Mindtracks

It is crucial to ask who you are creating a website for. In How To Create Pen Portraits and Understand Your Target Audience Chris Garrett discusses pen portraits as a way to visualise who your website is for. This is a marketing technique but many visual artists who are developing an online presence will find it useful to stop and think about who it is they are trying to communicate with.

Tom Haskins of growing changing learning creating has defined four different motivations for blogging

• Distraction blogs
• Archive blogs
• Conversation blogs
• Democratic blogs

Tom has been exploring these ideas further in the past week but these may be motivation for the blogger to write but I think at least a couple of these categories motivate a type of reading too. For instance if you are in a mood to read an ‘Archive blog’ and follow the links it is a different reading practice to participating in a ‘Conversation blog’.

Of course some blogs are a mix of these and it would be interesting to survey and break down the popular blogs and see what percentage of their content could be classified as falling into which of these categories.

Thanks for the link via 901am

British paper artist Peter Callesen creates intricate paper cutouts, which reveal a painstaking craftsmanship. The results of folding and cutting produce stark, dramatic 3D pieces that hint at narrative.

Callesen has an interest memory and its connection to childhood. He describes his work as a reinterpretation of classical fairytales and inspired by romanticism. Of his most recent work Callesen states that he is interested in relationship between two and three dimensionality and the tension between image and reality

The work exists in the gab between the recognizable everyday object and the fragile and spherical condition and material in which it appears. The whiteness, the ideal pure copy of something real as well as the vertical direction coherent in most of my paper works, could also indicate the aspect of something platonic or religious.

Legibility and Comprehension of Onscreen Type: Comparing the Legibility and Comprehension of Type Size, Font Selection and Rendering Technology of Onscreen Type (PDF) by Scott Chandler is a doctorate dissertation which contradicts many findings of prior studies.

This study considered the relationships between type size, font selection, and type rendering technology of legibility as indicated by speed of reading and comprehension when testing was performed on a computer with a CRT. The results offer an additional view on a new, under-researched area. The finding that there are optimal sizes onscreen will be an important concept to some. Evidence that the effect of anti-alias is highly contextualized based on type family and potentially specific typefaces could have an even more far-reaching impact. Clearly the role of reading on the computer needs to be better understood and explored through future research.

Laura Ruel and Nora Paul point to eyetracking research which is useful for online writers, editors and designers. In Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design a study indicated that reformatted text to make the main idea concise, tighter writing to shorter lines of text, and more white space took less time to read and increased comprehension. In a second study it was found that images used for the sake of having a picture are ignored.

Little people A Street Art project is by a London based installation artist Slinkachu.

Small hand painted figures are placed in everyday situations in the urban environment, photographed and ‘left to fend for themselves’. In other words they are left to be discovered by passers by who are observant enough to notice.

Slinkachu plays on the notion of surprise. This inventive blog charms while you re-evaluate the urban environment as Slinkachu hints at feelings of alienation, isolation, and loneliness.

In an interesting and well researched article Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Bryan Alexander asks how higher education might respond to the key concepts, projects and practices associated with Web 2.0 technologies.

With social software as a major component and the rapid adoption and growth of tagging, Alexander points out searching, reading and writing practices are all significantly different. How these practices can be applied in higher education is the question.

As an example Alaxander points to some of the advantages of social bookmarking in higher education and argues the practice allows for collaborative information discovery.

First, they act as an “outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries.

Bryan Alexander also teases out the possible implications of other web services such as Wikis which as collaborative writing platforms makes them useful tools in higher education. Blogs too are useful as they allow for writing and interaction via comments and RSS allows for the content to be combined with other services. The implications of these innovations in the way research, reading, writing and dissemmination of ideas and information is accomplished and how higher education responds to the challenges are as Alexander points out yet to be seen.

The Museum of Lost Interactions is described as a timeline of innovation.

The website consists of nine exhibits of forgotten communication and entertainment media, ranging from 1900 to 1979.

These are curious and fascinating projects that prefigure many of the technological gadgets we play with today.

These nine exhibits were donated by a group studying Interactive Media Design, who lovingly restored each to working order. Their discoveries were made whilst researching examples of interaction design that pre-dated digital technology. They also uncovered archive film, photography and packaging which places each artifact in its historical context.

I know that everyone involved has been affected by the surprising similarities and profound differences between these and contemporary designs, and of how interchangeable technologies often are but how much more important social change can be.

French Manuscript Illumination of the Middle Ages presents French manuscripts from the Getty Museum’s collection. This includes books spanning a period of over 700 years, from the mid-800s through the early 1500s.

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