The conference team is doing a great job! Wit and wonder abound. Links to my session reports:
- GIF from Katie Schaag's workshop "Queer/Femme Internet Aesthetics"
- Notes from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop "Feeling Without Touching"
[the following were awesome
and I hope to write about them later this year]
Wednesday Keynote by Lai-Tze Fan:
"Unseen Hands: On the Gendered Design of Virtual Assistants and the Limits of Creative AI"
Thursday Keynote by Archana Prasad (and many collaborators):
"RadBots: AI Augmented Writing towards Radical Video Bots"
Friday Keynote by Olga Goriunova:
"Subject-making and aesthetics of data practices"
Since 1998 these conferences have been respites from my career (LinkedIn) and regular life. This week I am on PTO (=paid time off, vacation) from my day job but my regular life is fraught, so I decided with a heavy heart to witness the tools and art sessions via video "later" (as a treat for myself throughout the summer) and actually attend:
- One precious workshop each day
- All the keynotes
- Events I'm doing with Deena (WRITEPODs being the one I worked on most fiercely)
The New Work is usually my favorite part, which means when I meet artists I have just seen their work and am able to react/enthuse. Missing that.
A partial self-intro
This blog subtitle "let's play follow the reader" references my career-long obsession with how people read online. My other obsessions include games and collaboration, summed up by this text from inside the early Frisbee:
Flat flip flies straight. Tilted flip curves. Play catch; invent games!
Those sentences used to be my Twitter intro, but now they're just on Medium. My read | play list (to the right), last updated in 2010, was a mix of people I had worked with and people I wanted to work with as of that date. My own works (some in the list on the left) have suffered from my "create one per platform and move on" approach but I learned something from each one. As part of facilitating the work of inventor/creators, my best skills are editing, facilitating collaboration, and continuous process improvement.
My first full time job was with an interactive TV startup, then I moved to tech writing and usability, then to working on interface "personality." For awhile I gave conference talks on online help and what I then called "object-oriented documentation." I was a fan of early hypertext (multiple platforms) and wrote erotica in Storyspace. In the 90s I was doing tech writing and usability at a CD-ROM division of Lotus and assigned myself to keep track of the early internet on top of that ...
Career highlights: the infographic
I met "this community" when Dan Bricklin sent me to ACM-HYPERTEXT (now SIGWEB) in 1998 to demonstrate Trellix. Since I'd been tracking pre-web-HT I knew well how most works invented their own user interfaces. Discovering how each one worked was part of the adventure. But many creators chose to sit with each reader to help them discover their work, so I started sharing basic UX observation techniques (including "sit quietly, on your hands, and watch") and I helped Deena Larsen organize the conference | house | party that was the CyberMountain Colloquium. Now we have page metrics and eye tracking, but low budget "fresh reaction" techniques still work and have informed my work with this year's WRITEPODs; I'm still joyfully collaborating with Deena!
I've also had the honor of working with (and learning a great deal from) Stephanie Strickland. Projects have included a non-standard Tumblr in honor of Dragon Logic and coordinating the work of two programmers for her "code project for print," Ringing the Changes.
And in order to work with Markku Eskelinen I learned enough Finnish to say, "Puhutko Suomea? En puhu." (Do I speak Finnish? Nope!) But it was Raine Koskimaa who laughed. I was glad to discover that word-magicians as featured in Kalevala are still with us.
Nowadays, as a small part of my current day job, I help two colleagues manage a dozen customer support chatbots. As of April 2021 this link goes to the chatbot for Sage Fixed Assets. Naturally I'm watching all the machine learning content with great interest.
Note re embodiment and archiving
A former therapist told me there are three ways to think about one's body: what it can do, what it "looks" like, and how it feels to inhabit it.
I've always been grateful for what my body can do (dance, row, hike) but have disliked how it looked and "felt". Cross-dressing helped a bit. I have brain chemicals that allowed me to talk easily with strangers (I recently did some coaching on how to talk to strangers at conferences, and here's the flyer) and a big voice, and for much of my career I weighed over 300 pounds. Being loud and large made me feel less specifically gendered.
Now that societal changes are making it easier, I'm using Jules and they/them pronouns, and I chose the nonbinary X on my drivers' license, and Deena used Rose Language to help me engage with the change. Of course I haven't gotten around to rebranding any of my web content, partly because I value the history. My first web site was at the nation's first public ISP, and it's still there! Not forever of course; I'm in the process of archiving and saving just the good stuff.
Two old stories (that I think are funny) about presenting Trellix to the eliterature community
At ACM-HYPERTEXT 1998, Doug Engelbart looked at Trellix, and asked tough questions such as, "If you change the name of the link there, does it propagate to the actual node (=lexia)," and fortunately the answer to that was yes. I chatted with him for awhile and got some of the pioneers' history confused ...
The next day I came up to him and said, "I wanted to apologize for something I said yesterday. I think I mistakenly attributed one of your ideas to Ted Nelson."
And he looked at me completely deadpan and replied, "It kept me up all night."
The other story is from TP21CL 1999, during the era in which large groups of people sat and watched as each presenter came up with their own laptop, connected to a projector, and rebooted. (Pretty soon after that, events started requiring you to give them your slides way in advance. But this was partly a tools/tech conference and most of the tech was new enough to require its own machines.)
Anyway, we were all in a lovely, steeply banked, wood-paneled auditorium at Brown, and I was presenting head-to-head against a hyperbolic text (viewer? or something) tool called The Brain. I'd created a work that showed off the Trellix features that were most useful for eliterature, but I failed to fully connect my laptop to all the pins of the projector so everything onscreen was too orange and white. (Afterwards Jim Rosenberg said kindly, "At least you engaged with the community.")
Then the guy representing The Brain took the stage, looking Matrixy (The Matrix had just come out), with glossy black hair edgily cut, wearing black jeans and a short sleeved black t-shirt, moving around the stage athletically.
He said, "I hear you people are into books so I decided to make a Brain using my favorite novel of all time!"
And much of the audience leaned forward a bit.
And he unveiled an interesting-looking web of words onscreen and said proudly, "Atlas Shrugged!"
[1] Footnote: Lily Zheng's excellent To Dismantle Anti-Asian Racism, We Must Understand Its Roots.
Comments