Literature in a Wired World

Daniel Keyes’ classic short story “Flowers for Algernon,” later made into the tearjerker film Charly, is now a blog! Which makes me wonder whether the blog format isn’t going to help revive the epistolary narrative.

We’re starting work today on our digital stories, which means now’s a good time for some help with materials!

First of all, we need to think about copyright. We talked about DRM in class. DRM measures are designed to prevent you from being able to infringe copyright. But say you’re able to circumvent those pesky DRM restrictions. Should you?

Short answer: for your digital story, No.

You want your digital story to be readable/watchable/listenable by anyone, anywhere. And you don’t want to get a C&D (cease and desist) letter from EMI instructing you to take Sigur Ros’ song “Staralfur” (sorry, Sigur Ros, I don’t do accents in blog posts) out of your story or they’ll sue you. And you don’t want them telling YouTube to take your video down in the meantime.

So, jeez. What do we do?

First, we learn about “fair use” guidelines for media. Fair Use says that, for educational and non-profit purposes, you can use, fairly, little bitty bits of copyrighted material without fear of infringing copyright. TechLearning has a great summary of this, and a really handy PDF chart of what counts as fair use. Download and print out the chart. It’s a keeper.

The biggest problem you’re going to run into is using music in your story. Most of the music you’re going to want to use is copyrighted, and you can’t use it, even if you bought the album. Seriously. Luckily, there are alternatives.

• Royalty-free Music has lots of free-to-use music
• Partners in Rhyme does too
• And here’s another R-F Music site

You can also check out the Creative Commons site for links to artists who don’t mind if you use their work (with some restrictions).

There is a lot of music out there that you can use in your story, but you’re going to have to look for it.

(And if you’re pissed off that you can’t use the songs you’ve legally paid for, why haven’t you started contacting your Congressfolk to agitate for change? Google “copyfight” for more info.)

A while back Japanese animators SamBakZa created a cute video about a lovestruck bunny and the feline object of her affection: “There She Is.” Then SamBakZa ran out of funding, and the rest of the projected 5-part series languished. Well, SamBakZa is back with the necessary funds to finish the story, and I’m really glad they are. The story of Doki and Nabi begins lightheartedly but becomes deeply profound and touching. It also rewards rewatching the earlier episodes.

We don’t have the final installment yet, but I can’t wait to see what happens.

So the votes are in, and have been tabulated by our highly-trained vote-counting monkeys, and the winners are:

Royale with Cheese!

Congrats to 72ner, Erik, and Austin!

For those of you gunning for the coveted winner’s spot (that is, everyone else), here’s what we’ve learned so far. Your classmates like:

• stories that are really fun to read, match what we already think, and that have neat and unique things to say
• blogs that have a good variety of topics written about, and are also all a decent length/ well written
• blogs with a good background
• blogs that use pictures
• blogs about the Large Hadron Collider
• blogs that really explore the posts on free topics
• blogs with an attractive, eye-catching layout
• blogs that are actually interesting
• blogs that are active
• blogs with funny posts

Our next blog vote will be October 2nd, so get to blogging!

First, a lesson in the fine art of blogging: Don’t store up topics to blog. I’ve been collecting open tabs in Firefox with cool things to blog about here and on my blog, and you know what? The more you collect, the less likely you are to ever post any of them because the task just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more unmanageable.

Ugh.

I’ve got the first installment of this mega-post almost written, and will try to post it here tomorrow or this weekend.

In other news, we’ve got our first blog vote today. Hooray!

In the comments below, vote for one blog from our class you think is:

• The best overall blog
• Which is to say, the best-written blog
• Which is to say, the blog with the most interesting posts
• Which is to say, the blog you look forward to reading the most

And here’s the fun part: after you vote, write at least 1 sentence (no more than 3) supporting and/or explaining your answer.

Remember, the winners get extra credit, and there will be more votes as the semester progresses.

May the best blog win!

I’ll add these to the sidebar of this blog.

UPDATE: As you can see, I’ve added them!

In Japan (and perhaps soon elsewhere) novels written and then read on cell phones’ tiny screens are huge. Read about it:

• Charles Muir at Core Brand
• Peter Brantley at O’Reilly Radar
• Yukari Iwatani Kane at the Wall Street Journal

In Tuesday’s class I mentioned an unfortunate Internet incident that had befallen a high-ranking Department of Justice official. Here’s the post I referenced.

Definitely recommended reading.

As you may have heard, Google surprised a heck of a lot of people earlier this week when they announced that they had created a new Web browser: Chrome.

Right now, Chrome is PC-only, and it is pretty sincerely still in beta. It’s incredibly fast at rendering large amounts of data, once you’ve downloaded that data. (Which means that no matter how blindingly fast Chrome may be, you’ll still be limited by your connection speed and by the response speed of the server hosting the page you’re visiting.)

It’s also not particularly good with all Web pages. I’ve already found a few pages that it simply won’t load for me, which is sad. And it seems really wretched with Flash applications and games, but I hope these will be addressed by a later plug-in or build.

But what’s really interesting to me is that Google decided to make their announcement via a comic book.

For those of you familiar with Understanding Comics or Reinventing Comics or Making Comics, you’ll recognize the work of Scott McCloud immediately. The comic does a pretty good job of visualizing the sometimes staggeringly dense and geeky details Google so desperately wants us to nerdgasm over.

To me, the choice of using graphic narrative like this suggests that Google wants to appeal to a wider audience than merely the bleeding-edge tech crowd who will download and install anything if it’s new and shiny, and for whom the phrase “multi-process rendering” actually means something. They’re trying to make this appealing and at least marginally understandable to the entire Web-browsing world.

But I don’t think they’re trying too hard to reach this second, larger group of people. Not yet. The tech-speak and details about Chrome are just too densely packed into the comic for that. Instead, and I think this is smart, they’re targeting the early adopters and will wait for the trickle-down effect of coolness to reach the rest of the world. And by that time, maybe they will have worked some of the larger bugs out.

(X-posted to Digital Digressions)

To get us in the mood, we’re going to start the course with a little writing.

Compose a comment to this post in which you answer the question: What is “literature”? Your comment should only be about 1 paragraph long, so you’ll have to be brief.

Also, where the comment box asks for your name, just put your initials. We’ll talk about why I want you to do that later in the class.