Bookmarks for Digital Culture: Mediamorphosis

Some of these documents may be assigned as readings, others will be discussed in class, and some are for inspiration or resources in developing your own creative projects. I'll make additions as the semester goes along, including pages you suggest. (This will be a great page to save for your eventual graduate school research on how out-of-date our ideas were in the year 2000!)
Note: In most cases I'll keep the document URLs visible so that you can see where you're going. But you can also follow any link and figure out where you are by looking at the URL in the "location" or "address" box on your browser. For example, compare my computer instruction sheets, http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/bob_stepno/evangelist.html, with this collection of glossaries called "gloss.html" in the same folder.

... bob stepno

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Digital History | Pre-digital Media | Individual & Society | Tools & Techniques

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Digital Media History

• The excerpt we were using from Fidler's Mediamorphosis is no longer online, but the full text is still at the library if you didn't run out and buy a copy. In addition, here's a summary of a few of Fidler's ideas in an article introducing television news executives to the idea of "interactive news" online: http://www.rtnda.org/resources/intnews/artwhere.htm, and here's another summary, from a review of his book, coming to you all the way from India: http://iw.sify.com/home/indialine/net.interactive/970531.html.
• Matt Lake, "A brief history of computing" (C/Net Digital Culture) http://www.cnet.com/techtrends/0-1544318-7-1656936.html?tag=st.sr.1544318-7-1656936-rost.back2.1544318-7-1656936
• Atlantic: Prophets of the Computer Age http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/tech.htm and Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," from 1945: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
• Robert H. Zakon, Hobbes' Internet Timeline http://www.isoc.org/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
• John Horvath, "The Importance of History in a Digital World" http://www.ix.de/bin/tp/issue/dl-artikel.cgi?artikelnr=6862&rub_ordner=special&mode=html
• Making the Macintosh (archives), Stanford University, http://library.stanford.edu/mac/index.html
• Cybrary, Internet history bookmarks: http://talkjustice.com/files/tj01.htm
• Who was Microsoft's first software "pirate"? http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/18/technology/18BASI.html
• Howard Rheingold's Tools for Thought, a history of the ARPANET/Internet and related computing technology, written in 1985 (I especially like Chapters 7 and 9, about Licklider, Bush and Englebart): http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
• Chronology-timeline of Silicon Valley, from Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine
• APA Style guide for citing URL addresses in research papers: http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html

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Digital History | Pre-digital Media | Individual & Society | Tools & Techniques

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Pre-Digital Media Technologies

• Inventors Timeline at invent.org (communication inventions and more)
• A timeline of information technology, going back to ancient times:http://myron.sjsu.edu/caesars/COMM.HTM (This link worked on Oct. 14, 2001, but not on the 16th)
• Prof. Fang's timeline: Communication History
• Scientific American overview of 20th Century Communications: http://www.sciam.com/explorations/1999/112999comm/
• History Wired at Smithsonian: http://historywired.si.edu/index.html, which has a very different multi-dimensional "information visualization" interface. (This worked on the 14th and 17th, but was down on the 16th in the lab... If it refuses to work in the lab, try it at home!)
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, online HTML edition: http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/fiction/bellamy/bellamy.html
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, online plain text edition via FTP: ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext96/lkbak10.txt:
• Television history: Interactive TV again? http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/technology/20hansell.html
• American Memory Project, Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html
• The Telegraph Office -- A Tribute to Morse
• An anonymous Telegrapher (photo)
• Inventing Entertainment: the Early Motion Picture, includes Edison biography at AmMem.
• Edison After Forty: Phonograph Image 1878
• Thomas A. Edison Papers
• Edison Motion Picture and Sound Recordings http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html
• Bell's telephone (sketch from 1876, at LOC)
• Writing -- from the Why Files, http://whyfiles.org/079writing/
• Rotary perfecting press, the 1863 beginning of "web" presses.
• Antique Typewriter Website and Museum, from Chuck & Rich Antique Typewriter collectors' site.

Audio recording

• Howstuffworks.com's "How Analog and Digital Recording Work
• Edison's Phonograph
• Analog Recording

Radio

• United States Early Radio History
• Marconi: la sua voce!
• 100 YEARS OF RADIO - HOME PAGE -

Photography (and composites)

• PBS American Photography television series' Web site.
• American Museum of Photography -- gallery collection includes archaic photo processes, artistically manipulated images.
• Photo.net -- Web "meeting place" for photographers, including Philip Greenspun's "stock" photo collection.
• Muybridge's stop-motion photography,Smithsonian exhibit, http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/index.htm
• Digital Truth article from PBS American Photography series: http://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/features/digital.html
• (Compare the Oswald-Ruby picture with the video of that day in Dallas, complete with eye-witness testimony, online courtesy of The Newseum.org)
• Simple combination of portraits http://www.digitalphotoartists.com/al_comp.htm
• Composites in20th Century tabloid sensationalism http://www.stepno.com/unc/graphic
• Library of Congress Civil War photography site, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html and its "Does the camera ever lie? section.

From early film to digital video

• Edison films and recordings at the Library of Congress:http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html
• Digital video articles from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/index-video.html
• Before (and beyond) cinematic realism... Lev Manovich: "What is Digital Cinema?" (with pictures of early moving-picture devices and hypertext footnotes) http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/film/6110/1.html; compare text-only version: http://www.ix.de/bin/tp/issue/dl-artikel.cgi?artikelnr=6110&rub_ordner=special&mode=html

The Dead Media Project

• Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto, an invitation to the "net" community to collaborate in collecting information about Dead Media. Related speech transcript at http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/deadmed.html ("Mirrorshades" is also the title of a cyberpunk anthology Sterling edited. In this case, it's his "conference" on the Well.)
• Same manifesto at back-up location: http://boingboing.net/deadmedia.html
• Dead Media Project http://griffin.multimedia.edu/~deadmedia/
• What is Dead Media?
• The Other Dead Media (Wired magazine) http://www.wirednews.com/news/interviews/0,1650,34905,00.html
• Dead Media List Archive @ GA Tech: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~grusin/courses/deadmedia/deadlist/
• Cue Cat: Dead media of the future? http://www.forbes.com/helpcenter/cat/ and discussion of it in Salon magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/09/15/cuecat/index.html (or http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/09/15/cuecat/print.html to have the whole article on one printable page)

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Digital History | Pre-digital Media | Individual & Society | Tools & Techniques

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Digital Communication, Individual & Society

Logs, blogs and diaries

• Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room: http://www.obscurestore.com/
• Robot Wisdom Weblog: http://robotwisdom.com/
• Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/about.pyra
• Dan Bricklin Log: http://danbricklin.com/log/default.htm
• Weblogs.com home page: http://www.weblogs.com/
• Bob Stepno's Weblog notes: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/bob_stepno/weblog/

Community & Society

• Five years of "Digital Culture" from The Atlantic, from Sven Birkerts' critique of computers to feature articles about law in cyberspace, video games, virtual reality, MP3s and Boston's Cyberarts Festival: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dcindex.htm
• MIT's Henry Jenkins on Technological utopianism in science fiction.
• Howard Rheingold: Technology, Community, Humanity and the Net http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue225/item4242.asp
• Will what Professor Philip Agre calls new genres of communication online contribute to new kinds of community?
• Google's new interface to Usenet newsgroups (see Hauben, below), http://groups.google.com, the pre-Web worldwide networrk of discussion groups.
• Ronda Hauben, "The Evolution Of Usenet News" http://gos.sbc.edu/h/hauben.html
• Hauben: Netizens Netbook http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
• "Adilkno" and Geert Lovink: "Writing in the Media" at http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199804/msg00064.html is the first chapter of The Media Archive; for "mediamorphosis," see the third chapter, "Old Media," http://www.thing.Desk.nl/bilwet/adilkno/TheMediaArchive/07.txt. (The table of contents for The Media Archive has coding problems when viewed with some browsers, so I'm providing links to specific chapters.) For even more about Lovink, see the interview at http://www.ctheory.com/event/e018.html.
• What does the digital world look like? See many different approaches in the Atlas: http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html

Digital property

• Ann Okerson on copyright: http://www.sciam.com/0796issue/0796okerson.html
• Intellectual property and other cyberlaw issues, interview with L.Lessig: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc991215.htm

Coming soon: Cybernetic organisms?

• Cyberpunk fiction overview by Henry Jenkins
• Blade Runner, the film http://us.imdb.com/M/title-exact?Blade+Runner+(1982)
• Johnny Mnemonic, the story (whose fans generally hated
  the film: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0113481)
• About William Gibson: http://www.levity.com/corduroy/gibson.htm

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Digital History | Pre-digital Media | Individual & Society | Tools & Techniques

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Digital Tools & Techniques

• How Stuff Works: The Web http://www.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm?printable=1
• HTML Quick Reference (C|Net) http://www.builder.com/QuickReference/HTMLReference/
• Emerson Academic Computing resources: http://telepath.emerson.edu
• Robin Williams (& John Tollett) design links (from various Peachpit books, including Non-Designer's Web Book)
  • Basic Design Principles: http://www.peachpit.com/features/ndmonth/nddesign.html
  • Tips on Web Page Design: http://www.peachpit.com/features/ndmonth/webpages.html
  • "Don't" List: http://www.peachpit.com/features/ndmonth/ndweb.dont.html
  • "Do" List: http://www.peachpit.com/features/ndmonth/ndweb.do.html

• Another good design book: Don't Make Me Think!
  • Chapter 2: How people really use the Web
  • Chapter 3: Design for scanning, not reading
• And another: http://webpagesthatsuck.com
• Jakob Nielsen, a leading guru of "usable" Web design at http://useit.com

• Dreamweaver References at Emerson Telepath, C|NET, Webmonkey, and Macromedia (some may refer to older versions).
• Color theory and design reference tools at MundiDesign.com including an intro to design concepts and this nifty drag-and-drop color table
• Photoshop & Scanning tutorials: (HTML and PDF, from UNC)
• John's Photoshop handout
• Other Photoshop resources (first four mentioned by John):
  • http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html -- information direct from Adobe
  • http://www.ultimate-photoshop.com -- starting point for tutorial searching
  • http://www.planetphotoshop.com -- portal to many Photoshop tutorials, tips, discussions
  • http://www.lynda.com -- graphics tips, color swatches with values, inspiration
  • http://builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/0-7370.html?tag=st.bl.3880.dir.7370 -- Builder.com's Photoshop reference pages, especially its "Graphics 101" section.
  • http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/graphics/tutorials/tutorial1.html -- Seven-part Photoshop tutorial at Webmonkey (Six numbered parts, plus a section on added features in Photoshop version 5.5... and here we are with Version 6 already!)
  • Academic Computing: http://telepath.emerson.edu/resources/software/photoshop.html including the Photoshop User Guide as a 6 megabyte (!) PDF file, and Quick Reference Cards for both Macintosh and Windows.
• Many more tutorials at C|net's "builder.com" -- http://builder.cnet.com/
  and Hotwired's "Webmonkey.com" -- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/
• Many more links about design and the Web, mildly organized and constantly changing: Bob's Web design bookmarks
• And many more about HTML: Bob's HTML resource bookmarks
• Emerson (student) Digital Media Group: http://dmg.emerson.edu/index.html -- not as active as it was last year, but watch for meetings or special events.

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Digital History | Pre-digital Media | Individual & Society | Tools & Techniques

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-- last update August 2002 by bob stepno