Memoz spatial weblogging

Transcription

1 Memoz spatial weblogging Jon Hoem Bergen University College Abstract. The article argues that spatial webpublishing has influence on weblogging, and calls for a revision of the current weblog definition. The weblog genre should be able to incorporate spatial representation, not only the sequential ordering of articles. The article show examples of different spatial forms, including material produced in Memoz (MEMory OrganiZer). Keywords: Memoz, spatial webpublishing, spatial montage, spatial weblogging 1 Introduction What I call spatial weblogging can be seen as a natural response to a more general development of media at large: from media with a bias towards making time one of the most significant factor towards emphasizing space. The following discussion of the cultural implications of personal media, and weblogs and spatial publishing systems in particular, should be understood in relation to two major movements concerning the differences between editorial and conferring media, and between evanescent and positioned media [1]. The first concerns the movement of power, from a situation where central units were in control towards a situation where large parts of the production, distribution, and use of media content happens through collective processes. The second concerns a shift in media concerning time, from a situation where the time between an event and the public mediation of this event was considered important towards an increasing importance of space. This influences production, distribution and use.

2 Editorial media follow a tradition where a relatively small number of people select, produce and redact media content before this is distributed to a public audience where every individual user is addressed in the same manner. A distinctive mark of editorial media is that production and publishing are controlled by formal procedures before the content is made available to the public. Editorial media is contrasted by conferring media where there are no formalized procedures for controlling the content before it is published. Those who edit and produce the content are individuals not part of an organization. Conferring media are also characterized by the users active participation. What I choose to call evanescent media is characterized by a close relationship between events, the production of content and the moment of publishing. Evanescent media are both contrasted and complemented by positioned media, that is media where space becomes more important than time. Examples are digital media where both the production and consumption of mediated content is made dependent on where the user is situated in space. This shift is introduced by mobile devices that make their users able to produce, store and distribute media content combined with specific information about these devices position. Some personal publishing-solutions already include positioning (e.g. by introducing geotagging in weblogs), other solutions let the users make explicit connections between maps and information (like Google's My Maps). 2 Weblog definition In a situation where conferring and positioned media become more widely used it is about time to discuss whether a weblog-definition, emphasizing chronology as a key feature, should be revised. Weblogs are already one of the most important genres of conferring media, but the full impact of mobility and positioning is yet to be seen. Spatial relationships between mediated objects and the events they represent will form sub-genres that we need to include when discussing the features of weblogs. When Jörn Barger coined the term weblog, more than ten years ago, he presented the following description: "A weblogger (sometimes called a blogger or a pre-surfer) logs all the other webpages she finds interesting. /../ The format is normally to add the newest entry at the top of the page, so

3 that repeat visitors can catch up by simply reading down the page until they reach a link they saw on their last visit" [2]. Barger mentions the reverse chronological order as a common feature, but this is probably of minor importance when trying to explain the success of weblogs. Far more important are usability, the ability to publish with a personal voice, and the hypertextual connections (permalinks, trackbacks, linkbacks etc) to and feedback from other users. This makes an individual part of collaborative efforts that also facilitates the creation of communities. Expressed differently: If one remove the chronological sequencing of posts one would only loose the most obvious technical characteristics of weblogs, but all the features that have made personal publishing a success remain. Weblogs can be seen as online diaries, but arguably the most powerful metaphor is the ship log. The reference to "log" emphasizes that a weblog is always about things and events that belong to the past at the moment of publishing. The log includes different representations of events, the time when the references were made and finally references to the locations where the events took place. The latter is yet not developed into a significant feature of today's weblogs. "Log" also imply some assumptions about frequency: In the classical log of a ship one will be likely to expect either entries on a regular basis, by the occurrence of important events, or both. In the ship-log the relationship to a specific place is arguably just as important as the reference to time. On the Internet a place can be virtual, defined by a URL, or it can be a reference to a physical position, defined by a Geo-URL. 3 Spatial Montage Until print technology emerged in the latter half of the 1400s, paintings and decorated architecture were the dominating technologies when mediating stories. In Europe the invention of printing made it possible to organize information more systematically - represented linear - and because of relatively cheap reproduction printed text became dominant for almost 500 years. Visual representations where of course developed along with print, but one can argue that print did become the preferred way of distributing knowledge. This is still clearly seen in education, where printed books dominate. Spatial, visual representations are still largely the domain of art and entertainment.

4 There is, however, a lot to be learned from the long traditions that store, structure and present information visually. Even though we do not remember all information as images, information is often easier to remember when connected to familiar spatial forms. In ancient Greece, a predominantly oral culture, one developed techniques to help a speaker, who had no physical storage media available, remember long passages of linked information. Simonides, who is considered the founder of mnemonics (μνημονικόςmnemonikos - "of memory"), developed the rhetorical discipline known as memoria (memory). To remember information and the relevant arguments Simonides recommended a speaker to associate individual items, that should be remembered, to specific rooms in a house. During his performance the speaker would make a mental walk through the imagined house and recall the items for each room he visited. Fig. 1. Early maps conveyed values rather than a representation of what the world really looks like.

5 The Psalter map accompanied a 13th Century copy of the Book of Psalm. Being a Mappae Mundi (world map) it was not designed for navigation, but the spatial representation was intended to illustrate a world view: for example, Jerusalem is located in the map's center, in accordance with the contemporary Christian world view. A visual representation can be used to recall the linear sequence of information elements, but a more significant feature are the spatial connections that can be read in any order - not restricted by the sequence of pages predefined by an author. Spatial representations enable multi-linearity and give more room for individual associations. Lev Manovich use the term spatial montage to describe situations where more than one visual object is sharing a singular frame at the same time. The objects can be of different sizes and types and their relationship form a meaningful juxtaposition that is perceived by the viewer. Where traditional cinematic montage privileges the temporal relationship between images, computer screen interfaces introduce other spatial, and simultaneous relationships [3]. Fig. 2. Aby Warburg, "Mnemosyne-Atlas" [4], Warburg made compilations of texts and illustrations from a variety of sources. The compilations were also photographed, as spatial

6 representations of specific themes. The photographs could later be used in other juxtapositions.. Our ability to remember information is often dependent on whether we are able to construct mental maps. Mental maps are essential when we are learning - a process where we have to make connections between new information to existing knowledge. To use content in new contexts is an essential quality of the compilation of a digital text. In As We May Think, the article that introduces the idea of hypertextual organization in its modern form, Vannevar Bush [5] described a trail blazer, a person who's profession is to construct trails in large complexes of information for others to follow. Bush's concern was how researchers should be able to keep themselves informed in their fields. Today, the amount of available information force every information user to adopt similar methods. To make new combinations of existing information objects can be such a method. In this context spatial forms of publishing seem to provide flexible options for linking web-based resources with existing knowledge. 4 Spatial web publishing Personal publishing on the Web affects all media, and a number of user-friendly, free services contribute to the wide spread of new genres. These include weblogs, wikis, and various services used to produce websites. All the different solutions have in common that the expressions are constantly changing, they are often played out within various social networks, and new aesthetic qualities are developed through various forms of interaction between the users. Among the publishing solutions used by young people we find a number of services that encourage visual and spatial expression. Using these solutions the users are able to easily create their own websites as a complex composition of text, images and video, complemented with music players, chat boxes, guest books etc.

7 Fig. 3. A fragment of a typical page at Piczo.com. The visual appearance clearly illustrates who the users are, most are early teenage girls. The publishing concept used by Piczo is, however, interesting to more than teenagers. When editing the page all elements can be moved freely. Even though pictures and videos are widely used, most weblogs still present information in ways that have not changed significantly from how they were presented ten years ago. This is contrasted by the most popular personal publishing-tools, which are used by youngsters. These webpages are also frequently revised and updated, and other users are able to respond. However, when it comes to chronological structure this does not seem to be a significant feature. Instead some popular systems let their users structure information spatially. During previous work with weblogs in education the

8 attention was driven towards systems like Piczo, publishing systems that were well known and widely used by most youngsters a few years ago. What made Piczo particularly interesting was the fact that the user interface made it possible to place the published objects in any position on the screen, not limited by screen size or if a specific position was occupied by another object. Spatial publishing-systems (systems where media objects can be placed in a position on the screen chosen by the user) allow their users a lot of freedom to express and present themselves. Where weblogs have analogue predecessors like diaries, journals, personal letters and logs, the spatial publishing systems have strong relationships to poster walls and scrapbooks. When these media are taken into the digital domain new forms occur, where quite extensive reuse of media-objects seems to be an integrated part of this publishing-culture. Piczo had several shortcomings, especially a a potential tool for learning, but it initiated the idea of a spatial Memory organizer Memoz. Memoz is a publishing environment that let the users publish spatially on a "screen-surface" that is not restricted by the physical sceen-size. Fig. 4. An example of spatial publishing with Memoz. In the background the user has integrated a

9 map with geotagged pictures, made with Google Mymaps. Note how a satellite photo is placed in a position corresponding to the underlying map. When editing the surface all objects can be moved, scaled and stacked on top of each other. The design was inspired by some of the features known from commercial systems, but the specific design was developed with education in mind. Memoz' key-features are: Spatial publishing where there are no restrictions on the size of the publishing surface. Easy combination of different media-expressions (text, pictures, video, animations, maps, etc) Features that allow collaboration between several users. A user is able to share editing-access to a publishing space with other users giving Memoz some basic wiki-like features. Each object can be addressed by an unique URL, a spatial permalink (SPerL), facilitating links between objects on the publishing surface. Commenting on individual media-objects. Open architecture enabling compiling of a variety of web-resources. A fully functional prototype of Memoz was made during fall 20071, making it possible to publish videos, pictures, maps (using Google maps) and texts literary side by side. Memoz was then tested in selected schools as part of a research project in Spatial weblogging with Memoz Working in Memoz is closely related to content resources available on the Internet. This gives the teacher a concrete base and a tool to teach students how they can work with a variety of sources, how they perform source criticism, and how they should refer to sources using hyperlinks. In Memoz the spatial publishing can be directly connected to the use of digital maps. Users can organize information objects spatially and visually, and collaborate on and present information and media elements in relation to a geographical position. In relation to education, the use of spatial publishing follows a long tradition of 'place-based education' in which teaching is related to local resources in the curriculum (the local fauna, culture,

10 history, etc.). Location-based teaching is inspired by the desire to bridge the gap between what happens in the classroom and places and events in the learner's surroundings. This perspective focuses on that one would like students to care about their local environment, the people living there, and become more able to take action when local problems occur. The structuring of the learning experience then becomes a way to create informed citizens who become more able, and interested in participating. A primary objective was to determine whether the students were able to take advantage of their everyday skills related to Internet use in school situations. Quite a few students managed to draw on experiences with other systems when working with Memoz. For example, knowledge of HTML, as they have learned as part of mastering other publishing solutions. Many of these students showed great creativity when they faced problems with the technology. The students who master these techniques seem to find that they have some skills that are relevant to problem-solving in the school situation. Fig. 5. A webpage made with Memoz where the students have used a huge image of a tree as background in order to show how different authors of criminal literature are related to one another. Only a small part of the overall page is shown on the screen at a given time. The page was used to assist an oral presentation, and the students made spatial hyperlinks making it possible to follow a walkthrough. Memoz automatically scrolls the page to show the objects that are linked to. Memoz seems to have a potential as a supplement to existing tools such as presentation tools, Learning Management Systems, weblogs etc. There are, however, also examples where the students did not use the potential that the tool offers. These students used the publishing surface in Memoz more as decoration than exploration. However, an important observation is that there is a wide range of activities related to the processes of selecting the content and form of what was presented, which can often not be found as part of the final product. The objects are transformed, moved and even deleted during the process of compiling the final page. Increasing use of online sources makes it necessary to deal with new questions about knowledge

11 sources. Student's work in Memoz has been closely linked to online content resources, giving teachers both a justification for and a tool to motivate students to reflection on the source types, source criticism, and source references. The students can draw on experiences from their private use of media, but this does not mean that this can be implemented in education without a critical follow-up from teachers. Some guidance are needed to give the application of students' competence a direction, so that the work processes and the media products produced become valid knowledge resources. 6 Digital bricolage Traditionally, media users were directed against practices and cultural understandings that provide relatively clear guidelines for what are considered good products. Previously, these socialization processes have been linked to social institutions, especially dominated by education and mass media, supplemented with experience from the individual's private sphere. New understandings and practices have been developed within the framework of subcultures. Some subcultures have evolved, been transformed, and become a part of the established mass culture. Today, individuals or groups of users can produce media products that are easily distributed through social networks, and in some cases to a large audience. The consequences are rapid proliferation of aesthetic practices, which challenge the traditional arenas of culture formation. Mediated expressions are transformed and re-contextualized quickly., and the production and distribution of media text involve collective processes [6]. Without content with qualities that the users find interesting no information service will ever become successful. However, when looking more closely at digital texts one see that one of their major qualities is their ability to provide context. A successful text uses elements from different sources, and supports social relationships to the producers, most often through links and comments. The process of producing a digital text often involve some kind of copying content, like material previously produced by the user on his own computer, or material found on the Internet. In personal publishing most new texts are made in response to information already available, as comments, as additions to texts published by others or as autonomous texts connected to other

12 texts through different ways of hyperlinking. The connections between texts may be characterised as communities. These communities constitute a public without any demands of formal connections between the participants [7]. The production of new digital expressions almost always involve some kind of copying content, or selection from predefined functions, whether this is the copying from material previously produced by the user on his own computer, or found on the Internet. Copying and reuse of media material is an activity that resemble what Claude Lévi-Strauss call bricolage. Lévi-Strauss introduced le bricoleur as the antagonism to l'ingenieur, referring to the modern society's way of thinking in contradiction to how people in traditional societies solve problems. A bricoleur collects objects without any specific purpose, not knowing how or if they might become useful. These objects become parts of a repertory which the bricoleur may use whenever a problem needs to be solved [8]. Fig. 6. Part of a page made entirely of existing objects: pictures, videos and texts. The pupils have not contributed with any material, but the overall compilation is nevertheless unique. The copying and reuse of media material make young publicists able to produce new expressions. These media-elements are likely to be taken from different, often commercial, presentations and combined into new personal expressions that are shared online. These activities resemble those of the bricoleur, understood as a person who take detours to be able to achieve a result that in the end seem like an improvised solution to problems of both practical and existential character. The process of bricolage may be highly innovative as objects often end up being used in contexts very different from the ones they originated from. Thus those who behave as bricoleurs often perform a complex set of aesthetic and practical considerations when using objects from their repertories in new media-expressions.

13 7 Further research on spatial weblogging Memoz has not been shipped as a service outside education, and the examples shown are from school situations. They are produced within a limited timeframe, and can hardly be seen as examples that can be directly compared to texts produced with ordinary weblogging tools. It is, however, possible to imagine how new posts can be added to a page that grow over time, placed on the screen surface in relation to previous objects covering similar topics. New objects can even be placed over older ones, resembling the development of a poster wall. In Memoz any sequential relationship between objects has to be created manually, using spatial hyperlinks. This is, however, a functionality that can be developed into a system where the sequential ordering can be followed in ways known from tools like Etherpad and Google Wave. In other words: if spatial weblogging is to be considered a genre, it is to be further developed. The spatial expressions, which until now has been viewed on traditional computers screens, can also be mediated by devices that in various ways can be connected to the reader's position. Mobile devices such as small computers, cell phones, ebook-readers etc. can establish a connection between the content and the location where the device (and the user) is at the moment of reading. This creates opportunities for a new, virtual level of information that comes in addition to what we otherwise experience in the physical environment. In the meeting between these spheres one can see a continuous interchange between physical and virtual expression. Space becomes a meeting place where two types of environments influence each other or being built together. It will be interesting to look more into how spatial web publishing can lead to new aesthetic and social practices in other arenas. One can already see a number of examples of how the spatial publishing are related to physical, place-bound aesthetic expression. These practice fields can meet in what is often described as "shifting" or "enhanced" reality (augmented reality). The relationships between space, location and representation are issues that are the basis for architecture and urban planning, but which also have great relevance for understanding the Internet's texts. In large online hypertexts there is no natural beginning or end. Thus the user must develop an understanding of the text's structure through the active use of text. With the increasing

14 complexity of how information is mediated, in both physical and virtual spaces, it becomes particularly relevant to look more into how the spatial screen-based representations can be connected to physical space in different contexts. This related perfectly to Barger's original definition of webloggging and to Vannevar Bush's thoughts about storing and exploring information, both emphasizing the making of connections to past events and experiences for others to follow. References 1. Hoem, Jon: Personal Publishing Environments, Doctoral theses at NTNU, 2009:3, 2. Barger, Jörn: Weblog resources FAQ, (1999) 3. Manovich, Lev: The Archeology of Windows and Spatial Montage, (2002) 4. Freiling, Rudolf: The Archive, the Media, the Map and the Text, (2007) 5. Bush, Vannevar : As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July (1945) 6. Hoem, Jon: Openness in Communication, First Monday Special Issue on Openness (2006) 7. Hoem, Jon, Schwebs, Ture: "Personal Publishing and Media Literacy, IFIP World. Conference on Computers in Education (2005) 8. Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage), Oxford Univ. Press (1962)