as I can read or write, especially when crafting something for an academic audience.

I attempted to share the contents of my bag in a POV format which is common on social media platforms these days such as Tik Tok or in “unboxing” videos. My intention with this redesign was that the familiarity of this format would compel those literate in this type of imagery to watch my video.

Task 6: Emoji story

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Describing the storyline of an episode of a TV show using only emojis as one of the most difficult tasks in this course so far. I am hoping that the plot is conveyed through these images, but I feel that it will be difficult to interpret accurately despite my best efforts.

This task was challenging and highlighted the nuances of modern written and oral language compared to hieroglyphics, or at least my familiarity with them and my ability to use a limited set of graphic symbols to tell an intricate story. I found myself relying mostly on whole words and ideas to tell this story, and the imagery selected tells more of a conceptual or feeling of what happens rather than specific details.

I started with the title in the hopes that it would be a useful clue, however in this case it may be more confusing than helpful.

Task 5: Twine Story

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Building on my last post, I created a twine story where the user gets to be a cat, either “Sam” or “Ben”. This choice is arbitrary in this version, but I could imagine creating a whole separate storyline for the different characters if I had more time. It took awhile to get used to Twine as I have never used it before, but once I got started I found it to be a very intuitive platform. After spending a few hours thrashing to figure out the basics, I put together the story. I spent some time storyboarding out the different options and events I wanted to include in the story and then wrote the actual content directly in the Twine passages. I found myself relying on a more informal storytelling choice of words and sentence structure than I typically use in writing, and found that the format of a text based game feels very conversational. I can see Twine being useful for teaching/learning since it can be made very interesting and engaging. Using more variables and multimedia, it would be fun to create a more complex learning game eventually using this platform.

Task 4 Manual Scripts

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Usually, I write by hand as minimally as possible. Writing by hand is reserved for bulleted points in lists, simple items in mind maps, or short sentences in notebooks. Anything longer than a paragraph is typed. Due to this practice, I found this task difficult since I rarely write more than a couple of paragraphs at a time by hand these days.

The primary reasons for this are that I can type faster and more legibly than I can write by hand. The legibility aspect is important, typing produces a consistent form to all of the characters that make up words on a page. The secondary benefit is that I can type directly into a cloud based note and review it on any device or edit on my computer. 

Writing on paper with an ink pen is susceptible to messy mistakes. I decided to scribble out my mistakes and write my correction overtop for a word change, or to simply leave the characters obscured by scribbles to signify omitting the mistake entirely. Writing by pen meant that I could not easily remove a mark once left on the paper, it could only be covered up. When typing on computer, I can backspace and easily remove and correct any mistake. These differences lead to me caring less about making mistakes when writing by hand since it seems pointless to worry about, and thinking more about mistakes when typing since it can be easily corrected. Another reason for this is that most of my handwritten work is only ever viewed by me (with the exception of a postcard or note to a friend) and my typed words are often for external audiences.

Writing by hand is a more organic and less mechanistic way of writing, making it slightly closer to orality but still significantly technologically different. Comparing typing to writing by hand elucidates how typing was another major shift in communication.

Task 3: Speech to Text

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Okay, so this is a story about a time when I thought I might not survive. So it starts when I was on vacation probably 10 years ago, in Brazil. And so me and my partner at the time were in southeast Brazil, staying on a small island called Elliot don’t Mel. And it was really beautiful place. There are tons of mosquitoes and really nice beaches. But anyway, anyway, there was a cave on the south part of the island. And so it’s really tiny islands, you could walk down there. And it only took a couple hours. And so we decided to walk down to go see this cave. But thing we didn’t realize was that the only way to get from the north to the south part of the islands by foot, if you didn’t have a boat was to go along this this jacket rock path that was right on the beach. And so you had to go when the tide was out, because if the tide was high, you wouldn’t be able to cross or go back. And so not knowing this, we went down to the cave. And it was beautiful, Texan pictures. And out of nowhere, this huge Tropical Storm blows in. And suddenly, it’s torrential downpour. And everything is drenched. There’s lightning. And we could tell it was getting pretty bad. It’s the lightning was like every few seconds. And so it’s dark, we’re wet. And we’re just sort of stuck on this beach. And so we’re trying to get back and to go back to the north part of the islands where our hostel is we have to go over that path. And we didn’t realize that now the tide had risen and so we weren’t able to just walk back anymore, we had to swim and actually go in the water to get back and we would have just waited out the storm but we also were running out of daylight and it was starting to get dark and so we had to walk through quite a bit of jungle forest to get back still and so we knew that we had to get back before the sunset completely or else we would be lost in the jungle on this island. And so so we start trying to find our way along this path through the water and kind of realize that the only way to do this is to actually go all the way into the water and and yes we had bags it’s like cameras and things like that in them and I’ve got fat is screaming and crying. And we go into the water and I toss her the backpack and it floats out to sea so that I could go dive in and grab this backpack with all of our our stuff in that cameras and bring this back and the waves are crashing right beside us into the rocks and there’s lightning every two seconds splashing around us. And I thought I don’t know if I’m going to die here get electrocuted or get pulled out into the water drown or get lost in silence but after this for five minutes of terror We made it to the other side and hurried back to make her way back to the hospital

How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?  In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?

Speech is non-grammatical, it is ephemeral and challenges the sense of time and space of conventions of the literate world. While written English is material as described by Haas (2013), “having mass or matter and occupying physical space” (p. 4), and endures through time, oral speech lasts an instant and floats through the air, leaving no trace except memory. As someone growing up in a literary world, the term “subtext” comes to mind; oral storytelling comes with a rich “subtext” of layers of meaning beyond what is spoken. For example, in telling this story I am presumably in some social situation speaking directly to another person, the story is inextricably wrapped in layers of situational context that are unclear from this passage. Questions must be asked of this text to understand it such as:

    • Why am I telling this story? 
    • What situation am I in while telling this story?
    • Who am I speaking with?
    • What do I really want the person I am speaking with to know about me? 
    • What am I really saying about who I am as a person and my relationship to the other person? 

In a literary work, an author would necessarily explain important contextual factors and relationships in writing, making them seem definite and absolute. With oral storytelling, situational factors are often more ambiguous and unclear, rules are not set in stone and can change ad hoc.

The socio-culturally agreed upon grammatical rules of a language are not rigidly applied to spoken language, at least in part because of the nature of oral storytelling, “a spoken (or mentally composed) message unfolds in time” (Gnanadesikan, 2011, p. 3) whereas writing places messages in space. Writing inherently implies permanence, but oral speech is a moment becoming a memory in real time, free from the mechanistic structures of physical objects.

What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?  What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?  What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

First, there are a number of both informal and formal grammatical rules of written English that are broken by the text from my oral story. There are many redundant words, missing prepositions, run-on sentences, and non-grammatical sentence structures. Sometimes the subject of the sentences is unclear. Additionally, many of the terms and phrases did not translate over accurately which led to some humorous results:

    • Elliot don’t Mel 
    • Jacket rock
    • Texan pictures
    • Back to the hospital

The island was called Ilha do Mel, I was describing jagged rocks, we were taking pictures, and we went back to the hostel. Some of these miscommunications might be quickly translated by someone through inductive and deductive reasoning given the rest of the information available, but some could lead to very confusing interpretations. For example, the location is important; if a reader is from the region they might be confused and distracted by this confounding information. More seriously, the interpretation of hostel to hospital at the end of the text following the sentence about my fears of death might lead a reader to question my safety and health.

Secondly, the information in the text might be “wrong”, meaning inaccurate. I was not from the island, and did not speak Portuguese, there very well could have been a safer way to get back to the hostel. However, when telling this story I presented my experience as fact, because at the time it was what I was thinking and feeling. This presents another difference between oral and written texts, if I had scripted this story I might fact check it, edit it multiple times, curate my selection of words. I would scrutinize it to the standards of the written world before sharing it and mechanize my speech to make it free from errors. I would care about the accuracy of my words because I would fear judgement and know that my words would become lasting tangible reality. Orality on the other hand is based in memory and lived experience, it emphasizes sharing subjective realities better than material facts. This is a strength of orality in its ability to persuade and evoke emotion.  

Last year, I began creating closed captions for videos for work to help improve accessibility. This practice has significantly changed my awareness of the differences between literary text and orality. I have come to understand that natural oral speech is non-grammatical, often containing stutters, non sequiturs, lengthy run-on sentences and filler words or phonetic sounds that contain no dictionary meaning. Taking this class, I now find the term “non-grammatical” to be quite intriguing. I learned this word as a common way to describe how people talk among the closed captioning community. This relates to Ong’s (2002) discussion on how literate culture understands orality in terms of how it is not literate (pp. 11 – 13), completely missing the point that orality preceded written literacy. Captioning is an exercise in taking something which can not be fully understood in a written form, and documenting it anyway because this is the best solution we can come up with.

There have been times when I am captioning where a sentence that I thought sounded completely reasonable becomes nonsensical after looking at it through the lenses of grammar and written definitions, highlighting the powerful impact of tone, pitch, body language, and other unwritten cues for conveying meaning. Orality can convey emotional meaning and a sense of interpersonal understanding in a fraction of the time that it would take to explain and interpret through written text. I do not see the non-grammatical errors in oral speech as mistakes, rather as an entirely different way of being and communicating.

 

References

Gnanadesikan, A. E., & Wiley Online Library. (2011;). The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the

internet (1. Aufl. ed.). Chichester, U.K;Malden, MA;: Wiley-Blackwell.

Haas, C. (2013). Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy Taylor and Francis.

doi:10.4324/9780203811238

Ong, W. J., Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy:

The technologizing of the word. London;New York;: Routledge.

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