The impulse to be minor

Posted on by Liz

When I’m editing a wiki, even privately, I have the impulse to click “This is a minor edit,” even when I’ve made significant changes. It seems presumptious to have an implied “major edit” be the default. I don’t want to contribute too much noise to the signal of the wiki’s Recent Changes page.

Part of the impulse to label all my edits “minor” is because I twiddle and save frequently; I’ll edit a few words out of a sentence here and there, save, and go right back to that paragraph. I blog that way too, screwing up everyone’s RSS feeds, publishing carelessly as an idea comes, and then fiddling with the entry over the next hour as I realize my phrasing was clumsy or a new idea, related, strikes me.

On a related but different level, I believe that it is important to expose the process of thought, the evolution of intellect, the muddled waters where research and inspiration meet and ideas coalesce. Many people don’t know how to think; they don’t think they think; they can’t see themselves thinking, because they only have seen “finished products” and never the intermediate stages. Uncertainty is forbidden. It is private. It’s personal. It’s weak and vulnerable. That is a limitation I see as unnecessary. It is often useful, but not always. It’s a barrier to collaboration and to learning.

But then I wonder if both these behaviors in myself, the constant “minor editing” of blog and wiki, might signify an asymptotic process-focus, where I regard nothing as done, nothing as major, nothing achieved. My poems remain in their notebooks and rough drafts indefinitely. I consider even my master’s thesis as a “draft”. It pains me to refer to it as finished.

Gender plays into this. Women underplay their acheivements & work. I do it too. I don’t want to bring attention, or be under fire. I rarely feel any work is done, good enough; I might change my mind. Everything could be improved. I can think of someone who has done part of that, or expressed the idea, more neatly, more professionally. And yet I consider myself bold! What baggage, what damage, we carry.

A good friend and I were discussing this the other day as we rushed to deprecate ourselves and our collaborative work on our own private wiki. “I haven’t done enough.” “No, I haven’t done enough!” Then we realized what we were doing. The conversation led to our discussing how we compare our own work to the best in our field, come up short, and feel we are impostors. As I contemplated this impulse in myself I realized I compare my own thesis, as a work in progress (seriously, it’s not really *done* done, no matter what the diploma says!) to writing by women 30 years older than myself who are on their 10th book. We are not comparing ourselves to our peers, but to the best we see — and worse than that, to the best we can imagine. On some level I am proud of this impulse, and think it will help me to keep improving my work for my entire lifetime. However, this strange combination of arrogance and humility can be a huge obstacle; when it blocks me, I have to try to break myself of the mental habit of “being minor.”

As a generalist who is constructing anthologies, I also put a lot of pressure on myself, and feel pressure from outside, to have depth of knowledge as well as range. I cannot be as much of an expert on each poet, or each country, as women who (again) are usually far older than myself and further along in their careers and who have focused down in a narrow area.

Despite all these things, I am becoming more and more comfortable claiming authority. I credit technology and the control over the means of production that it’s brought me with part of my own intellectual evolution. Without the freedom to publish and edit, publish and edit, in a cyclical pattern, exposing “drafts” — unlike the publication of a book that would have to start out more perfect that I could imagine, and that would never be fixable — I would not have had the confidence to step into a public forum of ideas. My notebooks, essays, poems, and all that would have stayed, like so many other women’s over history, in diaries and personal letters.

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Focus resolution; geek love

Posted on by Liz

Looking back on this blog – I realize I should focus a bit more. Liveblogging should probably not go here, but somewhere else, and I can link to it from here.

I could also go back through every post to add tags. Cleaning up my other blogs seems impossible because they’re too huge already, but this one’s not so bad.

Why this blog? I thought it could help me to have a public non-pseudonymous presence. I have these essays on poetics from a few years ago, which I should post here and be done with it. I have feelings that my thoughts and visions about literature and blogging and my approach to the Internet have roots in common. Whatever that unity is, I have not yet found a way to explain it, even thought the feeling’s still strong.

Since my first encounter with computers and even the thought of AI, I have felt that computers in relation to humans are beautiful. Part of the love I feel is twined with feminism; the Cyborg Manifesto expresses this very well. Now, I had not read the Cyborg Manifesto when I was 10 and pounding away on the keys of my neighbors Apple II or Kaypro to make it write poetry. And yet felt so deeply sitting there that I was in love in an science-fiction-loving way, with the future, with a key, a key to liberation or unity of something broken in myself and in society. Before my contact with the net, I loved the idea of it. In front of the fuzzy glowing green letters on the black screen my mind was taking off to imagine infinite things; my own robotic arms extending into space in a mining colony, or the beautiful moment when the computer talked back. When you meet a tool like that, that is not quite a tool, that is an artistic medium but more than that, it’s an important moment. While all machines have beauty to me, I don’t feel the same about a xerox machine or even a typewriter, though maybe about certain architecture or performances or cities. Complexity, constructedness, potential and space – space as in room; an organic work of art that invites participation in its own construction. It makes the human imagination bigger. Some vast imaginariness collective unconscious reservoir of potential opens up!

This is nonsense and mysticism, but I still want to talk about it.



A thought on cultural appropriation

Posted on by Liz

I was thinking of this today, as I did my “bridgeblogging” and some translation from Spanish. So went to look up the exact quote. It’s from Revolutionary Letter #31 by Diane Di Prima.

better we should all have homemade flutes
and practice excruciatingly upon them, one hundred years
till we learn to
make our own music

(In contrast to children in Bengal spending their lives in factories not singing because singing is for export, for Folkways records.)

I do try to “practice excruciatingly” – thus my blogs and poetry. I understand what Di Prima is saying – it is the “Are my hands clean?” of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s song – and the answer is no. I wonder if Di Prima listens to Folkways records. It is a poem worth thinking about, even if you don’t live by it, as I am not.

I hope that my blogging, reading and writing, have a net benefit for everyone. As a translator I do worry about this and issues of “cultural capital” and I don’t really have an answer. Oh, the guilty socialist intellectuals who don’t know what to do! I’m not complaining, but there it is. I wonder if it is that I believe not in Art (which di Prima’s poem is against) but in Information. Well, against it when it’s set against the value of human life. “not all the works of Mozart worth one human life”. Instead we believe we are saving lives by our techno info hippie art – but whose? Whose lives or whose privilege?

I believe in what I do! But I remain suspicious of it and of the structures that support it.



Licking the sun, or hot lava, or something

Posted on by Liz

Now here’s a fine sounding event… which I’ll just repost even though I’m white and not in Brooklyn. Just to wave my pompoms a little bit in the general direction, and spread the word.

Tongues Afire: Creative Writing Workshop for Queer Women, Trans Women and
Gender Non Conforming Women of Color*
October 5, 2006 – December 14, 2006
Workshop Facilitator: R. Erica Doyle

What: Creative Writing Workshops

When: Thursdays, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Where: Audre Lorde Project, 85 South Oxford Street; Brooklyn, NY 11217**

How much: FREE
How to Apply: Send an email with your contact information to
tonguesafire@gmail.com to register for the workshop.
Space is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Registration Deadline: Monday, October 2, 2006



Feminism and blogs

Posted on by Liz

There’s a panel on November 14, Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance, at Barnard:

Of the internet’s viability as a tool for political change, we ask, is there a better example than the blog? Young and youthfully minded feminists have learned that blogging allows them to carve out personal and political spaces where their lives, their issues, their analyses of the world can come into sharp focus. Outside the confines of mainstream media, where women are addressed (usually exclusively) as consumers, feminist bloggers have become the cultural producers blazing some of the most radical and rousing paths toward revolutionary social change.

In celebration of the publication of this fall’s issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, guest editors Gwendolyn Beetham and Jessica Valenti come together with select contributors to discuss how feminists are fulfilling the promise of creating a cybercommunity dedicated to securing a more just and peaceful world. Panelists include Lauren Spees and Michelle Riblett, BC ’05 (Hollaback), Liza Sabater (Culture Kitchen), among others. Join us for a spirited discussion of feminism in the 21st century.

Good! We need more discussions like this. We need to be documenting our feminism, compiling references, making solid, lasting interconnections. The Scholar and Feminist Online seems like a good step.

We’ve had one feminist think tank discussion in chat since the Wiscon “Feminist think tank” panel, and other projects spawned from it, like the stuff at feministsf.net – a group blog, a wiki, a carnival of feminism in SF, and more.

I still think that Wikipedia’s dearth of information on feminism needs to be addressed and fixed, but we also need new tools.



Virtual Poetry Slam

Posted on by Liz

This contest looks pretty cool. Citizens for Global Solutions is holding a virtual poetry slam video contest. Video yourself and upload it to their blog. They ask for a focus on the environment. I’m not sure what the other guidelines are.

Cash! First place – $500; second place – $250; third place – $100
Top entries will be posted on our website blog on a rolling basis as we receive them. So, hurry and send in your video. The contest deadline is October 15th.

It’s a good idea. I wonder how much poetry performance is on YouTube already? Let’s take a look, with a search on “poetry” with the highest ranked video at the top.



Barcamp presentation on Celestia

Posted on by Liz

barcamp stanford
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

A few slow moments, but impressive and cool as hell. In the application, Celestia, you can fly around to planets and stars, see orbits, etc. And each star or planet or whatever has a ton of information. Rod lectured us on luminosity. Galen let us know that Viga is the coolest moon of Neptune.

This presentation generated the best quote from barcamp stanford:

Audience: Hey Rod, what are those green lines?
5 year old kid: Those green lines? Those are curved space-time.

I could only lie there on the ground and whimper, that was so cool.

and the next best quote:

Galen: Can we see Uranus?



flickr video generator

Posted on by Liz

This thing is extremely clever. From the command line or with a little cgi interface you can put in a keyword and number of images. The application fetches that number of tagged images from flicker and puts them into a quicktime video format. hey presto, instant slide show/video thingie.

I think someone wrote it this afternoon. (That’s why I’m not linking to it. I’m sure some version of it will be public soon enough.)

I could take all the photos from Milo’s stop motion animation projects, put them on Flickr with a unique tag, then generate a bloggable video way faster than i could on iMovie.

Now we need the streaming audio to go with it!

Barcamp Stanford – Notes from Day Two (rough)

Posted on by Liz

BarCamp Stanford – Sunday Aug. 27, 2006

It’s nice to be in the English building at Stanford. I think of all the times I’ve been here for literary readings (or job interviews). Now… how odd to be here for a computer conference.

*** first session ***
Guy talking about mashups. He’s from the stanford hci group.

henry ford museum. toy thing. little houses, magnetic. close circuit on a map. you can move them around. and it hooks up to google earth for a flythrough.

[Horribly… my first thought is that it has a direct military application as you could make your little models of the war front especially urban, flyable in simulator]

he has a slideshow. Their whiteboard has its own flickr account. big red staples “easy” button, camera in ithe ceiling takes a photo of the whiteboard, sent to python scripts, then you can safely erase the whiteboard.

other guy – can you actually read it?

mashup guy – yes.

Adina – do you have a recipe for it?

speaker – yes , here it is (shows diagram)

mashup guy – shows how they made it a sketch/animated thing.

example #4 – color field cam. like the flickr color picker mashup. but in the real world. point at a color, and you get flickr images that match the avg colo

question – how offten are you updating

mashup guy – not that fast… ilt is cached…

mashpits… start witout a

hci human computer interface. venn diagrams.

– things that live online (green
– live in interface physical space (red
things that live on computer. (blue

the intersections need the glue! most mashups are in the green section of “things that live online”. what goes in the other areas of the venn diagram?

….
liza loop: kids, younger?

mashup guy – lego mindstorms, other ones.

[i’m thinking of nintendogs and tamagochi ]

Back to glue.
green + blue = flickr, python api
red + green – shared phidgets, sensor nets?
red + blue: d.tools

Hotglue. a surface adhesive. duct tape. (screen scrape, poke)
dovetail joints – precise fitting, beautiful, parts know about each other. deep integration (public api)

http://mashup-tools wiki. password is design

easiest ways is not thru keyboard interface
but to arcade controller people… they are these 20 dollar boards…

Kent brewster – new developer network. was a hobbyist.
showing spiffy!search.

myweb at yahoo. tagging stuff.
picocricket….

brewster’s field guide to web 2.666 — kentbrewster.com/spiffysearch

okay, that’s spiffy. search that come s up with popup menu style list of stuff and you click on the side doohickey to get a popup window for you to tag it. works with delicious

Hell yeah, this looks handy. Then I could import it straight onto my blog with rss. my tags I wonder what it will look like using delicious. (is this link going to work… i think not. fix it later.)

Chris Messina – doing tech and flow.

sunday sessions. ID 2.0
tech a nd policy.
Online problem solving, politics and conflict res
Astronomy sim
co-working
mashups lighting talks @ lunch

****

me and a dude from microsoft… Nima… wearing laughing squid tshirt. I demo kent brewster’s thing… he tries it…

I whine that flock has not given me a pony yet. their search yahoo toolbar thing does not have a function for me. kent’s thing is better.

me and tantek talk abut information absorbtion speed and reading and habits. it needs to be fast like a video game. that is what we grew up with. keystrokes. I can play nethack or use vi without thinking. I want to browse, search, and read blogs that way, with fast muscle memory ingrained. tantek says the myweb thing is nifty but like many such tools it assumes way too slow an information stream and that you will maybe look at 10, 20 things… not 300- 500 a day. we need batch tagging.

I need to turn on a bunch of tags so that everything i do in a space is tagged with something.. like if everything i noted today till 5pm was tagged barcamp stanford techie, that would be useful for me & then I could toggle it off again . (again i am thinking of nethack or emacs or something. screw clicking.

****
tech and policy discussion

john pete nima todd tim adina tracy silona christine (mit limewire) tantek liz

Adina – 1) tech policy 2) partisan electoral politics 3) Deliberative. figuring out consensus building etc.

***

bill in congress right now passed house july 26 410-15 vote. DOPA now anything with social network is illegal in libraries and schools.

liz – all libraries or just kids room

pete – just kids room i think

pete – is lookign it up. if you have contact info on it… then it’s too much. blogger comments might be illegal.

adina – it’s not law yet. it’s passed the house it’s in the senate commerce committee. The next step here is to contact the members of the senate commerce committee. senator boxer from CA is on the committee. Contact her office. let’s look for creative ways to get web 2.0 people to communicate with the people on that committee.

nima – a lot of big companies like google, microsoft, yahoo, are affected

pete reads to us from wikipedia entry for dopa. forum, chat room, im, email…

liza – thats like outlawing cell phones
pete – it’s like outlawing http.

adina – they are going on parents who are worried… socially conservative suburban family votes, going into election season.

Adina talks about the stuff they did in Texas. It worked – they affected policy.
there was a billin the tX state legislature favored by the telecom industry , make it illegal for cities and towns to provide wifi and broadband service for that city.

Adina talks about that groups’ specific strategies. blog, mailing list, private wiki. collaboratively wrote the documents and position papers. this was all basically free, using ffree tech and our existing skills.

***
kid break.
Rod (5 years old) is drawing on a white board in a room for Milo & Galen. He made an outline and a diagram and was lecturing them!

***

another kid break – i go up and down 6 flights of stairs several times – they are in the basement on the couches under the stairwell. there is a dungeon.

***

best practices – no unified place..
liza suggests doing a lot of tagging…
silona – yah tagging
liz – but then we’ll just be talking to each other, learning curve for tagging, practice of it… mobilizing mommybloggers
adina – constituency building
liz – cause widget. have easy widgets, meme thingies, with political issues, with un-dopa…
adina – events. time senstivive
todd- freepress.org
liz – countdown. upcoming.org events, a checklist
sliona – a feed
adina – email isn’t useful for us anymore we need rss
liz – a todo list or a checklist sort of approach so on upcoming i do the action
tracy- there coudl be a way to add new suggested actions to the countdown/political action need
liz – and i do the action and i check it off and it’s visible that i’ve done it , a declaration, so you see “3000 other people have done this…”
adina- a calendar/action widget

lack of structure and formal hierarchy. freaks out washington. they like to pick the most famous person in the room nad pick them to give a speech from a very high podium.

todd – it is a west coast east c
oast thing.

adina – this is a good fodder for the hacking mashup doit session. before that do we want a … upstream

tim – is there a microformat use case for activism, issues, etc.

tantek – the closest thing is you could use todo vocabulary from icalendar. todo items that don’t have a defined person who’s supposed to do them.

liz – a social todo list. collective todo list. important to track how many people ahve done it

pete – or how many intend to do it. 100,000 people have noted to themselves to vote you out of office.

tantek – markup… cut and paste in blog post – integrated tools that m ake it trivial for someone to integrate into blog post – in wordpress, moveable type.

43 things site – public todo lists – existing human behavior – so why not put this on your own blog.

liz – repeats what pete said about 100K people vote you out of office

adina – would be interesting for a codeblue tool….

pete – can you subscribe tot he feed of people who subscribe to skydiving…

tantek – hmmm the list of people who have “vote” on their todo.

oooo!

pete – digg thing of a flash visual of what’s being paid attention to. on 43things they are doing something similar but it’s todo items.

liz – imagine the realtime poll thingie in newspapers tracking what people are paying attention to

todd – site called ….? dopa… campaigns wikia

tantek – i’s on wikipedia

tim – voter information guide, getting past partisan yelling, there’s a growing community on that. get a page up on there on DOPA.

silona – he just put a polling piece on there.

adina – the eff page is a good resource for it.

Adina – so, campaigns is different from neutral point of view.

Tim –
Adina – I have no interest in a neutral point of view on DOPA.

Adina – discussion of wikipedia article – it lacks a description of the unintended effects. Let’s flesh that out.

Todd – CPSR, Leage of Technical Voters, EFF – that’s the place for it but Wikipedia isn’t necessarily.

Adina – once you’re up to the point of doing pro and con that means the issue has been framed for you already.

tantek: if the battle ground has been defined you might have already lost.

adina – exactly. for or against is too late in a way, there is rethinking needed of what are you trying to.

todd – talks about campaigns wikia

pete – we could use dopa as the test case for these ideas
***

tim – a wiki edit is hard. we need something that will be like digg-ing.

who is editing. some low number of people, 1700, make 75% of edits…

tim – getting past the yelling…

Adina – taking off my nonpartisan hat. this will ruin your day. here is a map of saudi oil production. this number has been flat. the plateau starts. number of oil rigs. they start to order rig after rig trying to get more oil out of the ground. there are a # of potential explanations. they can’t make any more and they are desp. trying to put in new wells in the ground. timeframe for slope. the panic drilling starts in spring 04. and then jumps up in 05. continues to accelerate now. their producction has been flat. this is peak oil.

tantek – read up on peak oil

adina – theoildrum.com

liz – that coudl be investment banks overoptimistic about investing in exploration and drilling.

tracy -o and keeping prodution flat on purpose …

tantek- a big problem

adina – this could have a huge impact on civilization
tantek – oh it’s so much worse than that. you cant even pick it apart. it’s not even partisan… swap out political party

[I agree with Tantek]

adina – i disagree with you …and i’ll explain why over lunch

tantek – peak oil, read up on it

pete – gigantic value web

tantek – the layout of towns. roads, infrastructure
pete – the way food is grown and distributed

***

lunch

talking about activism
truthiness, wikipedia politics, la times attempt to talk about israel/lebanon, best practices for wiki discussions etc., todd talks about juan cole/al franken – talk page (on wikipedia) – see also timeline 2006 israel-lebanon conflict
todd – they say inaccuracies are corrected quickly but… this one is not
pete – the word “provocation ” – contentious –

history & diff
tracking turbulence on wikipedia
making movie of changes to wikipedia articles.
then you could tag up segments of the movie and note “here is the meta analysis of what was happening”

more intense disc. with adina and silona about social software apps for political action memes. msg to your cell phone or todo list, your five friends all voted on x issue.. you should too… (i.e. blog-based/political dodgeball) using xfn . what if your technorati favorites (or however you tag your blog feeds) had xfn and you used that for your action todo list.

*****
Starting up again.

Adina – what about having a barcamp-style political/tech meeting.
Liz – What about the cpsr conference as a forum for that? a track to the conference?
… is it election week?
Tim – every weekend there’s something going on
Silona – oct. 13 is the code-a-thon
Adina – technopolitics – hey chris, is it possible to call it a barcamp? is there a rule?
Chris: huh? oh… Are you going to charge?
Adina : no. does it matter?
chris: no.
liz : hey chris, are there any rules?
chris: No.
liz: not that i care if there are. hahaah.

***

kid oakland – bloggers united. local bloggers political bloggers…

***
3:00
dopa timescale? senate commerce – after labor day
what can we do right now

right now today
– EFF action alert
– post to your blog the DOPA widget from : http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net/?p=73

– fix to wikipedia entry. it is missing some information. about the scope of the bill

this week:
– 2-3 phone calls to boxer’s staffer, the guy at Public Knowledge who’s working on this, is there useful in-person stuff to do?
– things we can think of??? building a widget or a badge

action: email or call the ALA
adina : public knowledge and boxer staffer

facebook: give them a variant of the badge?
liz: who wants to edit the wikipedia page on dopa? john? You would be good at that.
John: Oh. Um. Actually I’m doing it now.
Liz: Oh. Of course you are.

***

Here’s the badge, from Bump on a Blog

Tracy’s to-do list on 43things, very cool: stop dopa

I signed up on 43things just to see how it works and it’s nifty.