Reflection

The wiki project was an interesting experience. I had never actually built an article from scratch, but it turned out to be really intuitive. I guess familiarity with MediaWiki’s software helped in this instance. It was kind of like learning… uh… a new dive, when one already knows how to swim.

For my article on Avidemux, the easiest parts were the technical requirements and what scant history of the project is available online. The brief analysis and overview of strengths and weaknesses for writing classrooms took a bit more thought. I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with theory – I know the audience is meant to be teachers of the English language, but whether they would have the same background in the material that we now all have wasn’t quite clear to me. I erred on the side of caution and chose to address Avidemux’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on writing as simple as possible. If the wiki is aimed at people with the philosophical/phenomenological basis that we all share, then they may find the strengths and weaknesses a bit too simplistic to be fully informative.

Building the Avidemux page wasn’t necessarily “difficult” but it was a tiny bit time-consuming. Since I’m old-fashioned, I tended to do my drafting in Google Docs or Word, just to keep everything safe in the event of unfortunate catastrophic network failure! It’s not that I don’t trust the wiki, but it’s never a good idea to let too much of your hard work sit unsaved on the preview page! That was the most interesting part of the process of forming the page, really, aside from going through many other articles and generalizing a template that would fit the look of the Writing Technology Wiki.

My main focus was the entry for Avidemux. I think our group spread the work very evenly and fairly – while Avidemux was my main responsibility, I also had good suggestions from my groupmates. We all pitched in to modify the category page, and Addison did a great job wrangling the Wax entry into shape. I mostly just tried to give suggestions and not step on others’ toes when it came to the other entries, since my focus was elsewhere.

I’m not sure what remains to be done this semester. In future semesters, I imagine continued maintenance of the wiki entries to keep them up to date will be a primary concern, and perhaps tweaking the strengths/weaknesses sections if the clientele for the Writing Technology wiki changes. Adding new entries is, I imagine, one of the major goals of the wiki, and since new video editing software is being created all the time there should be plenty for future collaborators to work with.

The Perils of Studying English

No blog post is necessary this week, so apparently I'm going to make two.

Anyway, I've discovered a new danger to being an English major: dissociative episodes. There should be some kind of FDA warning against reading the finale of both Middlemarch and 1984 in one sitting. It's impossible to explain the feeling of oneself being simultaneously annihilated and joyously reaffirmed.

MLA Changes

Ars Technica ran a story today about "print no longer being the default" for MLA citations. I guess print really will some day go the way of the dodo. The biggest change the article covered was that URLs are no longer necessary for online sources. I guess we no longer need "stable URLs" a la JSTOR. I suppose this makes it easier for everyone, from students such as ourselves to the code masters of archives who no longer have to be concerned with implementing such systems. The habit is kind of ingrained, though! Will I be penalized for including URLs?

So, what's the procedure in academic circles? Is the new MLA immediate law - thus it is written, thus it shall be done? (Sorry, I watched The Ten Commandments over the weekend.) Or can professors choose to take a while to "catch up"?

Contingent Cooperation in the Face of Zombie Hordes

Lately I've gotten back into Urban Dead. It's a text-based browser-based MMO, free to play, in which a player is either a human survivor or a zombie in a quarantined city.

There is a very robust meta-game, which is Serious Business(tm). There are free agents as well as enclaves of survivors and hordes of zombies who collaborate on password-protected message boards, stuff like that. There is also a wiki that is as central as Urban Dead gets, which includes the all-important suburb Barricade Plans, which leads me into a discussion of "contingent cooperation".

I'm going to skip a lot of background here, because it's too lengthy. It takes a long time to explain free running, barricade levels, and the sin of overcading to the uninitiated. :)

Suffice to say, Barricade Plans are created to ensure that new survivor characters have access to hospitals where they can get first aid, police stations where they can get weapons/ammo, etc, while simultaneously maintaining extremely heavily barricaded fortress-like hideouts that can withstand assault. The Barricade Plans tend to evolve and change as groups leave areas and new groups establish headquarters, stuff like that.

You see contingent cooperation when an old group disperses (or is dispersed by a particularly large zombie horde) and new survivors move in. Initially, it is chaotic in the suburb, with buildings 'caded to varying degrees with no rhyme or reason. However, when a few people - sometimes part of a coordinated group, sometimes a few early "settlers" who spontaneously collaborate - use spraypaint to tag buildings according to a Barricade Plan, characters in the area generally all fall in line. The will to cooperation is there, contingent on the first actors who set the plan in motion. The amount of people who are adhering to the early Barricade Plan depends - just as Rheingold's article describes - on the amount of cooperation they see in others.

Wiki Workshop Week

So... I've been slowly but surely building a page about Avidemux that will ideally serve as a warning to all those who may come after. Here be monsters!

Kidding, kidding - after all, that "The neutrality of this article is disputed" tag isn't very handsome.

In gathering references for my annotated bibliography, I found several articles I can't wait to devote more time to - phenomenology is about as concrete as philosophy is capable of being, and I've found a few pieces that address phenomenology and digital scholarship that should provide good material for the research paper. It seems like a very complex, nebulous area to probe, but armed with enough sources I'm convinced I'll muddle through. I'm very excited to use the specific example of manuscripts in digital archives like JSTOR as the basis for an analysis in the spirit of Idhe or Hayles.

But first, I have to finish warning casual users off of Avidemux. Don't be fooled by its easy-going system requirements and promiscuous OS charm. That's how it gets you.