Up now: Live-blogging the P3 Workshop with Anne Balsamo

Anne Balsamo's book, Designing Culture: A Transmedia Project, is about to be published. www.designingculture.net/blog

Anne Balsamo: Prezi eats kittens <laughter> (David Gibson and Ana Boa Ventura both used Prezi for their talks).

The value of a portfolio can manifest in part through the reflection in creating the portfolio (looking at Anne's blog, portfolio). We see an mage of Anne in graduate school -- she is cutting and pasting the morning of her talk for MLA). Material practices of scholarly production, have inculcated in a rapid changes of practices of knowledge production from cutting and pasting of paper. www.designingculture.net/blog

Research looks at collaboration that happen in the course of everyday life. Investigation into maker culture, documentary footage of Maker Faire, interested in comparing the insights that she has assembled. Subculture of maker or DIY groups. Tinkering is an important issue to address in digital age. Collaborative, body'based nature of tinkering. Working between people, their hands, and tools and materials. (Great image of young girl tinkering with an adult watching her work, both engrossed, heads leaning closely).

Ways of the Hand:

Improvisation, ad-hoc, just-in-time art making, ripping, circuit-bending. Remix, mash-up, collage. Trying to create a taxonomy: open, physical, co-presence. Trying to understand what the commonalities are across the practices. Call all of these things are called Ways of the Hand. Hands working with our digital companions. These are the ways we make the world, The way of Knowing, A Way of Life, The Way of Making Community and Culture. Tinkering is not a leisure activity of a culture that has accumulated time and resources for many cultures, those who make the conditions of their own subsitence. Ways of the Hand are the ways we make our communities. Explicate what it means The Hand, The World, The Body, is always playing a part in how we create culture beyond the community level.

An exercise for the P3 Workshop Audience: collaborative improvisation on the ethics of collaboration. Creating a Cloud. What makes a good collaborative participant? Especially when you're collaborating across domains. (We all have pens and pads of paper in our P3 packets). Anne asked us to take a break from the back channel, to be present here and focus...Think about a moment, positive moment, of collaboration across a vector of differentiation. Something that person performed in the collaboration toward you. What was the human quality in the collaboration feel empowering and enabling your individual effort. List five words, find partner and compare lists, pick two words that both agree on. Then the group shares words and w create a tag cloud. Some of the words being suggested:

Empathetic, forgiving, responsive, curiosity, humor, dedication, connected independence, synergy, comfort, willingness, respect, creativity, collegiality, expertise, open, listening, quirky, investment, trust, desire to learn, reciprocity, bonding, committed, engagement, possibility, compromise, experimental, enthusiasm, humility.

Now Anne is creating the tag cloud (by hand!) based on how many counts per word. OPEN is the biggie. Then humor. Then curiosity, dedication, reciprocity, listening, creativity, respect. All the others are teeny.

What would you take away from this tag cloud? What does the tag cloud tell us? What are we set up to believe about a tag cloud, so that OPEN would be the most important quality. And then humor would be the second most important. Dedication, curiosity,etc. would be the next most important. Would you be motivated, and would you be self-disciplined to be concerned about the small tags? Conventions of tag clouds tell us that the bigger the tag, the more weight we should give to the word and the action. This exercise is not to debunk the usefulness of tag clouds, but to show that we need to interrogate about what our digital tools are doing. In a collaborative especially distributed community, how do you get at minority opinions? How do you get at the lone voice? How do you get at the voices that are not well-represented? How do you get at the long-tail of discourse. How do we understand the scale and spatial relationship, and how do we understand the things that go at the margins.

All of these terms probably lend themselves in important ways to good collaborations. Tag cloud subsumes while emphasizing.

Ethics of interdisciplinary collaboration: intellectual generosity, intellectual reliability, intellectual humility, intellectual confidence. These come from Anne's essay, and if she gave us the essay to read prior to this exercise, we would already be prompted to use the terms she used. Anne has used this exercise to get her students to think critically about tag clouds, and also to elicit terms. How do we make tag clouds a more nuanced application? Consensus and outliers can have their ideas represented and valued, maybe even because the tag cloud has been generated.

Questions: what do you think about traditional Library of Congress terms as they compare to the tags in a tag cloud? (Has never found a tag cloud ever useful). When searching in an academic setting, subject terms are helpful. Anne: How we enage them, what is the knowledge -- needs to be parsed. Just as we need to be skeptical of how LoC assigns words. Catalogs are institutionally guaranteed, while tag clouds are perhaps more emergent. Discourse of tagging may become more conventional.