Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Resources for class, 1/31

The "href" tag:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_href.asp

The "img" tag:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp

Aligning images with CSS:

http://www.devlounge.net/design/aligning-images-the-right-way-using-css

Here's a downloadable zipped file with css and an image to play with:

http://www.box.net/shared/j96gr8e650

Here's a paragraph from a story we'll be talking about today -- and creating some hyperlinks with as well:

I said out loud: I must flee. I sat up noiselessly, in a useless perfection of silence, as if Madden were already lying in wait for me. Something--perhaps the mere vain ostentation of proving my resources were nil--made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I would find. The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the key ring with the incriminating useless keys to Runeberg's apartment, the notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy), a crown, two shillings and a few pence, the red and blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet. Absurdly, I took it in my hand and weighed it in order to inspire courage within myself. Vaguely I thought that a pistol report can be heard at a great distance. In ten minutes my plan was perfected. The telephone book listed the name of the only person capable of transmitting the message; he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour's train ride away.

Here's the wikipedia page for the story, which contains a link to the full text of it.

Lastly, for Tuesday's class, I'd like you to read the below article about hypertext (from the defunct website "five standing"), and answer the following questions (print out your responses and bring them to class):

a. List three ways in which reading on the internet is different than reading from a book.

b. How is the web-reading experience "non-linear"? And how does linear thinking differ from non-linear thinking?

c. In what way does non-linear reading invite us to be the "author" of texts that we read, even if we didn't in fact write those texts?



'Naturally my attention was caught by the sentence, "I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths." I had no sooner read this, than I understood. The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself. The phrase "to various future times, but not to all" suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space. Re-reading the whole work confirmed this theory. In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradiction in the novel.'
Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Garden of Forking Paths'


The Internet brings with it a new format of communication and thus affects and challenges our assumptions regarding textuality, reading, writing, and authorship. Hypertext implies and, paradoxically, demands new methods of writing and inevitably produces an extended text, one that is made up of individual, and sometimes, independent fragments that coalesce to create a whole greater than the sum of its constituent segments.

There are numerous essential differences between a hypertext and a written text. Primarily, instead of encountering it in a paper copy, the text is read on a computer screen. Contemporary screens, which have neither the portability (unless one owns a lap or palmtop computer) nor the tactility of printed books, make the act of reading somewhat more difficult - imagine sitting back on your bed or couch, a steaming cup of coffee on the table next to you and your favourite book in your lap. Now imagine doing this with a computer screen. Impossible. This is an immediate hindrance.

Reading a hypertext does, however, offer certain advantages - the reader can change the size and even style of font to facilitate the act of reading. Although such vacillate modifications cannot be permanently implemented in the text as seen by others, the reader is capable of making them whenever he or she wishes to. More importantly, the reader is in control of the text. He or she can move forwards and backwards through the text, changing and manipulating the text into fresh permutations, each alteration bringing new meaning to the text, increasing the interpretory vicissitude and creating a perceptual dissonance unique to the reader.

Hypertextual Consciousness is the science of writing displaced into a cyberspatial geography, a transcendental region where language is able to evolve, adapt and synchronise itself with the machine. Once this symbiotic interaction between language and narrative environment makes its way into cyberspace's eidolonic reality, then the Hypertextual Consciousness itself, as an 'event horizon' in the development of the gestalt-self, makes it possible for a discursive network to continually circulate without any need for something as overdetermined as the single reader (or indeed, the singleauthor.

Hypertext, as a concept, suggests an alternative to the more inflexible, authoritarian linearity of a conventional text. In the middle of reading a hypertext (and it is arguable that the reader is continuously in the middle of reading a hypertext), the reader is supplied with a number of options to select from so as to break away from the text-block being presently read, thus the reader become complicit in the manner in which the text unfolds and enabling him or her to immediately enter a new writing or textual space.

These options are reminiscent of the remote-control devices we use to 'channel-surf' with our televisions. A hypertextual viewing style would be one where the reader actively 'clicks' their way into new graphological, textual or audio-visual spaces. Hypertext, as a more narratologically-generated,
manually manipulated reading format, can be construed as a kind of literary MTV.

Roland Barthes describes an ideal textuality that precisely matches that which has come to be called hypertext. That is to say, a text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path: 'In this ideal text,' says Barthes, 'the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilises extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language'.

Like Barthes, Michel Foucault conceives of text in terms of network and links. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he points out that the 'frontiers of a book are never clear-cut,' because it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... a network of references'.


Like almost all structuralists and poststructuralists, Barthes and Foucault describe text, the world of letters, and the power and status relations they involve in terms shared by the field of computer hypertext. Hypertext, a term coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, refers also to a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, and a mode of publication. 'By 'hypertext,'' Nelson explains, 'I mean non-sequential writing - text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways'. Hypertext denotes text composed of blocks of text - what Barthes terms a lexia - and the electronic links that join them.

Hypermedia extends the notion of the text in hypertext by including visual information, sound, animation, and other forms of data. As hypertext links one passage of verbal discourse to images, maps, diagrams, and sound as easily as to another verbal passage, it is relatively easy for the computer based medium to effectively combine these into an aggregate product - hypertext intimates an information medium that links verbal and nonverbal information. Electronic links connect lexias 'external' to a work as well as within it, thereby creating a text that is experienced as a nonlinear, or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequential. Although conventional reading habits apply within each lexia, once one leaves the shadowy bounds of any text unit, new rules and new experience apply.


If you wish to continue investigating 'hypertext' and 'narrative theory', you may find it beneficial to examine the weblinks provided in the 'links' section of this website, as it is far easier to unearth information online than from physical texts. However, if you prefer to examine text books, I suggest you track down some of the following.




  • Amiran, Eyal and John Unsworth; Essays in Postmodern Culture, (Oxford University Press, 1993)
  • Bal, Mieke; Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, (University of Toronto Press, 1997)
  • Barthes, Roland; S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (1970)
  • Coste, Didier; Narrative As Communication, (University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
  • Currie, Mark; Postmodern Narrative Theory, (Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998)
  • Danow, David K.; Models of Narrative: Theory and Practice, (St. Martin's Press, 1997)
  • Genette, Gerard; Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, (Cornell University Press, 1979)
  • Gibson, Andrew; Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, (Edinburgh University Press, 1996)
  • Landow, George; Hypertext: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, (1992)
  • Landow, George; Hyper/Text/Theory, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
  • Lehman, Daniel W.; Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge, (Ohio State University, 1997)
  • Martin, Wallace; Recent Theories of Narrative, (Cornell University Press, 1986)
  • Mitchell, W.J.T.; On Narrative, (University of Chicago Press, 1981)
  • Phelan, James; Narrative As Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, (Ohio State University, 1996)
  • Rabinowitz, Peter J.; Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, (Ohio State University, 1997)
  • Richardson, Brian; Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative, (Univeristy of Delaware Press, 1997)
  • Richter, David H.; Narrative/Theory, (Longman Publishers, 1995)
  • Roemer, Michael; Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative, (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1995)
  • Schank, Roger C. and Gary Saul Morson; Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, (Northwestern University Press, 1995)
  • Tabbi, Joseph and Michael Wutz; Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, (Cornell University Press, 1997)




Last updated: Monday, 10th May 1999
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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Hello my name is Matt Braley. All my friends back home just call me by my last name. I am obsessed with snowboarding! I am from a small town in Maine and I am on my local fire department. I am not too computer savvy but I can usually figure my stuff out.

I forgot to put my favorite websites up. http://thissongissick.com/blog/
I also visit http://www.theclymb.com/ a lot.

This is me planking at the top of Mt. Washington!


Just thought I would throw this out for a little joke!

Brett's Introduction

I've been going to SNC for about 2 1/2 years. This is my senior semester so I'm pretty stoked to be almost done with college, until grad school.....maybe. I grew up in Virginia Beach, VA and first attended college at Utah State. I have an upcoming BFA show late Feburary, and it's an interactive show so stay tuned.


I enjoy creating all types of art from abstract and impressionist painting to digital art and video. Last spring I created my company "Bring Ya Lunch".


Bring Ya Lunch is an apparel and artistic brand/company, which is dedicated to showcasing my art and the ideology of the brand. It's all about living your life to the fullest. The website, facebook, and instagram showcases my artistic work, apparel and links to other artists' websites and/or emails.





 

Introduction: Kyle Huddy

Hello class, I am a 29 year old small business owner in the Reno/Tahoe area. I have spent most of my adult life working in hotels, doing sales and marketing. For almost 5 years now, I have also been married to the most beautiful and intelligent woman that brings joy into my life.
Growing up I always dreamed of being a Major League baseball player and in that pursuit received a baseball scholarship  from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where I received my Bachelors in Business and then spent 2 years playing Minor League Baseball for the Cincinnati Reds.

Currently, I am taking this web design class in order to build a top quality web page for my business (www.allnaturalnv.com). Feel free to look at how bad it is right now, so you can see the vast improvement towards the end of the semester:-)

Jenn's introduction

Hello, I'm Jenn. I like skiing, loud music and oysters on the half shell. When I was a kid, I swallowed one of my teeth because I thought it was the "crunchy" part of my "crunchy peanut butter" sandwich. The tooth fairy took pity on me a left me $1 anyway. I didn't eat crunchy peanut butter again until I was an adult. Here is a picture of my dog with his brother. I think it's the only time they've ever been tired.



I often frequent facebook, youtube and my email account, but I'd rather show you this article. It's blown my mind as far as what can be done in the realm of multimedia journalism. My blog can be found at nosnowsnakes.wordpress.com

Monday, January 28, 2013

matt's video of the day

Resources for 1/28 class

HTML - basic definitions.

A basic HTML intro, from a great web design resource site, W3schools:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp

HTML elements:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_elements.asp

A guide on how to write html using TextEdit (taken from about.com):



If you use a Macintosh, you don't need to buy or download an editor to write HTML. You have a perfectly functional editor built into your operating system -- TextEdit.

For many people this is all the HTML editor they will ever need.

There are only a few steps to creating a Web page with TextEdit:

Open TextEdit
Open a Finder window
Switch to the Applications folder
Scroll down to TextEdit and double-click on it


Change the format to plain text
TextEdit defaults to a rich text format, so you need to switch it to plain text to write HTML
Open the Format tab
Choose "Make Plain Text"
You can also hit Shift-Apple-T to switch to plain text


Start writing your HTML
Remember that you need to be more careful than in an actual HTML editor. You won't have elements like tag completion and validation.

Save your HTML to a file
This is the tricky part. TextEdit normally saves files as .txt. But since you're writing HTML, you need to save the file as .html.
Go to the File menu
Choose Save As... (or Shift-Apple-S)
Change the file extension from .txt to .html
A popup will ask you if you want to append the extension ".txt" to the end. Choose "Don't Append"

Opening an html file in TextEdit(from www.askdavetaylor.com):


Go to TextEdit --> Preferences... and choose "Open and Save". You'll see:


The key is the first option under "When opening a file": you want to check Ignore rich text commands in HTML files. Check that option, then quit TextEdit.
It turns out you can also do this by manually selecting File --> Open..., choosing the file, and also selecting the option in the Open dialog window of "Ignore rich text commands", but since i'm always double-clicking on files or otherwise launching TextEdit, it's a much easier solution to simply fix the preferences and never worry about it again.

Here is a battery of links that may be useful to you in the formatted poem:

Links to CSS text and font info:



http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_text.asp


http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp

The "span" tag (for modifying elements outside of "p" and "header" tags:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_span.asp

Web colors:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp



Link to CSS examples:

http://www.w3schools.com/CSS/css_examples.asp

An online resource for getting the text of a poem:

http://www.bibliomania.com/

Emily Dickinson, defaced via CSS:



http://sncweb.110mb.com/class/EMILY_PLAIN.html

Diva Helmy Introduction

Hello! 

My name is Diva Helmy. I am a Sophomore and a Digital Arts and Entrepreneurship major here at SNC. I am from the bay area and I am extremely passionate for filming and editing sports, fashion and event videos. 




One of my favorite filmmakers is named Johannes Ring and I visit his website often because I love his style as a cinematographer and editor. 

Intro: Jaka Jazbec

Hello everyone!

My name is Jaka and as you all probably figured I am not American. I come from a very small country called Slovenia, located right next to Italy:



I am also a part of the Sierra Nevada College Ski Team. Now that's all I can remember right now.

Since my dog is way cutter than I am, I'll just post his picture instead.


Site I visit often would probably be THIS.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Matthew B's introduction

Greetings!

My name is Matthew Brill, and I'm an alcoholi-----wait, wrong blog...

I am a student at SNC and should be graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in digital art and computer science come May 2013. I enjoy doing stuff when I'm not doing things, and doing things when I'm not busy doing stuff.

I couldn't say what websites I frequent, as I tend to surf the net, but I am going to throw Chris off here before he realizes I just copied and pasted my previous post and link to Stack Overflow instead of Least I Could Do.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Hello

... my name is Carrie.



                                                                                                                      I design outwear! 
 



I just came back from the Caribbean where I was sailing around for a month to all the different islands with my pirate parents...

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Alexa's intro

Hello everybody! My name is Alexa but my nickname is Big Cakes. 
I have been attending college for 5 years now and have finally figured out that I was meant to be an art major. I love cats, unicorns, and gangster music. I am also a swimmer, dancer, and technology enthusiast all of which I hope will be reflected in my work in this class. A website I visit often is StumbleUpon 
 
^A picture I made in digital darkroom last semester

^My kitten Stache 

Intro Post: Kelvin Chiu

My name is Chun Kit Chiu, but I go by Kelvin.
I am a environmental science student and this class is my first art class.
I have no sense of art, so I hope my web site would be at least readable for everyone.
If you want to help me on it, feel free to leave comment on the post of send me an e-mail
The website I visit most is Gundam Wikia
Im Alex Sullivan, Im a photography major from Colorado. Besides taking pictures I love snowboarding and getting out in the backcountry. I enjoy the outdoors and camping, traveling and my dog Targhee. A website that I visit often and intern for is UnofficialNetworks.


Intro Post: Chris

Hi my name is Chris. I teach this class.

Here is a site I visit often: Comics Reporter



Tom wrote:

There are two books coming out in 2013 from the line, both of which feature the series design work by Jason Booher and Helen Yentus. According to a statement supplied CR by the publisher, the series is designed to reflect the way that mid-20th Century manga was less "an independent world of its own" than in part reflective of a significant influx of American comics and cartoons from the 1920s through the 1970s. The line promises both largely forgotten one-offs and ignored work from various manga superstars.
That's the end of the quote.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Web Design Class Spring 2013: Welcome

Welcome to the blog for the web design class.

My apologies in advance for missing out on class next Thursday. You have a two-part assignment to complete before next class, which will be a week from today – Tuesday, 1/29.

PART ONE

Make a post on this blog. You should: a) write a short paragraph about yourself, b) include a picture of yourself, and c) provide a link to a website that you like or visit often.

PART TWO

Be prepared, next class, to talk about why you like the website for a presentation of five to ten minutes. Write and print out an outline, which you will hand in on Tuesday's class (this is not a full paper, but an outline you can refer to in your presentation). Talk about:

1. The design of the site

You should be able to describe the use of:
a) color
b) fonts
c) images
d) the general layout

How do each of these elements serve (or undermine) the purpose and content of the website? What is the emotional or design quality of each of these elements? For instance, a site designed for children might use colors that are bright, vivid, and friendly -- with a font that appears playful or toy-like.

2. The navigation of the site

How it the site organized? How do you get from place to place? Is the content on the site easily accessible? Are there different navigation schemes on different parts of the site, or is it consistent across the site?

3. The functionality of the site -- what the site "does."

Also, if you have a website of you own, post a link to that as well.

And don't forget -- I highly recommend you order the book "Visual Quickstart Guide to Dreamweaver CS6," online.

Finally -- if you'd like to download a copy of the syllabus, it's here:
https://www.box.com/s/azhgrqmr16fa7vndmj2a