Rev. Edupunk photo by umwdtlt.

During the holidays I was catching up on reading old Wireds and a word in the Jargon Watch caught my attention:

Edupunk n. Avoiding mainstream teaching tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, edupunks bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of ’70s bands like the Clash to the classroom.

The term edupunk was coined by Jim Groom and there’s even a somewhat out-of-date aggregated site dedicated to the edupunk.

Since I started teaching I have disliked Blackboard with its unfriendly user interface. It’s clunky, ugly, gray, closed and supposedly extremely expensive. Unfortunately I have to work with Blackboard with the first year students because the first year courses are attended by 400 people which all have to hand in the same assignments. I must admit edupunks would have a hard time with grading and supervising over 100 students.

But at heart I am an edupunk. I prefer to have my students blog their assignments, or send a link to whatever form their assignment may have. On top of that, as a teacher, I would prefer a blog as well. It’s easier to maintain, the usability is much better and it allows for feedback from the outside. Of course there is the downside of spam but it weighs up against the disadvantages of Blackboard.

Another aspect of me as an edupunk is the fact that I am not a big fan of Powerpoint. It has become a noun. Thus, during our last New Media team meeting we decided not to ask the students to do a Powerpoint presentation but instead make them aware that there are other formats or forms they can use to deliver a slideshow presentation. Keynote, OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, an image slideshow. Anything. A presentation does not equal Powerpoint.

Last week I gave a lecture on ‘Blogging, software standards and template culture’ at the Dutch Film Festival at the SuperPowerPointCinema mini-conference with Bruce Sterling and Eboman organized by Mieke Gerritzen and Koert van Mensvoort.

I do not have a transcript of the actual presentation (which included a few improvised extras) but here are my prepared notes:

1. Blogging, software standards and template culture
Thank you very much for inviting me. My name is Anne Helmond and I am a New Media Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam where I conduct research with the Digital Methods Initiative within the emerging field of Software Studies.

2. The “new” media effect: Software Studies // Software Culture // Template Culture
This SuperPowerPoint Cinema mini conference is part of the re:vision2008 series titled ‘The New Media Effect’ which aims to address important questions including

1. Is there such a thing as a language of new media &
2. Does this lead to a new image aesthetics?

Lev Manovich addressed the first question in his book, appropriately titled, The Language of New Media (2001) in which he argued that new media does have its own distinctive language, or rather distinctive languages. He states that media have become programmable and that we need a new field of study to address the issues that arise from this turn in our culture. Not only has software quietly penetrated our daily life but it has also become invisible. The ubiquity and so-called transparency of software renders it invisible but at the same time it points out the importance of studying it. ‘’From media studies, we move to something that can be called “software studies” — from media theory to software theory.’’

3. Software Studies
Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software.

4. Software Culture
“We live in a software culture – that is, a culture where the production, distribution, and reception of most content is mediated by software.” Manovich
Software has become a cultural force….

5. Template Culture
The language of new media produces new visual aesthetics which are clearly visible in what I would propose to call a Template Culture.

This Template Culture is especially visible in popular Content Management Systems such as Joomla, Drupal and the blog software WordPress. The aesthetics of the content created within these systems are based on software standards, default settings, themes and templates.

6. Defaults
Templates define or reinforce a certain aspects of software culture as a culture is shaped by its medium and practice. What do templates say about the medium and practice of blogging? The WordPress default theme points to the ‘easy publishing’ model of blog software which supposedly no longer required HTML knowledge to publish online. However, it also implies that you don’t know how to change the adjust the stylesheet and code or change the software settings to escape the default. One blogger thus ironically named his blog “Default Settings.”

7. h4ck3r
The practice of blogging changed with the introduction of blog software as coding knowledge is no longer required. Easy-to-use blog software introduced the practice of blogging —that previously belonged to (semi) tech-savvy web users— to the ‘average’ web user. However, customizing the blog requires a move back to code. Subverting the defaults requires CSS and PHP skills.

8. Database aesthetics
The blog, blog software and the blog theme act as an interface to the underlying database where the blog posts and some of the content is stored. A theme determines which content is retrieved and where it is displayed.

If we see the blog as a database we can also see theme hacks that focus on the database. This means that we can build themes that retrieve the information in the database in different ways that defy the regular blog structure of reverse-chronological order and its accompanying aesthetics.

9. Widgets and plugins
This is an exceptional hacked customized WordPress theme. According many researchers within the field of Software Studies hacking plays an important part in opening up our understanding of software.

However, if we want to look at the common web user to make sense of software culture on the web we should take a different approach. Most of us who use and study software don’t hack, we are part of the template culture. We are defined and restrained by templates in which dragging and dropping widgets offer a small degree of personalization.

10. The Widgetized Self
Widgets are pieces of code that you can drag and drope into your template and have become a popular way of ‘accessorizing’ and personalizing the blog. Widgets are used to embed the scattered self into one place, the blog, creating ‘the widgetized self’ (Baym, 2007). Small customizations and modifications in the backend of the blog are a major practice within the blogosphere.

On the web, the practices of the drag-and-drop and modding user show the workings of a template culture as an important part of software culture.

11. Thank you! Questions?

I finished my first semester of teaching in July and the final tests from our first year students revealed some interesting web 2.0 insights. Students were asked to define a few web 2.0 terms besides answering more in depth questions. We read and graded over 300 exams and I took some notes while grading. Some answers obviously showed a lack of studying but other answers made me look at things I take for granted differently, for example:

Folksonomy: The term used for the collective filtering of webpages through the practice of “tagging.” Example: Tagging YouTube movies

This student has seen tags on YouTube but has not quite grasped what they are or do. The answer is an interesting mix of the concept ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and tagging and tags as links that may be used to filter.

Folksonomy: a website that relies on user generated content to exist.
Folksonomy: Economic model that works with tags. Example: Tags = rating
Folksonomy: Economy based on knowledge

Once again these looks like a lucky guess but then again if you think of YouTube or Amazon they are not that far fetched. The rating concept may also come from tagclouds with weighed tags that could be interpreted as ratings. The more often an object is tagged with the same term, the more relevant it is. Tags as recommendations.

Folksonomy: the way things are being found on websites with the use tags.

What surprised me most is that a lot of students described tags as a type of hyperlinks. Tags are often links but tags in itself are not hyperlinks. However, most of the examples of tag use we showed the students on Last.fm, Flickr and YouTube are hyperlinks. The practice and use of tags have transformed tags into a type of hyperlinks. Tagclouds have transformed tags into a type of recommendation and filtering tool.

Over the past two weeks uɐɯʞuǝɯ ɐsoɹ and I have been working on the Mediamatic Distributed Library project:

We are liquidating our library in protest of the cultural funding stalemate

Mediamatic will give away all its books. Our library will cease to exist in protest of the impasse between the Raad van Cultuur and Minister Plasterk on cultural subsidies. We call on the public to come collect the full book collection and to take care of the cultural capital themselves. Mediamatic can no longer do it on their own. (Press release June 19th, 2008)

A library filled with books and media objects waiting to be taken care of.

Mediamatic has been carefully documenting their collection of books, magazines, VHS tapes, Betamax tapes, CD-ROMs and a wide variety of other media objects in Filemaker. The first part of the project consisted of exporting this Filemaker database to a .cvs file that could be “cleansed” before importing it into Mediamatic’s anyMeta system.

The cleaning of data is a meticulous task for any (un)certified Data Care Specialist. Unfortunately the original Filemaker file had all the authors in one single field without a consistent notation. I spent the first week on preparing an import file for anyMeta and working with Mediamatic on database structures and press releases.

After 2500 items were imported into the database Roos and I went through the whole physical archive and moved it into the library space. We started planning and organizing the event that took place on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th of June.

Five minutes before take-off. Cybrarian crew from left to right: Me, Michael, Laura and Roos

The event on Saturday started at 4 o’clock and dozens of people who had been waiting outside for the doors to open entered the library. Even though we had friends helping us register all the outgoing books the amount of people who wanted to take care of all the books was overwhelming.

Crowds are gathering.

There were drinks and a DJ and a lot of press present to cover the bookparty. After day 1 about 70% of all the titles were gone and distributed among the members of the Mediamatic network.

Happy booklovers

On the second day there were still dozens of people taking up to thirty books home! It was less busy which gave us the opportunity to personally help people to enter stories on the books and take pictures for the website. One of the rules of the Mediamatic Distributed Library is that you will write down your motivation for taking care of this particular book and enter a picture into the system. A typical page will then look like this entry on the book Jargon Watch. The idea is to extend the information on the media objects and to build a social network around them using the existing Mediamatic network.

The Stedelijk Museum is going to take care of all the items that have not found a new caretaker this weekend and is going to distribute a part of the collection among other cultural institutions and libraries.

Mediamatic is thinking about organizing a follow-up event to meet your fellow booklovers, caretakers to provide a platform where you can exchange your books or bring new books for the distributed library. Keep your eye on the Mediamatic website for more information.

Press & Media coverage:

Parool.tv. Three seconds of me at 2:24 mins ;)

More pictures on Flickr.

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style. Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy’s own apologetic words: “It’s not me, it’s the software.” The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the “speed dating” Pecha Kucha presentations. Critical storage studies The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies: “While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.”

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software ‘alive’ because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated ‘the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project‘ that Kirschenbaum is currently working on. Taxonomy of Software Studies Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost’s taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out:

What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post. This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with updates. This post was originally written for the Institute of Network Cultures who made it possible for me to attend the workshop in San Diego, CA, USA.

The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).

I proudly present you the new Institute of Network Cultures portal. I have been working on this project for the past few months and I’ll be working on finetuning the portal (including some Internet Explorer issues) from now on. The old portal consisted of a custom-made CMS with a few additional WordPress installations for all the different projects. The old CMS has been replaced with a WordPress MU installation perfectly suited for the easy addition of new projects in the future. A few old blogs and projects have been imported into WPMU to gather more projects under one roof. The Institute of Network Cultures weblog, running on an ancient installation of Movable Type, has been redesigned and relaunched as well.

Institute of Network Cultures portal front page.

Institute of Network Cultures portal projects page.

Institute of Network Cultures weblog

Nieuwe Media in Nederland krant. This is the most minimalistic design I have ever made. The website supplements the “New Media in the Netherlands” newspaper with its austere design. You can read the newspaper online, download the PDF or order a copy.

Nieuwe Media in Nederland krant

Last but not least I would like to thank Erik Borra for all the great help. (f)