Final Project

See our exploration of Pittsburgh's street art here!

Last Class

Instructions: write a description of someone in the room not using name hair color outfit

To the rhyme scheme of “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle,” and/or “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” depending on how cultured you’re feeling.

Just sit right back

and you’ll hear the tale

of a loud but lovely girl.

whose laughter rings throughout the room

as bright as shining pearls.

And Batman is

her favorite dude,

she loves the comic arts,

photography, and videos.

She’s really very smart.

A pink backpack

beside her feet,

and pink most everything.

Inquisitive and curious

with two silver nose rings.

Ask her about

D.C. Comic books,

She’ll talk ‘til she turns blue.

She laughs real loud about most things

and makes great cupcakes too.

American Idol

My goal as a nonfiction writer is to have as interesting a life as Ernest Hemingway, but with less animal killing.

I can smell the books from here

The New York Public Library: I want to go there and read forever.

New rights management for a digital world

We talked a few times in class about copyright issues, the need to protect your work, and the need to exercise caution when using the work of others. These last two points are absolutely vital - you can't rip off other people, and you (probably) don't want people ripping you off, either.

The problem our society and creative culture currently faces, however, is a mangled, overly complex mess of copyright law, over which corporations with the most interest have the most influence. In earlier times, creative culture, or intellectual property, passed out of the control of the creator and into the public domain within a matter of years. This meant that there existed a growing, constantly updated pool of content upon which new creators could draw for inspiration. This is especially important when you realize every aspect of our creativity builds upon what came before. Isaac Newton's famous quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants" is absolutely true (and very probably borrowed from somewhere else.) Rap music came from hip-hop which came from jazz, which built upon the synthesis of classical music, ragtime, and the blues.

Unfortunately, this can no longer be the case. Consolidated content publishing companies like Warner Bros. and Disney have used their influence to lock up intellectual property ownership, preventing new ideas from refreshing the Public Domain for huge periods of time. As copyright law now stands, rights to new intellectual properties stay private for a period of 80 years after the creator's death. Technically, if you want to sing "Happy Birthday" to someone in a room full of fifty people, you'd need to pay money to Warner/Chappell Music, the rights holders.

Enter Creative Commons. Established by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons system acts as an add-on to existing copyright law, allowing content producers to let others know which parts of their work are free and open to public use. This allows content creators to contribute to sustainable, remixable creative culture and clear up confusing questions about permissions and fair use while preserving the rights to their creations. Writing is just as much a part of creative culture as music or film, and I think the principles of Creative Commons apply as much to us as writers as they do to anyone else.

An example of a Creative Commons license:

Lawrence Lessig even looks smarter than me.

Where writing ends and stand-up begins

Recently, I spent some time researching author David Sedaris for a class presentation and because, well, he's pretty damn great. I needed to talk for 15 minutes, so naturally I started trawling the web looking for a video to show in order to eat up some time. This little gem comes from The Late Show with David Letterman:



Short of analyzing Sedaris' unique delivery or the various techniques he utilizes for maximum humor, what interested me most about this video is the blending of genre lines. Shows like The Late Show or The Tonight Show typically feature stand-up comedians, not writers. So what is Sedaris doing here? Where does the distinction between humor writer and humor performer lie? Is there one? If you're a talented enough writer and your delivery is entertaining enough, can you too perform on late-night television, regardless of comedic content?

Like Storify, but video

The Occupy movement is, it sometimes seems, everywhere and inescapable. Whether you're tweeting, watching the evening news, or merely walking through a particular section downtown in many major cities, you're bound to hear something about the 99% and their criticisms of modern financial and government institutions.

Lacking any real education with regards to economics and banking systems, I find myself unable to weigh in either in favor of or against the Occupiers. I do, however, support without question the right of American citizens to publicly assemble and voice their concerns and opinions without fear of oppression or violent aggression.

Assigned to make a remix video for my Creating Digital Media class, and with the recent police violence at Occupy protests in mind, I made this video, a cut up audio and video footage gleaned mostly from YouTube. And while it's a much more visually-oriented piece, it occurs to me now that my video-making process was really not so different from assembling a Storify - sourcing information, cutting it up, rearranging it as you see fit to say something meaningful. And when you think about it, Storifying is just classic storytelling via a different medium; so really, remix is at the heart of all storytelling.

In the Face of Death

By now you've no doubt ascertained my love of Christopher Hitchens and his writing. At the risk of boring you once more, I wanted to share this new article he wrote for January 2012 issue Vanity Fair. In it, he deconstructs the saying "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger," by analyzing its source (likely Nietzche, who Hitchens largely dislikes, it seems) while framing the whole thing within the context of his own battle with esophageal cancer and the necessary radiation and chemo treatments. The entire article is fascinating, but it was this paragraph near the end that struck me as particularly poignant:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I hope to never find myself in the painful situation that Hitchens now does, save for the desperate need to write and speak in order to properly live.

This Western Pennsylvania Life

I adore Ira Glass/NPR's This American Life program (when I remember to set aside 40-60 minutes to listen, that is.) If you ever need a fascinating look at people, flavored with a healthy dose of wit and whimsy, you couldn't do better the "show presented in three acts."

A while back, some friends and I decided to take a road trip to the great state of Kentucky, which was equally as fun as the drive was long. To help pass the time, my good friend Charles came prepared with a bevy of TAL podcast episodes on his iPod so we could listen in the car. We put this one on somewhere in Ohio, and it lasted us through the Pennsylvania border and a good bit of the way back to Pittsburgh. Never before has a public broadcast program made me more depressed or angry.

It's the perfect combination of fact finding and narrative-driven storytelling, and the fact that it hits so close to home makes it all the more compelling. To hear the interviews of people who live within a hundred miles away, and how adversely their lives have been effected by the Marcellus Shale drilling is devastating. Hearing about how Range Resources strong-armed local communities into adopting the company's policies is infuriating.

This is my favorite TIL episode, and I'm not sure I have the stomach to listen to it again.

Bonus: a diagram of how the drilling/hydrofracturing process works

Neil Gaiman and Henry Jenkins

I recently found this video of a conversation between author Neil Gaiman and American media scholar Henry Jenkins. In particular, I think the very first discussion question is fascinating, because it's about how an audience interacts with author's work when it comes in several different forms of media. Gaiman, for example, makes movies and comic books in addition to writing prose. In the battle to get comics the same recognition and respect as other art forms, it's nice to hear someone who does both say, "Hey, the comic is just as good. You'll get that same peculiar kind of buzz."




Bonus interesting point - According to Gaiman, there are a number of people who only read his blog, and none of his other written works.

Tumblr

Here's my tumblr on Chirstopher Hitchens - A Hitch in the Plan

Storify (disaster)

Here's the early draft of my Storify. Due to Storify's technical issues, none of my organizing/editing/most of my work saved, despite repeated clicking of the save button :(

Storify after the jump:

Byliner Follows

Some people I'm following on Byliner.com:

1.) Bill Donahue - When I logged into Byliner this morning, Bill's recent story for Wired, "6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission" was on the lineup of current new stories. Well, I love space, so obviously I clicked on it. It's great, and I figured if this is the kind of stuff he writes about, I definitely want to read more. Hence, the follow.

2.) Christopher Hitchens - I'm pretty sure I've talked about Hitchens a bit before. I really admire his journalistic work in addition to his more opinionated essays. Currently, he published pretty regularly for Slate in his column "Fighting Words"; it's usually about current events in world politics - like the recent flotilla to Israel/Gaza, or the United States' escalating drone war in Pakistan. Hitchens helps keep me informed about the wider world, and subscribing to him on Byliner reminds me when he publishes new material.

3.) Stephen Jay Gould - The only one of the three here who's no longer living (though Hitch isn't far behind), Gould was a famous well-known biologist who focused on the field of evolutionary biology. He proposed the concept that if the course of evolution were to replay itself, it almost certainly wouldn't turn out the same way again. As famous as Gould is for his work in science, he's almost as popular for his essays; I recently read an excerpt and decided I wanted to read further, so I subscribed on Byliner to help me find more.

Lab 10/26

Think of three different ways—other than print—to tell a story. (We’ll assume that your piece has a print component.) Give a descriptive one-paragraph summary for each. Post idea by the end of class.

Okay, so I really like music and music journalism/reportage. So let’s say, hypothetically, I’ve landed my dream job and i’m covering a band on the brink of major success.

1.) Naturally, an audio component is pretty much required. But we want to see change and growth, not just the finished product. Everyone hears the final product. Let’s say this band I’m covering is in the studio, recording their new album. It’d be great to embed audio clips of, say, one song in progress - 30 seconds each of an initial demo, somewhere midway through the recording process (a click track, a rough track mix or whatnot), and a sample of the finished song. Coldplay did something like this a while back where they posted early demos on their website (I can’t find it now, though), but that was all after the fact. Being able to hear audible evolution embedded along with a story would be great.

2.) I want to know how a band with big label backing spends their money during recording and touring phases. So, I'd take the data and group it: this much spent on studio time, this much on guitar strings, this much on room service shrimp cocktails, this much on cocaine, etc. Then, I'd turn the data into pretty colored shapes, or graphic icons to represent individual categories alongside numerical data and text. As often happens, I refer to the infographics living at Good Magazine. See:

http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1105/opportunitygap/flat.html

http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1104/pot-energy/flat.html

3.)Video - Day in the Life. Train a video camera on the band (or maybe one particular member of the band; if I were doing, say, 90's Oasis, it’d be fixed on Liam Gallagher) for 24 hours, plus or minus however long they’re awake. Are they normal people going about their business, drinking coffee at Starbucks and making stir-fry for dinner? Or are they snorting Adderall off the bathroom counter in the recording studio and prank calling Zooey Deschanel at 4am? These are the question I ask; the video shall answer them. I’ll take a day’s worth of raw footage and edit it down to a manageable time frame.

Sarah Palin, Poet Laureate

Jesus, what a terrifying title.

It's hard to tell whether Michael Solomon's remixed re-imagining of the former Alaska governor is tawdry or genius. Perhaps he's straddling the line with one foot in each yard.

To be sure, it's a brilliant experiment in language, and the brunt of the work seems to be in data scouring and formatting. It forces us to simultaneously rethink poetry and everyday speech. Somewhere, somehow, the two intersect. And if you can tease that intersection out of the torrential onslaught of faux-folksy speech inflections and you-betcha religious extremism, well then goshdarnit, you can probably find it anywhere.

Reading these poems: where to start? First of all, apologies to the poetry gods for the sin of elevating Palin's verbal utterances to the status of noble wordsmithery. I want so badly to write this project off the way I would cheap political action figures and calendars sold at shopping mall kiosks.

And yet, there's really something beautiful here, in the way a few paragraph breaks can turn a lament over a conference meeting into:


    The sunshine is perfect— 

    Too bad we’ll be looking at it 

    Through conference windows 

    This afternoon.

I want to hate Sarah Palin - for her ignorance, her intolerance, her insistence that there are "real" and "not real" parts of America - but when it comes to language I sort of have to pause now. Am I so pretentious that paragraph breaks make everything seem deep and meaningful and beautiful?

Is that Solomon's whole point?

The Atavist

My first question was what is an atavist? So I looked it up. Merriam-Webster defines atavism as:

recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity.

So with that in mind, I poked around the site a bit to see what they're all about. It became apparent pretty quickly that the name is a reference to the group's goal of bringing good, engaging, well-researched nonfiction narrative back en vogue. It seemed a bit like Byliner, if Byliner only published its Originals series and didn't link to other works. As such, there are way fewer titles available on the Atavist, but I think that might be a solid business decision - if you're not linking people to free articles, they're more likely to buy the ones you're selling, right?

Speaking of buying, The Atavist makes it short and simple - all links are right there on each piece's profile page. I like that they've made an effort to offer their product in a variety of formats (even though it's one fewer than Byliner). It's an obvious and simple way to distribute their stories as widely as possible (in terms of digital distribution). Personally, I think it's important to not let media distribution become too centralized if your aim is to preserve the freest and easiest possible dissemination of information.

So, it bothered me that I miss out on the extra multimedia features just because I don't own an iDevice. I understand the constraints on a small outfit like this one, and I'm sure their development budget isn't huge. But it just seems like a mistake to only let the Apple crowd into to multimedia party, especially considering that they brag out its benefits on their about page:

That allows us to do some things we couldn’t otherwise—within our own apps—like including a free audiobook version of every one, and allowing you to flip back and forth between text and audio while the story keeps your place. In addition to each story’s unique collection of video and other media, inside the Atavist apps they have what we call inline content: maps, timelines, character lists, primary documents, and links. You can turn on the inline content to find out what’s behind the story, or leave it off to read completely distraction-free.

I'm not trying to say that the writing can't stand on its own. I'm in the middle of My Mother's Lover and it's excellent, but I keep wishing that I too could have access to the video of a pilot from Zahrt's Air Force squadron, as well as to the audiobook version. Couldn't they host it online behind a wall, and email an access code to Kindle and other ebook buyers? (For the the extra buck, of course.)

I didn't mean to whine. It just seems like if you're trying to herald in a digital publishing renaissance, it'd be wise to not restrict it by distribution platform.

Class Lab

48-hour blog lab

Theme: "WINTER IS COMING"--What Pittsburgh is thinking as winter approaches

Format: Like Longshot, we’re aiming for a publication that can be printed and/or posted online. We’ll have articles and stories that contrast each other on a two-page spread.
Each story and infographic will have its own page, making the magazine roughly 20 pages long.

Story Ideas:

"Where do the LARPers Go?" / "Where do the Homeless Go?"

• The first story will focus on LARPers (Live Action Role Players; people who re-enact fantasy situations) in the area that meet in Schenley Park and Shadyside and see where they go in the winter.
• The second story will contrast the LARPers and see where Pittsburgh’s homeless seek shelter during the winter, covering the local organization that help the needy.

"Seasonal Depression" / "Sun Lamps"

• “Seasonal Depression” will take a look at those in the Pittsburgh area effect by S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and how they cope with the city’s weather
• “Sun Lamps” will be a brief report on sun lamps, what they do and the positive effects on users.

"Ode to and Ugg Boot" / "Ugghs"

• A brief poem in favor of Ugg Boots opposite a brief poem or manifesto attacking such a vile fashion trend.

Infographic:

sunny days in winter: PGH vs. Honolulu or wherever

• Envisioned as a kind of GOOD Magazine-style infographic - where data is presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner

Jobs Won in Winter / Jobs Lost in Winter

• Profile on the employment opportunities created by winter weather in Pittsburgh: for example, Christmas tree lot salesman, Snowplow driver, etc.
• In contrast, lots of people end up losing their jobs come winter, like Kennywood employees, construction workers, etc. This profiles the hardships they face and how they endure.

Infographic:
alcohol consumption v. winter injuries

• Again, presented like the previous infographic. Data localized with regards to the Pittsburgh region

Winter Crime / Winter Charity

• “Winter Crime” will be an inforgraphic on crime rates in Pittsburgh as weather worsens.
• “Winter Charity” will be an opposing infographic on philanthopy in the Pittsburgh area during the holidays.

Weatherman / Snowplow Driver

• These pieces will be characters sketches of local weathermen and how the public feels about
  their predictions (and therefore the weathermen themselves) for Pittsburgh weather during the winter. The opposing piece will be about local snowplow drivers and how the public feels about them. It will examine how children like bad weather predictions (snow days) whereas adults are the opposite and how these roles are reversed when it comes to the snowplow drivers.

Art

The art will include several infographics (like the charts for alcohol consumption and injury rates in the winter) These playful infographics will be in the style of GOOD magazine. In keeping with the theme of contrast throughout the magazine, art will also be “dark” or “light” in color and tone.

Finally, there will also be photography throughout the magazine.

Facebook Following

I'm now following Good Magazine on Facebook, since they're on my Twitter feed too. Gotta keep my social medias uniform, right?

Number two: Vice Magazine. I keep seeing links to their incredible short documentaries posted on Reddit, so I thought I may as well follow them properly. the Vice Guide to Congo was incredible - highly recommended. Now they're on to Belfast - like their FB page to see it on the front page right now. When a story opens with a group of your children proclaiming to "hate the Catholics," it's pretty damn chilling.

Social Media Extravaganza

For Grantland:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• RSS Feed (this is maybe a stretch for social media, but worth a shot, right?)
• last.fm page for podcasts
  
  This is all I could find for Grantland. Either I'm seriously missing something, or they haven't established a huge social media presence quite yet, which would be understandable considering the site's relatively recent launch.
  

For Slate:

• Facebook
• Interestingly, Slate has multiple Facebook pages for its various sections and columns: Culture, Slate V, Double X, Slate Politics, Slate's Culture Gabfest, Slate's Political Gabfest, Digital Manners.
• Twitter - like on facebook, Slate maintains multiple Twitter accounts and lists the Twitter profiles of many of its authors. Some of them include SlateArticles, SlateForeign, TheBigMoney, DoubleXMag, ForeignPolicy Magazine, Music Critic Jody Rosen, and so on and so forth. They even list their copy editors' Twitter accounts. See the complete listing here.
• Apparently Google+ doesn't have business/corporate accounts yet, so for now Slate recommends following one of its authors and "unofficial Google+ ambassador" Farhad Manjoo. Slate also lists the Google+ accounts for some of its other writers here.
• Slate has a YouTube account in addition to their own video site at slatev.com
• Slate also maintains a page on last.fm, where it posts podcasts.
  
  I wonder if it's important for large publication like Slate to maintain many social media feeds so that their readers are more easily able to get updates on the topics they'd like to read, without getting buried in the stuff they're not interested in.

Lab 2

I've started following Democracy Now! on Twitter and Facebook. It's a nationwide, daily, independent news publication broadcast on NPR, college radio stations, and on the web via podcast (among other outlets). In an article in The Nation in 2005, professor and media critic Robert McChesney said of Democracy Now:"I think it's probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time."

Democracy Now! uses Facebook and Twitter in much the same way many news organizations do - to give updates for new and recently-updated stories. Whenever a new podcast or video production is finished, DN puts the link on their social media sites as well. The Twitter feed is particularly effective for reporting on breaking news, like the current protests in New York City. I think it's one of the best examples of a media putting something like Twitter to good use. The only downside I can think of is that sometimes they unleash a torrent of tweets on my feed, which can get irritating. They should consider dividing their feed into categorical divisions, like The Guardian.

As for an individual, I'm following Richard Dawkins, because I really like science writing and people critical of fundamentalist religiosity. Admittedly, though, his Facebook page is far from stellar; either he (or someone on his publishing team/entourage) just started using it, or he doesn't care about using it all that much, because the only post he's got up is about the release of his latest book. Twitter, however, is a different story. Dawkins uses his feed to not only publish links to his own articles and book releases, but also to articles by other authors on similar topics, in conjunction with his website. So, he's not ground-breaking in the internet department, but pretty good all the same.

My Mother is a Fish

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

-William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1950.

You can hear and audio excerpt of Faulkner's speech on the Nobel Prize website. For a text transcript, see here.

* * *

January 1, 1644 fell on a Friday, according to the Gregorian Calendar. The moon was in waning gibbous. WolframAlpha, the computational/algorithmic search engine figured it out. (More information about WolframAlpha here.) According to the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, weather in the state from January 1-10 1644 was "cloudy and rainy weather, with occasional sunshine and somewhat warm."

* * *

The five deadliest US Hurricanes, according to a NOAA report (table 2):

1. Galveston, TX, 1900, 8000 deaths
2. SE/Lake Okeechobee, FL, 1928, 2500 deaths
3. Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA, 2005, 1200 deaths
4. Cheniere Caminanda, LA, 1893, 1100-1400 deaths
5. Sea Islands, SC/GA, 1893, 1000-2000 deaths

* * *

Fallingwater Site's series of architectural drawings.

* * *

He's number 359666.

He has a widow's peak.

He is wearing a suit and tie.

It is a United States passport.

The red official stamp is off center.

Street Art Update

I've started taking my camera around with me so I can document any street art pieces I happen to find while I'm out and about. Here are some recent ones from around Oakland:

Descriptions and more photos are up on my Street Art Flickr set.

I'm also working on making a custom map via Google Maps so we can pinpoint the exact location of each piece.

One of the murals I just found today had the artist's email address at the bottom; I'm going to be shooting an email to him soon to see if s/he'll be willing to talk to us.

Quick Edit:

Forgot to put this in, but found a great site of an artist who's doing a lot with yarn and yarnbombing in NYC, here.

Amazon's New Kindle Wants to Set the World on Fire

The Tweet Beat

Here's who I've started following on twitter:

@slate - doesn't need too much explanation; it's the feed for Slate Magazine, which puts out quality essays on a pretty regular basis. I'm partial to the ones by Christopher Hitchens.

@sjf - the personal Twitter account of Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic at The New Yorker, among others. I really like writing about music, so it's good to look to some of the best for inspiration.

@Steven_Hyden - Music editor at The A.V. Club. It might be a subsection of the Onion, but their music criticism is both legit and entertaining. Which is something I enjoy.

@outsidemagazine - More and more, I'm becoming enamored with all things outdoors - skiing, backpacking and kayaking in particular. I'd like to explore writing more about this, and though I've just started getting into Outside Magazine, it's obvious they put out some pretty great pieces.

@TheAtlantic - Again, not a whole lot of explanation necessary. I do really enjoy seeing new stories pop up on my feed; that way I don't forget to, you know, actually go and read them.

@AJEnglish - Al Jazeera's English language feed for 24hr news and current events. They do some really excellent reporting and manage to cover stories that seem to slip through the cracks of the other big news agencies (like the Wall St. sit-in, for example).

@romenesko - updates from the Romenesko column on the Poynter site. I just started reading, but I like him already.

@guardiannews - Updates from The Guardian. I like getting news from the outsider perspective; at least it seems like there's less potential for bias. Or, at least it's another point of view to help average out the others. I also like how they divide their feed into individual sections. For example: @guardianmusic.

@kdmc - feed from the Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Lots of great info and tutorials for aspiring journalists looking to incorporate all that new-fangled technology stuff.

@PEJPew - found this while looking at KDMC's following list. It's the feed for the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Pretty self-explanatory, really.

Don't Stay Glued to the Past

In 2010, cash-strapped Paste Magazine had an enormous decision to make. With ad sales flagging because of economic recession, the magazine, which started as a quarterly publication in 2002, could either follow its current distribution model into eventual bankruptcy, or it could radically change things up and hope to save the business. Fortunately, they went with option two.

And so, on August 31, Paste went entirely digital, completely cutting out the printed form altogether and thereby saving the farm (for now, at least.) It seems to be working well, and a digital format seems a natural fit for a publication that covers pop culture exclusively. For example, one thing Paste was known well for was its music sampler CDs packaged with the print issues. Well now, with a little web magic, presto! You've got music downloads.

Perhaps the best example of Paste's successful embrace of the "hybrid" model is its new mPlayer, now in beta. It's great because it's got a fullscreen layout like a magazine page with big, bright photos and text, but with the added bonus of embedded content. Again, this is huge for a culture publication - music samples and even videos are there right on the same page, without taking you away from the article. For example, here's a recent Clap Your Hands Say Yeah feature. It's got cool little touches, too, like if you hit the 'next' button on the media player at the top, it automatically takes you to the artist article corresponding to the song that's playing. That's thoughtful integration of new and old-fashioned media.

street art story sources

1. One of the potential aspects of this story that I'm really interested is the debate over public space, how it should be used, and who has the right to use it. This article from the New York Times profiles a group of artists and activists reacting against the prevalence of corporate advertising within public space. (publication)

2. "What is Street Art?" from Art Radar Asia gives nice, succinct definitions of street art in its various forms (including yarn bombing!), and briefly touches on questions of vandalism and legality. (blog post)

3. I was totally going to use this "Street Art, Sweet Art" article from the Journal of Consumer Research, but then I saw that Steve already did. Drat. Well anyways, here's an article about yarn bombing in Australia (EBSCO login req'd) (research resource)


4. Over here on justseeds, a local wheatpaster talks about a West Pittsburgh public art project. (there's a nice flickr feed to go along with it, too.) (expert)

5. Last of all this video is awesome, highlighting Shepard Fairey and the preparations for his exhibit at the Warhol last year. (bonus theme: the power of art to affect big change in society!) (a/v)

[Citation Needed]

I hate to beat a dead horse (I also hate that expression), but I want to join the party and talk a little bit about Wikipedia. Sorry.

Poor Wikipedia. Every single first day of class, during every professor's how-to-do-research speech, Wikipedia's treated that one uncle who went to prison once whom everyone tries to avoid at family gatherings. That sort of "Don't touch it, you don't know where it's been! Anyone can edit it!" attitude.

And it's true. Anyone can edit it. But what's often forgotten is the massive amount of editors proofing new changes to articles, software that keeps track of all new changes and allows for reversion to previous unaltered versions, as well as the site's strict insistence on neutrality and citations standards.

I think it could be argued that Wikipedia is one of the most transparent sources of information online. Though admittedly it's not the case with every article, many of them are meticulously cited, with nearly every major point linked back to an original source. I can think of few other sites that give source lists this extensive:

148 verifiable sources, and that's just for the article on Batman. Furthermore, Wikipedia has systems in place for designating its most well-written articles (see: featured articles), as well as a system of flags to designate portions where neutrality or quality of research are disputed. And because every part of the site is a collaborative effort, the argument could be made that over time, Wikipedia's content will likely trend towards neutrality more strongly than other sources with clear bias (like, say, The Huffington Post or Fox News.) It's also worth mentioning the 2005 study by Nature which found that Wikipedia's accuracy was close to the Encyclopedia Britannica's, at least in terms of science articles.

Wikipedia's not perfect, and it should obviously be used with caution and common sense; not everything it has to offer is rock solid...yet. But if we're going to talk about the rapidly changing digital nonfiction world, I think it's important to acknowledge that as Wikipedia advances in age and size, so does its credibility. [citation needed]

-- -- --

Since I mentioned the Huffington Post earlier, I'd like to touch on that a little more. I used to read it regularly, until I realized that every other top read article was about Kim Kardashian's latest wacky exploit. And even the 'serious' articles are entirely blown out of proportion:

When a front page headline is more concerned with sensationalizing fear than introducing solid reporting, I'm automatically going to call the whole enterprise into question. How can a publication even pretend that neutrality is a priority when it puts the word "FEAR" in 60 point font overtop a blown up image of a syringe, juxtaposed with a controversial politician? Editorializing is one thing, but when there are few lines dividing it and reporting, I'm going to seriously re-evaluate how much I rely on that source. To be fair, Huff Post sources a lot of its content from AP and/or Reuters, but in that case why wouldn't I just go directly to those sites for my news?

first post!

Over the course of the summer, in between yelling at the high school kids I supervised to "do some goddamned work," and flipping burgers on the flat grill at my near-minimum wage job, I had a lot of time to ponder my last upcoming college semester. Followed by graduation. Accompanied with anxiety.

It's occurred to me that the vast majority of nonfiction writing I've consumed lately has involved critical thinking about political developments in Africa and the Middle East, or has managed to take a broad topic, like gossip, and tease out four separate, compelling, and unified stories out of it. They've been podcasts and blogs and posts from news sites online, often accompanied by various multimedia, and linking to further information at other parts of the web.

The kind of writing that's made me want to read it has (mostly) had nothing to do with physical print, nor has it been content with mere memoirs and personal narratives. Discouragingly, that's precisely the direction my writing classes have taken - little to no outside reporting, and no web presence at all.

I'd like to do the kind of nonfiction writing that makes me interested enough to read - the kind that goes out and finds stories in the fascinating or the mundane, the known or the obscure. I'm bored enough with the stories coming out of my own head, so I can't imagine how a real reader might feel. So one of my goals is to practice real reporting in my writing - something I haven't really done since freshman year Intro to Journalism.

Having realized that I primarily consume writing via electronic means, namely the internet, and having seen job listings that require extensive knowledge and/or experience within the digital realm, my second goal for this semester is to become proficient in integrating my writing with technology. Specifically I'm interested in working on integrating embedded media (pictures, sound, YouTube videos, links to other sources of information) into my essays and work to create a fuller experience.

Two of my favorite nonfiction writers write now are Christopher Hitchens and Ira Glass. With Hitchens, I admire the sort of old-school Fleet Street journalism techniques in his writing - everything he writes about gives me the impression that he's done so much research he's now a veritable expert on the subject. At least, he writes so forcefully and with so much conviction that it certainly feels that way. And I particularly admire the way he integrates that reporting with personal insight. With regards to Ira Glass, well, every time I listen to This American Life I'm absolutely floored by the stories that seem to come out of nowhere. They're engaging to the point of being almost addictive, separate yet subtly woven together, introduced well in the beginning of the program and tied up neatly at the very end. I also admire the program because it's a great example of nonfiction writing in an entirely different medium. (I realize that the program is written by many authors, but it seemed convenient to use Glass as the figurehead.)

So there it is: my reasons, my goals, the examples I want to follow.