Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Wednesday (1/28) Info

TAGS WE'LL BE LOOKING AT TODAY:

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 Monday'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 27, 2015

Cool Website & Magazine Layout (and good facts about awesome technologies)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/

Hi


Hello! My name is Alison Matthews, Ali for short. I moved to Incline with my husband from Oakland a year ago. I feel so lucky to be able to live and work in this glorious place called Tahoe. I thrive in this environment where everyday brings a new adventure and inspires you to be better. I’m new to skiing but steadily improving; currently “shredding” the greens. I’m a graphic designer and have worked in the fitness industry, doing print based design, for the past four years. I’m auditing this class to learn more about web design and enhance my skill set. 

I've moved around a lot in the past three years, so I often turn to Yelp, to help with reviews on local businesses. 


Monday, January 26, 2015

JT Surwall lyrics page

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {color:black;}
h1 {color:green;}
h1 {font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; text-align: center;}
p { font-size: 15px; font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;text-align: center;}
p.ex {color:green; font-size: 25px;}
footer {text-align: center; font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1>Ultimate Spinach</h1>
<p class="ex"><i>Visions of Your Reality</i></p>
<p>
I don't want to be a rusty suit of armor</br>Or a tumbled out forgotten castle in your mind</br>I just want to be a twisted willow</br>So I can leave you shallow thinking far behind</br>
I can feel the darkness in your shadow</br>And the melting of the ice behind your troubled eyes</br>And the discoloration of all the words you're saying</br>As you're hunted without mercy by your lies</br>
I've flown so high I'll never return</br>And I've been to the bottom of the drags of your troubled soul</br>And I've basked in the sun of your revelations</br>But I guess</br>You and I have different goals</br>So go and slay your dragons in blind amusment</br>And topple imagination with a song</br>
And the moon it plays little mind games</br>So you'll wonder where all the stars have gone</br>Listen to me</br>You have spoken to be about nothing</br>And you've shown me fantasies in a crystal ball</br>And you've promised me the world for my asking</br>Don't you know</br>That to me</br>It means nothing at all</br>Because I know you'd leave me a burnt out matchbox of forgotten roses</br>Inside a get well card I had to address to myself</br>But that's not what I need from another stranger</br>So I guess I better do things without your help</br>So I guess I better do things without your help</br>So I guess I better do things without your help</br></p>


<p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/He53R6EgqPM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
</body>
<footer>
footer
</footer>
</html>

Resources for Monday, 1/26

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, our first html-based assignment:

I want you to take a poem or song lyrics, and use text formatting to "design" the text in ways that emphasize properties of the poem/song (for instance, if there is a line that's very angry, perhaps the font is larger and red for that section). I want you to use at least six different text properties (color, font face, size, alignment, etc.) in the course of the poem/song.

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/

This is some basic html text styling code – utilizing inline CSS – that I thought might be helpful as a "base file" for you to build your poem out of. Hopefully it gives an idea of some basic text-styling syntax (I'll break it down in class):

------------------------------------------------
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {color:red;}
h1 {color:yellow;}
p.ex {color:rgb(0,0,255);}
.bluebackgrounditalicboldetc
{
background-color:#6495ed;
font:italic bold 28px Georgia,serif;
}
.greenspaced
{
color:#00ff00;
letter-spacing:5px;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<p>This is an ordinary paragraph. Notice that this text is red. The default text-color for a page is defined in the body selector.</p>
<p class="ex">This is a paragraph with class="ex". This text is blue.</p>
<p class="bluebackgrounditalicboldetc">This is a paragraph that has been styled with a class that has multiple elements controlled by it – background color, italics, bold, 28 points, in the Georgia font.</p>
<p>This is an ordinary paragraph, but I've modified this one word – <span class="greenspaced">HERE</span> – using the span tag, styled to a unique class.</p>
And </br>
lastly </br>
I'm </br>
including </br>
some </br>
line </br>
breaks </br>
with </br>
the </br>
break </br>
tag.
</body>
</html>
------------------------------------------------

Flying Lotus Embed

John Wilkins

Hey, my names John Wilkins, grew up in Lake Placid, NY and this is my Senior year at Sierra Nevada College studying for a BA in Entrepreneurship.  Throughout my years at SNC I've found tons of different activities to keep me entertained but the best would have to be skiing, snowboarding, camping, volleyball, and water skiing.  Currently I'm the Captain of the SNC Water Ski Club and am looking forward to traveling up and down the west coast for competitions and our meeting in Vegas!

Two websites I use a lot would be Newschoolers and Transworld Snowboarding for skiing and snowboarding videos, articles, and forums.

Video of the Week #1:Philosophical Discussion on Nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKuGiZ0rL-0

Sunday, January 25, 2015

First post

Thats a photo of me doing one of my favorite things, snowboarding. My name is Jake Brayton, I spent all of my life in upstate New York until a life changing road trip brought me here. I am now in my junior year at SNC pursuing a BA in Digital Arts and Management. A website that I visit often is http://www.thrashermagazine.com/ for all my skateboard video needs.

Steve Granelli

Hi,

My name is Steve, I am in my final semester at SNC and am majoring in Entrepreneurship and Global business management. In my free time I enjoy dirt biking around the lake, kayaking, and hiking with my dog. In the fall semester I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. After graduating I am planning on moving to San Francisco to work. I am currently on SNC's lacrosse team and am looking forward to traveling across the West coast for an exciting season.  

Here's a website that I enjoy using - http://expeditionportal.com/

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Justine Paige

Hi,

I'm Justine, I was a born and raised in Tahoe and continue to live a blessed life surrounded by this divine environment. I am continuously inspired by life's duailty and cherish each breath I take. I value self-care and have interest in pursuing counseling with an emphasis on self-development through the seven major chakras. I am also an artist who views the world as an endless pattern of interconnected karmic paths of energy, and understand that balance is key to well-being.

I have a deep love for design and fashion, and particularly admire the designs of the brand Free People…Even there website is pretty badass and I visit it all to often… www.freepeople.com 

Friday, January 23, 2015

Henry's Intro

Good afternoon. My name is Henry. I am a 14 year military veteran. My hobbies include motorcycle riding, long walks in the mountains, food, community service and being a pain in the ass to the professors at SNC. :) My future goals include finding out what I want to be in life, foreign policy work and contributing to the community. Below you will see a picture of me pre and post beard!

The website I visit a lot in my work as a veterans advocate is: http://vfwnv.org 




Post One: Introducing Natalie

Photo featuring Natalie Clark Postles by Natalie Clark Postles


 Often called Natalie. 22 going on 23 years old. Born April 24th. Taurus. In her second semester at the post secondary school, Sierra Nevada College she transferred to the school as a Sophomore. Natalie's major is Digital Arts & Entrepreneurship with a minor in Journalism. She dabbles in digital and film photography during her free time as well as reading, freelance writing, and involving herself in outdoor activities as frequently as possible. She has a passion for traveling and exposing other Americans to the beauty of other cultures. She hopes that her degree and time spent at SNC will help her advance quickly in the travel industry.

A site Natalie uses occasionally and finds intriguing: