Communication 850F (cross-listed as Art Education 795) (5 hours)
(TH 1:30-3:30) Spring, 1995
Introduction: This graduate level course examines the process of electronic publishing in HTML and as CD-ROM formatted material. The goal of the course is to produce team-created multimedia documents. Six faculty members are team teaching this course. We've concluded, and will try to persuade our students, that no individual nor individual discipline has "all the answers" in such a rapidly changing and multifaceted area of study.
Read the following syllabus carefully. After doing so, if you are interested and feel you are qualified to participate, please contact one of the faculty offering the course for further information. Registration for this SPRING 95 course is by "permission of instructor."
Instructors:
Links/Quotes/Contradictions/Conflicts/Revealers:
This multidisciplinary seminar has been created as an experiment in graduate level education. One assumption of the course and its instructors is that compelling topics of current interest must be examined from many perspectives at once, and that no individual discipline can adequately serve this need. Collaboration across the disciplines is in itself part of this experiment. Neither the institution, nor individual faculty, nor students are particularly experienced at collaborative work, or in understanding the work patterns and obligations of the group process. Because we feel this approach is very important for contemporary education, we are offering the course to better understand the many issues involved in this form of instruction and learning.
This particular course focuses on creating multimedia products. Multimedia as a buzzword has appeared overnight and almost always is discussed as a "product," something that already exists. This course is about the process that brings multimedia products to life, and about the interrelationships of the people, the semiotics, and the techniques that combine to construct multimedia works.
Because the course involves multiple perspectives, students can expect to hear and are expected to contribute different points of view. Often these ideas do not lend themselves to synthesis; they stand apart and distinct. This tradition is captured in some of the remaining parts of this syllabus. You'll find the individual perspectives of the faculty presented, rather than "speech of a single voice." We invite your engagement.
Acker: This course will explore its title:
Authoring refers to the process by which an idea finds expression and includes such activities as ideation, audience definition, revision, technical aspects of the form of expression, and publication.
Collaborative implies co-creation and may represent brainstorming, sectioning and integration (you write half and I'll write half), versioning (here's my draft, improve on it/here's the text/illustrate it, here's the information/edit and format it).
Multimedia refers to text, sound, still image, moving image, and linkages among these forms to represent an integrated whole.
As process, this course considers how ideas find expression through the work of more than one person and are presented using audio, video, and language symbol systems to an audience.
Bracken: This course will explore the implications of multimedia on authorship, focusing especially on the communication richness of the multimedia environment, the social processes of authoring, and the effectiveness of authoring support technologies. Foci of study include the impact of multimedia resource richness on authoring practices and the use of authoring support technologies; the implications (limitations?) of authoring support technologies on the communication of multimedia rich messages; the social processes of authoring as an intermediary (both message sender and message receiver) in a communication rich multimedia environment.
Justice: What is the role of the designer when visualizing information that is constantly evolving? Visual snapshots to support the content? A visual record? Increasing visual literacy throughout the process? I would suggest that it is all of this. We can explore the ways that visual communication designers can support this process. The proposed course content and methods will give a mix of practice and theory. The course will provide a high level of opportunity for exploration and evaluation of the visualization process used for producing an interactive product.
Scott: This course will investigate the implications of the collaborative creation of multimedia, for artists, designers, educators, librarians, and scholars. Some of the questions which will be raised by the course will include: What is publishing, in relation to available technologies of distribution? What is authoring, in relation to cooperative and collaborative work? What is expected of the "reader" of a multimedia, multimodal, work? What is the function of librarianship in a distributed environment? What is the function of the visual artist in designing multi/hypermedia? What are the boundaries between art, literature, education and information? Whose text is it, anyway?
Smith: Interactive multimedia environments have given rise to a new arena of human experience, interaction and expression. As noted and popularized by the science fiction writer Gibson this new arena is quite usefully thought of metaphorically as a space not a physical space but informational space. The course will explore the technological, cultural, social, political and scientific implications of this cyberspace.
Ulman: This course will investigate the new forms of collaborative multimedia authoring enabled by digital media, telecommunications, and collaborative work group software. In addition to enabling practical innovations, electronic multimedia is prodding theorists in communications, literature, film, rhetoric, and other disciplines concerned with symbolic communication to address a number of theoretical and cultural issues in new ways. If symbolic artifacts can be manipulated seamlessly by both authors and audiences, how are the two roles different? Will new groups of people find ways to publish their concerns and creations? How will people collaborate in the production of this new media? If all symbolic artifacts can be dynamically linked to one another, what constitutes a discrete text or artifact? If electronic artifacts can be easily reproduced and transformed, how do we define and protect intellectual property? If electronic artifacts can represent text, images, video, and sound, what niche will such artifacts come to occupy vis a vis printed books, live theater, television, and so on? If we are all connected to a dynamic, worldwide web of electronic artifacts, what new communities and work groups will arise?
Links/Quotes/Contradictions/Conflicts/Revealers:
>From Acker:
William Gibson "I think that the correct reaction to the perpetual exponential advance of technology is a deep ambivalence. Being dubious is the only healthy response.*"
*Interview with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
Being is not healthy, because it is a passive verb. Better to have an active response: "Taking charge and designing the technology is the only healthy response"-SRA.
From Bracken:
"A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,
Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,
Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight,
The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm's with Wit."
Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism" (1711)
From Justice:
"Good design is a fusion of information and inspiration, of the conscious and unconscious, of yesterday and today, of fact and fantasy, work and play, craft and art." Paul Rand quoted in Basic Typography: Design with Letters, Ruedi Ruegg
From Scott:
"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of a mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all of his [or her] books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his [or her] memory."
As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 1945 reprinted 11/94
I have this quote at the top of my home page on the World Wide Web. I am creating my home page to be my own research tool, in the intimate fashion Vannevar Bush proposed for the memex. I like the irony of having the personal linked to the public, nay -the global, though my "home" on the web. Aren't homes private - an Englishman's home is his castle, I remember. Am I publishing by having my page accessible? Why are home pages always individual or corporate (which is in legal terms, individual, too)? What would OUR home page look like? How would WE construct it? Will we be good room-mates?
From Smith:
(still in cyberspace)
From Ulman:
"The 'zones' of intellectual exchange today resemble Thomas Pynchon's centrifugal vision of postwar Europe. They are separate societies moving along distinct ideological and methodological paths, fleeing the center. By linking these zones together, a pluralistic hypertext system could create new opportunities for communication and empowerment, both within and among disciplines" (Stuart Moulthrop, "In the Zones" 26)
We will share information in a variety of ways, including
Approximately 15 graduate students from multiple disciplinary backgrounds will be selected on a "permission of instructor basis." Students will be chosen on the basis of a goal statement, an example of previous authorship (in any medium), and fit with the desire of the course to represent many different academic traditions and disciplines. Students will be admitted by members of the faculty acting as an admissions panel. High levels of energy, participation, and tolerance for ambiguity are characteristics valued in student applicants.
Steve Acker is Associate Professor of Communication. His primary research interests are in the design and diffusion of new media technologies and collaborative distributed work.
Jim Bracken is Associate Professor, University Libraries, and bibliographer for English literature, communication, and speech. His primary research interests are bibliographical, covering the "new" media technologies of Renaissance England (printing) to those of the present, as well as their reconciliation, or convergence.
Lorraine Justice is an Associate Professor of Visual Communication in the Department of Industrial Design. Her primary research interests are in the production and evaluation methods of interactive media.
Tony Scott is Assistant Professor of Art Education at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. His primary research interests are the application of multimedia telecommunications to multicultural arts education; the role of communications in advancing arts education in rural America; the teaching and learning of computer graphics in comparative cultural contexts; and the social construction of computer art and culture.
Jack Smith is Associate Professor of Pathology & Computer and Information Sciences. His interests are as diverse as his appointments, but they include the ethical and social issues of virtual reality and alternative scholarly communities
Lewis Ulman is Associate Professor of English. His interests include the many ways that hypertext and electronic multimedia challenge us to rethink theories about the construction of meaning, authorship, and textuality.
We will have access to a number of production facilities for this course. These facilities include the College of the Arts Emerging Technology Laboratory, The English Department's computer-equipped writing laboratories in Denney Hall, and the Communication Department's video and audio production facilities in Derby Hall.
To create the collaborative multimedia works, we will use a variety of tools. Meeting of the Minds, a collaborative writing tool developed at Ohio State, will serve prominently in the process of supporting group work. Many production tools will support the creation of images, moving images, audio, and animations. Several HTML converters will also be incorporated. Supporting tools for this course include:
Students will author a collaborative multimedia work, provide a critique of a collaborative work prepared by a different group, evaluate the strengths and weakness of tools used in the production process, and contribute an abstract of four information sources provided in the electronic course pack from which they most benefited. In some form, the combined efforts of the class will be preserved and mastered as a CD-ROM.
Based on the assignment on which the student wishes to place his/her efforts, evaluation will fall within these ranges (as chosen by each individual student):
The thinking of the various faculty in constructing this assignment schedule follows.
Acker: The primary assignment of the course is to author a collaborative multimedia product. Additional assignments will include a comparative analysis of a tool used in multimedia authoring (e.g. Storyspace), the contribution of articles/examples of multimedia work from a multidisciplinary universe, and critique of the work of other members of the class.
Bracken: Participants will collaborate to author communication rich multimedia projects ("documents"?) and evaluate alternative platforms for publication/distribution/dissemination (including customized desktop, or on demand publishing; traditional publication in books and journals; and electronic publication, in CD Rom and on the Internet) and the corresponding implications for each publication method. Participants will use Meeting of the Minds (MoM), a collaborative research and writing interface developed at OSU, as the primary authoring platform and have the opportunity to use and compare other state of the art authoring support technologies.
Justice: Students will engage in the process of creating a collaborative piece of interactive media. Throughout this process the students will explore the range of tools used to produce a prototype that will visualize the intent of their product. In addition, students will engage in research and discuss current interactive media products available to them.
Scott: Students will investigate the processes of collaboration by undertaking group projects to develop exemplars of multimedia applications using one or more of: CD-ROM authoring software, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing packages, or more traditional media.
Smith: Students would be expected to complete a collaborative project regarding cyberspace beyond their group participation in faculty guided forays. The collaborative project could include developing some content in an existing cyberspace construction tool either text or more multimedia based. Students could also conduct and document their own forays into an area not explored by the group or conduct a study of an existing cyberspace. These projects would be approved and monitored by the appropriate faculty involved in the course.
Ulman: These assignments will allow students to take various stances toward collaborative multimedia, including those of author, critic, and theorist.
Most of the material for this course will be distributed from a World Wide Web server. The material will be in the public domain as well as copyrighted. All copyrighted material will be cleared with the Copyright Tribunal Agency and students will pay an electronic access fee that gives them permission to download and print the material. The Web site will contain scholarly articles, pointers to databases, and examples of multimedia work. Topics covered will include collaboration and distributed collaboration, the nature of texts, discourse, and audiences, documentation on the Interactive CD-Rom publishing process, articles on legibility issues in visual communication, CyberSpace and CyberPunk literature.