juliannechat

Feelings from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop (ELO2021 - 2)

Among Laura Hyunjhee Kim's many roles is that of feelosopher.

As described on her website, "a Living Lab focuses on the body as a feelosophical medium and a somatic laboratory for art-in-the-making." And so her workshop "Feeling without Touching" included remote-friendly versions of her practices, which involve "attending to the everyday with a sense of critical wonderment," by means of "spontaneous and improvisational perspective-shifting experiments."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE ALL DID. (I looked up these words afterwards. In the moment I just experienced her suggested activities to the deepest extent possible.) 

Part of the documentation is an image of all of us dancing. I'm waving my large arms and also (it's probably not possible to discern) using my electronic recliner to fold and unfold at the same time. 

Laura asked us to choose an object. This was mine: an extra-large D20 for tabletop gaming. (With pencil for scale, and a view out my office window.) 

(Due to climate change there is thermal film on that window, and I'm featuring the number 17 because Stephanie Strickland has turned me on to prime numbers. You can see this same ledge in my Palm Sunday posting.) 

Up close, the die has glitter embedded in it ...

... which reminded me of the glitter we had played with in Katie Schaag's workshop the previous day. 

My most surprising encounter with the die was when I closed my eyes and simply felt. The hard edges and corners felt "safe"; they were not going to hurt me. 

And finally, when Laura asked us to drink water (all together), I didn't expect to have a flash of worry about the water molecules and their health and our health and the health of Gaia.

I'm now realizing that on a deep level this connection to water is always with me, and I have to ignore or tune it out for some daily activities, but when Laura asked us to be present, there it was!

THIS NEXT BIT IS OPTIONAL and involves "visions" /warning

In the 90s I "captured" some text from the point of view of the water molecules in my morning wash water. It turns out (I was surprised to "discover") that they were keeping an inventory of all living creatures and reporting back to a vibrating database (in the Sargasso Sea at the time; they might since have moved it). 

"Apparently," back in the day, water molecules pushed atoms and molecules together into chlorophyll and proteins and all manner of shapes, so that the (the water) could flow through these shapes and have varied and interesting embodied experiences. But the human-shaped creatures have been harmful to the biosphere generally, and (I was saddened, but not surprised, to further "discover") now water is conducting a referendum on whether to pull their creations apart.

Here are the sort-of-poems. 

Of course, rather than leave well enough alone, I buried them at the center of a hypertext called Murmur of Water. Depending on how you answer a question at the beginning, the reader is either stuck at MIT with some computers wondering where the humans have gone, or maybe it's not too late but this situation is tense. 

The hypertext was an artistic failure, which I analyzed last year in this infographic.

Thank you, Laura and everyone in the workshop!

 

Here's my self-intro for the conference overall. I hope it'll link to more notes soon.

ELO 2021: session report links, self-intro, & 2 stories from the 90s

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.

time to Echo? yes, because art

I worry that if I get an Echo, I'll become even more Narcissus-istic than I already am.

Carrie, that one was for you. I'll keep working on my one liners.

The moment the Echo came out, people started making art with Alexa. Here's The Listeners, the first Alexa project I was ever aware of, from John Cayley and collaborators, which has now been updated multiple times.

Here's an opinionated and informative overview of the space by Jessi Hempel. 

In 2017 I will get one, because I also want to design for voice on these new platforms.  

While I'm thinking of pioneers who have passed away, I highly recommend Wired For Speech by Cliff Nass and Scott Brave. (Cliff is the deceased pioneer. The book's subtitle: "how voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship.") Their findings can be weaponized now. Is that a good or bad development? To be continued!

 

PS: I hung a poster of this painting by Waterhouse in my college dorm, and earlier this year I temporarily resurrected it, along with an early Yes album cover, to decorate the upstairs hall while Valerie and I were downsizing. Narcissus also has a cameo in a discussion of this art project: When I Think About You I Text Myself.

Carol Leaman: anyone can build anything

"There is no such thing as a technology race any more. It's a marketing race. Anybody can build anything. You just need to go get customers as fast as humanly possible and lock them down with real value, so you buy yourself years in the market and you can grow from there."

From a Business Insider feature on Leaman's experience with Axonify.

Thought-provoking rants on Medium

Jorge Ribs' Bridgefy pre-launch rant

Gonzalo Muñoz: Trash is Nothing More Than a Design Error

Nikki Lee: "There are two ways to be noteworthy. You can be the absolute best in the world at something. Or you can put together two things that haven’t been combined before.

You can be the absolute best in the world at the game that exists. Or you can make your own game."

[This is buried in a longer rant.]

@krave on Apple's App Store not letting developers post fixes

Jesse Saunders on house music and innovation

"The most interesting tech companies aren’t trying to sell software to other companies. They are trying to reshape industries from top to bottom." (Chris Dixon from Andreesen Horowitz, quoted by Roderick Morris.)

Scott Belsky on The Interface Layer: Where Design Commoditizes Tech

 

ux+viral case study: Order Of The Stick's turbo-Kickstart

Last week Rich Berlew's Kickstarter project became one of the top ten funded Kickstarter projects of all time, and the highest ranked one that's creative (not technical). Rich's goal was to raise $57,750 to reprint one of his web-comic compilations, and he received $400,000 in the first 12 days. As a comparison, of the top 10 comics-related Kickstarters in 2011, only one cracked the $100K barrier and most hovered around $25K.

How and why did this campaign go (comparatively) viral?

The usual elements for a successful Kickstart were in place: Rich's comic is high quality, with a solid base of long time readers (most of whom are geeky and thus more familiar with online fundraising). But he also has a design degree and prior self-publishing experience. He added extra elements to the usual Kickstarter campaign and those, combined with ongoing responsiveness to his target customers, are making the difference. Here are the distinguishing elements of user experience (ux) that helped this drive go viral:

Sponsor rewards are unique merchandise

Rich's self published books are sold in gaming stores. They contain significant extra content that has never been on his web site, and older titles are out of print. "Sponsoring" in this case is more like "purchasing merchandise" than with most Kickstarters.

Upbeat progress charts are linked by a narrative

Rich's updates are the heart of the campaign. His color-coded charts visually show how each new chunk of money will be used; they're the old "thermometer" progress graphics on steroids and mushrooms together.

The charts are linked by a story, which started with a comic on the project's home page (an opportunity to kick a character from the strip) and unfolds with developments on each new chart, so readers want to check the updates whether or not they've already signed up. (For the full effect, read from the back forward.)

Rewards are networked

Some sponsor rewards are PDFs of new stories that the fans want. As people kept donating, Rich added all the electronic rewards to EACH package. By now a person who bought in for the $10 "fridge magnet" level is getting a ton of special rewards that they didn't plan on getting, and the revelation of each new "Mystery Reward" also kept people checking back in and telling their fellow fans.

One of the latest rewards is a set of free downloads. Rich Berlew wrote, "That's my way of thanking all the fans who may be not be able to help out in monetary ways but are spreading the word and keeping it alive." To sum up, the networked-rewards technique uses swag to leverage the power of Metcalfe's law.

Kickstarter comments support viral behaviour

As various targets were reached, and more books are able to be reprinted, Berlew began offering full sets of the books, full sets signed, full sets signed with original art, and so on. And early sponsors switched to these better options. To quote Dave Freireich at approximately comment 1960, "Only 2 books? What was I thinking? I want all of the full color books. Pledge upped!"

Kickstarter doesn't allow projects to adjust or remove rewards that people have already signed up for. Berlew continually added various combinations of merchandise as requested by fans, so that now the list of sponsor packages is (a) mostly sold out and (b) an unholy mess.

But as people "managed their pledge" (which Kickstarter does support, quite elegantly), some of the early sold-out packages (rare Christmas ornaments, full sets of magnets that you would have had to attend three gaming cons to get, etc.) briefly "flicked on" as available. The comments list was a 24-hour party of fans around the world refreshing their browsers and trying to get the rare stuff. Then they praised Kickstarter's server capacity and decided to make a chart of where fans were geographically and showed all those other signs of a project going viral on the web.

Summary (at the half-way mark of 15 days)

To sum up, Rich Berlew was already taking good care of his target audience with high quality content and extras such as Christmas ornaments and fridge magnets. He took the basic Kickstarter template and added dramatic progress visualizations and networked rewards. His fans took this viral.

As of this posting (Sunday evening 5 Feb 2012) the drive is closing in on the #6 position (on the all-time list of Kickstart projects), but in his latest update Rich has also suggested that it will soon be OK to put on the brakes: "That should take us to a cool half a million dollars of OOTS products being created and shipped, which defies all logic and common sense." With 15 days to go, I can't wait to see where this ends up.

read | play link updates

I have updated the "read | play" list (to your right), a selection of people whose work with electrons has inspired me. You are invited to hover over the links to see WHY I think you might enjoy clicking each one. I have also collected list metadata & trivia for those of you who have read the hover text and want to have fun with it.

Many of the people listed create poetry as a primary or secondary activity, or just because they can. Grappling with their work takes everything I have. By now I know not to even start when I cannot pay full attention. That says more about me than about poetry, but I'm just explaining this because I don't like to hear, "I tried a poem once but I couldn't get into it." Rita Mae Brown recommends preparing physically for mental challenges and mentally for physical challenges. So a few hours of Pilates (or equiv) should set us right up...

No attempt has been made to be comprehensive; many more digital objects | opportunities to read | play can be purchased from Eastgate or the MIT Press and found in the directory maintained by the Electronic Literature Organization. I hope that if you find the list wanting (too many poets and visionaries? not enough history and theory? needs more Australians?), you will be inspired to update your own and send me a link.

As I checked all the links just now, several pieces in particular struck me.

 

Secret rules from within Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature

This node offers an alternative path into Deena Larsen's e-literature teaching site. It contains the most concise statement of ... I dare you to click it, that's all.

 

Torill Mortensen's thinking with my fingers entry "It feels final"

Excerpt: Living in Volda, the distinction between "real" and "virtual" world feels meaningless. What's real about living here? It's so secluded, so filled with its own rules, concerns and moving by its own rythm that living in the flesh world of Volda is like living in a virtual world. The insane beauty of the place, combined with the ruthless weather, the heavy darkness and the dreariness of the third month of rain and sleet, it turns Volda into something on the flip-side of other flesh world realities. At the same time - this is it. This is the reality, because reality is made up of a million little spots like this, places of heartbreaking beauty and equally numbing mundaneity, spread like random handfuls of marbles all over the planet.

Torill, your poetic way of ... *weeps quietly* Hope the move continues to go smoothly.

 

Elin Sjursen's posting on Barriers to Understanding Twitter

Excerpt: Journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. ... Sweeping generalizations that misguide the public on the reality of what happens online is a big problem.

Although perhaps my favourite bit is where she asks (after quoting some "experts"), "Are you on twitter? Is this how you feel?" Exactly!

 

The final two links have content about health, linked to matters of spirit and mortality:

Justine Larbalestier's posting on RSI and so much more, "Farewell For Now"

Bassey Ikpi's re-posting of "One Good Reason To Stay (A Poem for Phyllis Hyman)"

Excerpt from the introduction: Fuck Stigma. If you need help, get help. Those who wish to shame you aren’t going to ever come to your rescue. Fuck them. Seek treatment. Pity the ones not brave enough to seek help. Who only want to sit in judgment of those who do. Fuck them. Seek treatment. Talk about it. Fuck a stigma.

 

If you are listed here, and I have not linked to the preferred version of your online presence, please let me know (juliannechat at gmail dot com). All comments are welcome!

oooh! readinglisted again!

Every now and then a teacher assigns one of my URLs as class reading. It's always a thrill. (Susana Pajares Tosca and Chris Willerton were the first, I think.)

This particular link is embarrassing because I've written many usability reports, and this one is NOT one of my most professional. The tone is chatty (qualitative) and it reports only on a minor "icebreaker" activity, not a full review. However, most of my professional usability reports (including the ones for Trellix) have been too proprietary to post online so this sample is all that's out there. Dan Bricklin (the client in this case) believes in exposing all aspects of his process for others to learn from, and since the site was more or less a personal project of his, he included in the site one of the usability reviews of it.

A course syllabus from Berkeley SIMS IS 214; the other readings look terrific!

The usability report referenced; *blush*

You can follow Dan Bricklin's continuing (professional) adventures on his weblog.

I cannot resist adding a bonus link to one of the most fun (for me) samples of writing I did for Dan. (I did some sample documents in Trellix format that were LOTS more fun than this, but this is the most fun of the ones that are still out there in HTML.) He asked me to do a sample document for a fictional company going through a reorg. Here it is, inside one of his slide shows. The goal was to show how an online document could be made more "scannable" than the equivalent content on paper. I am amused to see that he posted the version that includes a "to do" list of what else could be done to make the document even better. (Again, Dan believes it's important to expose process.) Anyway, the fun part for me was that I got to include (what I hope was) some satire in the background memos...along with the usual...

Kappa's hard-charging Director, J. Osbert Kennell, will be leaving immediately to pursue other opportunities. Os has been a "true believer" whose ability to articulate the Kappa technology and approach have made Kappa what it is today...

In our global marketplace, the risks are great, but so are the rewards. These are difficult times, as Sigma attempts to adjust to global change while continuing to provide our customers with the best solutions possible and extend our domination of all three major product categories. Thank you in advance for remaining flexible and willing to make whatever changes may be necessary for all of us to succeed. Etc...

 

Ironically, I've just registered for the last two classes that I'll take as part of my UTS degree in interactive multimedia, and one of them is about "global IT management issues" - so I hope I'll be learning about the reality behind the hype-y language I parodied. Will report back on that!