Shape Shifting, Addendum + Anticipating Console-ing Passions

I have had a chance now to compare the 4:3 and 16:9 versions of first-season ER and this confirmed my speculation about how the show was shot in the mid-90s. In shooting the show, the camera framed a common topline for different aspects ratios. In preparing the 16:9 transfer, the producers cropped a sliver of the bottom of the 4:3 frame, but added extra space on the sides of the image. Here are a couple of comparisons from the episode "Love's Labor Lost," originally aired 3/9/95.






If you look at the bottoms of the images, you can see that the 4:3 version has a slightly lower frameline. Perhaps not quite as low as the diagram I made to illustrate my earlier post, but still lower. Not sure this rises to a level of enormous significance (maybe this is the sort of thing derided as "merely academic"), but there is a certain pleasure just in knowing things.

***

Looking forward to seeing some of you later this week at CP in Santa Barbara. I've been reading about the Experience Music Project conference in blogs (for instance, at Zoilus) and was struck by this description at Dial "M" for Muscicology:

Everybody wants to hate on the EMP pop conference, because everyone hates and fears critics, professors, hipsters, and academic conferences. Getting a bunch of hipster critics and professors together for an academic conference just seems unnatural and wrong, an affront to all that's decent. Just as soon as I came to town I read a piece in the Seattle's alterna-weekly The Stranger that offers an excuse: it's just a bunch of harmless nerds getting up and geeking out about their favorite music, like fifteen-year-old kids playing each other their favorite records in the basement or, for that matter, like Star Wars obsessives showing off their action figures. Which I thought was probably bullshit, because it sounds so self-serving. We don't judge! We love! We're cute and brainy and don't even notice our cultural authority! But actually, it was kind of true. This was maybe my favorite conference ever, partly because the papers were generally so good and partly because there was a vibe of total geeked-out unironic love and enthusiasm that just doesn't come naturally to academic gatherings.

No comment here, just a link and a quote and something to think about.

Shape Shifting (TV opens W I D E)

4:3 4Evah (t-shirts to follow)


_{Widescreen DVD version (2004) of the pilot episode of ER (1994)}

Widescreen moving image processes are old but widescreen images on a television set are pretty new. I remember my first letterbox experience watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan on PBS in the early 90s. I didn’t know what the stripes were for but I could tell they must be important. Apparently the letterbox was already more common in Europe than North America, but I was not aware of the term before my adult years and my discovery of cinephilia. Friends and I would watch VHS dubs of letterboxed films off of laserdiscs. The very word, “letterbox,” sounded so distinguished and luxurious, the home video equivalent of “extra virgin” or “high thread count.” I remember moving my chair closer to the 13-inch television set I inherited from a cousin when I moved to Madison in 1997. It was on that diminutive set, with staticky sound that could only be too loud or too soft, that I watched dozens of classic films, many widescreen, so pleased to be seeing them in all their glory even as the images were tiny. Did I really see those films?

A consciousness of aspect ratios seems like a product of the DVD and HDTV age, but there must be something generational to it, as well. Anyone who was of cinema-going age in the 1950s would remember Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO, etc. They would remember movie screens going wide. But Gen X’ers like me have no memory of movie screens ever changing shape. The movie theaters of my youth were a mix of picture palaces converted to duplexes and triplexes (often the balcony and orchestra were made into separate auditoriums, with a steep slope upstairs and a flatter grade downstairs) and shopping mall shoeboxes like Cineplex’s original multiplex at the Eaton Centre in Toronto. The old theaters had bigger screens and more comfortable seats. I was aware of IMAX and 70mm but these to me were merely bigger and better, not wider. I don’t think I was conscious of a difference in shape between movie and television images before my introduction to cinephile culture. I certainly was not aware that movies “formatted to fit your screen” had been cropped and radically reshaped, sometimes losing half the frame in the process. I was not aware that full-frame videos sometimes introduced edits or camera movements that weren’t in the theatrical version (“pan-and-scan”).

The millennials now coming of age cannot be as innocent as I was. Since 1997, DVD technology has been educating the public that there are versions of movies, wide and full. HDTVs distinguish themselves from their predecessors by being differently shaped, and everyone can see that—it’s more obvious even than the improvement in picture quality. Around 1999-2000, television programs started to letterbox their broadcasts even to 4:3 sets, and by this time many MTV videos and commercials had adopted a letterbox image, usually trying to look “cinematic.” ER was NBC’s first show to go widescreen in November, 2000, and many network shows soon followed. At this point, the general public was newly aware that not all moving images are the same shape. Everyone who cares as much about movies and TV as I do (and you too, I’m sure) had the experience around this time of trying to explain the black bands to a skeptical civilian. It might look to you like less, but actually it’s more! (As always, The Onion nailed it with its story, “Non-Widescreen Version of DVD Received as Hanukkah Gift.”)

Movies since the late 50s are generally shot in a wider aspect ratio than 4:3. Filmmakers have lots of reasons why they prefer widescreen ratios but distinguishing films from TV is a big one. Perhaps some even want to make films that will play badly on a small screen. Films shot in very wide ratios like 2.35:1 are mutilated when cropped down to 4:3. Films shot in today’s most common ratio for Hollywood movies, 1.85:1, sometimes also look terrible in 4:3, but not always. There are several reasons why a film exhibited at 1.85:1 might look fine in a fullscreen version. The filmmakers might be shooting in Super 35mm with two overlapping frames in mind, one wide for the theater, and the other more squarish for the small screen. The movie version is missing some of the top and bottom of the frame, and the video version is missing some of the sides. You probably aren’t missing anything crucial to understanding the story or appreciating the visuals watching the fullscreen version of a movie shot this way (e.g., Titanic).

(NTSC was established at a 4:3 aspect ratio in 1941 because that matched the standard cinematic frame of the time, which had been established a decade earlier as the "Academy ratio" of 1.37:1. The move to 16:9 TV may be seen as a more belated effort to keep television matching the movies' shape, especially important when the TV set is the most common way movies are seen. For more see Schubin in the references below.)

Cinephiles, technophiles and, more generally, snobs like to say that they prefer the version that best reproduces the artist’s intentions. This is the most commonly heard defense for preferring widescreen video. It sounds nice, but there are problems. Enough to make a list.

1. The artist’s intentions might not include watching a movie on a TV at all.

2. The artist’s intentions often cannot be known, and even if they tell you their intentions they might be wrong.

3. The artist is actually many people, not one. In a collaborative medium, different artists often have their own intentions. Whose do you follow? (The studio releasing a video is the “author” for legal purposes, and it is often the studio’s intentions for videos to fill the 4:3 screen.)

4. The artist’s intentions at the time of production might be different from those of the time of a video release.

5. The artist may have multiple intentions, and these might run up against one another. For instance, let’s say filmmakers intend for small details in the frame to be visible. Let’s say they also intend for the whole 1.85:1 frame to be preserved. When I watch their movie letterboxed on a 4:3 television, some of the details they intended me to see are not visible because the image is quite small. When I watch the same movie in a fullscreen version and the image is bigger, the details become noticeable and I recognize what I had missed, but now I can’t see the sides of the frame and the compositions seem weaker. Neither option follows all of the artists’ intentions; each one is the result of a tradeoff. Those who favor widescreen in every instance should keep this in mind.

Cinematographers often say that you cannot frame effectively for more than one ratio, but they typically “shoot-and-protect” for 4:3 because they know that many viewers will see a 4:3 crop. This means that the sides of the frame, which are visible only in the theater and in a letterbox video, are treated as less significant than the center. Filmmakers call the areas that won’t show up on a 4:3 TV screen “fluff.” Even if they intend for the widescreen version to be the better option, it would be wrong to say they don’t intend for their work to be seen in 4:3.

Since the mid-1990s, some television programs, like many movies, have been shooting for multiple aspect ratios. This began in anticipation of HDTV sets with their 16:9 (1.78:1) frames. Television producers knew that their shows would be seen in syndication or on video in the future, and that the televisions of the future would be widescreen. (16:9 was established as the aspect ratio for HDTV in 1983, though filmmakers would have preferred if a wider standard had been adopted.) The X-Files was among the early examples of a show to frame in widescreen in anticipation of the future. By 2000, when ER began to letterbox its images for the 4:3 broadcast, DVDs had introduced viewers to the variability of aspect ratios and the “cinematic” connotations of this look were well established in the general public. Within a couple of years, television programs were letterboxing all over the schedule, on major networks and boutique cable outlets and netlets like the WB. Critics often greeted the widescreen ratio as an obvious improvement on the boxy traditional television frame. Tom Shales, for instance, wrote that widescreen more accurately reproduces natural human vision. Networks were apparently wary of taking this step, worrying about alienating the average viewer and anyone with a small set. So the shows that got letterboxed were much more likely to be upscale, quality shows like The Sopranos and ER. John Wells, ER's showrunner, explained the move to letterboxing as a strategy for distinguishing his show as a "classy project."

When TV on DVD became such a huge phenomenon, episodes of programs that had originally aired fullscreen became available in a different format. For instance, the first season of ER is on DVD only in 16:9 widescreen although it was not seen that way originally. Perhaps the creators of ER always hoped to be able to show the widescreen version but I doubt it. This is speculation (I haven't found a description of the gauge and framing of ER in its early years yet), but I’m educated-guessing the way ER was shot was on Super 35mm film (a standard gauge in TV production in the 90s) framing principally for 4:3 and protecting for 16:9. The “common top” aperture below means that both the 4:3 and 16:9 framing have the same frame top, but that the (green) 4:3 frame is slightly longer vertically and the (red) 16:9 frame includes the fluff on the sides.



The shots below from the pilot episode seem to have extraneous lateral space, and at the same time, the bottom often seems unfortunately truncated. In medium shots, often a pair of hands is near the bottom frame line. If I'm correct about the way ER was shot in the beginning, more of these hands would have been onscreen in the original broadcast. Regardless, on the 16:9 DVD image, they're not well framed. In all three of the scenes here, a doctor-patient encounter is unfolding in which the doctor's hands are working, caring for or comforting. The hands are important to the way the scene's story is being told. In the middle scene with Dr. Lewis (Sherry Stringfield), she has just told the patient that he has cancer and will probably not survive. Composed for 4:3, the figures would fill the frame more and there would be more balance between two areas of interest--their eyes and hands. We might focus more of our attention on the framing of the patient against the hot light illuminating the X-ray of his diseased lung. So why was this show released on DVD in a widescreen version? Maybe the artists intended it that way.





I imagine these shots the way they were seen originally looking something like this:



I imagine that the red-tinted portion was on my 4:3 screen in 1994, including that thin strip on the bottom that I imagine has been lost in the new transfer. The non-red areas on the sides were certainly not seen originally. If I had access to the original broadcast image, of course, I would do a comparison but I'm not even sure that the fullscreen image is the one being seen in repeats, and I don't know when to expect this episode to air again. (As far as I can tell, only TNT has repeats in my area, and right now they're on 2005 episodes. If I'm wrong, then the bottom frame line wasn't cropped from the original transfer, and the difference is just that the sides have been added.) The easy availability of the DVD version and the difficulty of accessing the 1994 broadcast version mean that the 16:9 image will endure as the one most people see for as long as DVD and 16:9 are standard formats. It will be the way the show is most available to scholars and fans alike. Yet my desire to recapture lost time (among other things) tells me that this new version is not improved.

As a case for comparison, consider another quality drama trying to look cinematic, but one which began after the 16:9 frame had emerged as a consumer option and aesthetic standard. Lost debuted in 2004, the same year as the ER season one DVD was released. It is shot on 3-perf Super 35mm film, which is standard Super 35 film but with a frame three instead of four perforations high. This is a format ideal for shooting film to be seen on HDTV because its aspect ratio is precisely 16:9. (Super 35mm exposes a wider frame than regular 35 because it doesn't save space for an optical soundtrack. Since TV has no need of this, Super 35 is a standard format for TV shot on film.) The widescreen image suffers no vertical cropping when converting 3-perf from film to widescreen video. But in airing the show on its standard def broadcast, ABC prefers full frame, which means we lose the portion of the image on the sides if we don't have HDTV. In considering these frames from the first episode of Lost, it's obvious that the production was very careful to keep significant information in the 4:3 frame. It's hard to say which is the primary aspect ratio and which they're "protecting" for. The characters who are the subjects of a shot are never framed against the edges. Everything you need to see is in the safe zone. Which aspect ratio you prefer might be dictated by the shape of your television. It's hard to say what the 16:9 adds aside from that cinematic feeling and the satisfaction that every pixel in your expensive new set is being put to work. I suppose seeing more of the space of a scene adds something, but more isn't necessarily more.







There are no inherently good or bad aspect ratios. Beautiful and horrid pictures can be composed in any shape. But the shifts in conventions of picture shape over time are fascinating evidence of the way social, aesthetic, and technological developments intersect and influence each other. New media technologies make different ratios into viable options for producers, but these technologies are products of social and aesthetic forces and in turn influence the culture of image-making and reception. ER won praise in the 90s for being unconventional, for being more cinematic than the typical TV show. Its steadicam shooting by Thomas Del Ruth certainly influenced many movies and TV shows. It did this working in the 4:3 shape. Retransferring it at 16:9 is supposed to add aesthetic value, but this only works if you buy into the aesthetic and technological superiority of one ratio over another, willy-nilly. The choice to release the video in this format may have as much to do with a sense of audience demand for images to fill their new 16:9 TVs--16:9 to better reproduce a cinematic frame--as with an aesthetic consideration about the value of one framing or another absent external constraints. It may be the product of a preference for one shape over another for reasons that probably have less to do with the possibilities of expressivity in widescreen than with the prestige and legitimacy that have been attached to cinema ever since television replaced it as the dominant mass medium.

References (that aren't links):

John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992).

John Calhoun, "Treachery in the Tropics," American Cinematographer (February 2005), 44-48. (re Lost)

Chris Probst, "Darkness Descends on The X-Files," American Cinematographer (June 1995), 28-32.

Mark Schubin, "Searching for the Perfect Aspect Ratio," SMPTE Journal (August 1996), 460-478.

Tom Shales, "Vital Signs: 'ER' Still Full of Life" Washington Post (16 November 2000).

CNN has the Widest Screens

If this were my face, I'd be pissed. Why is this image (of a Virginia Tech student) being presented in this format? The 16x9 aspect ratio on CNN's online video player is presumably to accommodate widescreen footage in its original ratio. But when showing 4x3 footage, CNN uploads distorted 16x9 stretched to fit? It looks awful. Does the whole world really not notice? Is the impressiveness of filling the frame really so much more important than preserving the dignity of the subject? Here's another:



For comparison's sake, I looked at NBC news online at MSNBC. The player might be 16x9 but it preserves the 4x3 ratio when appropriate. Perhaps it's significant that this is a shot of a highly-paid anchor--they have a disincentive to make his appearance unappealing by stretching it horizontally.



And here's another comparison, to the online version of the NBC drama Heroes. Here the player is 4x3 and the original image is widescreen. The familiar letterboxing preserves the integrity of the subject.

Variety reports on the digital camera's effects on acting. The ability to shoot continuously without worrying about wasting film, without having to call "roll sound" and "action" and "cut," is initiating a shift in the creative process of making films. The author of the piece, David S. Cohen, interviews Mel Gibson and Tony Bill, who have both recently shot films on digital cameras (Apocalypto and Flyboys, respectively).

Bill:

For 100 years of acting on film, actors have had to cope with several technical limitations...they had to rehearse the scene before they shoot it. Then, once shooting begins, they have to act between reloads.

[...]

they have to act when the camera is running, not when it's not running. They're always aware there's film running through the camera, which is a tremendous burden for an actor, whether they know it or not.

[...]

This is going to change the way films are made, the way directors relate to actors, and the way actors relate to the camera. I think this will change acting as much as the Method changed acting.

And Gibson:

It just gives you a little more room to experiment, to explore, to talk, and you're not burning this precious stock that's very expensive and runs out. It would have been a tragedy to burn all that film talking to them.

The article goes on to describe the experience of Marley Shelton, who acted in both halves of Grindhouse. Rodriguez's portion was shot on video, and Tarantino's was shot on film. Shelton describes the difference in these processes. Rodriguez would gather actors around the playback monitor and everyone would watch the takes together. Tarnatino's style is more traditional.

Cohen begins by announcing a revolution in acting style, but it seems from the description of the changes that what's really at stake is a directing style as much as an acting style, a new way for filmmakers to collaborate with their actors. I would still love to know more about how the finished product might be different. A matter for future research, for sure.

And another question: isn't the same thing happening in some television productions? Peter Berg and Jason Katims have discussed similar creative situations on the set of Friday Night Lights, and a big part of the spontaneous, natural, partly improvised aesthetic of that show comes from shooting in this more casual setup, with multiple cameras running continuously. (For instance, see the description of the filming of FNL at Wikipedia.) And yet, as far as I know, FNL is shot on film. Maybe there's more to this new style of shooting than just a technological innovation?

(via CinemaTech)

Random:

Hipster indie music snobs skewered (via gf, who links to this video with nothing but the description "word document")

Last nite I saw The Host (scary monster!) and before it the trailer for Year of the Dog, which looks great. Has anyone compared The Host and Pan's Labyrinth? I'm too lazy to Google it, but there's certainly something there with young girls, disgusting creatures, and politically-themed global genre cinema. (See also, NYT profile of Molly Shannon.)

IHT on Helvetica, an appreciation of "a democratic luxury."

Wikipedia: Five-Second Rule.

NYMag on the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit is the best analysis I have read. Google, according to this account, has a kind of corporate Asperger's syndrome that makes it oblivious of other corporations and their psychology. (See also The Economist on Google and the future of books.)

The Chron picks its favorite campus prank web videos. (via a+l)

A sneak-peek at TV Guide's forthcoming web video portal/search. I always want to buy TV Guide at the supermarket, their covers are so appealing. But it always seems like a waste of money.

Sanjaya drops by Weekend Update. I am so glad that the web has made it unnecessary for me to watch the 1:27 of SNL each week that isn't worth my time. I hope Sanjaya sticks around a few more weeks b/c he's more interesting TV than some of these other bland nobodies. I think he will. (See also Jenkins on idolhacking.)

Tumblr and the Immersive Internet

For some people it's hootch or craps or Lifetime movies. Lately for me it's these nifty web 2.0 apps. I can't hear even the vaguest hint of hype about a single one of these things without signing myself up. I was already neck deep in blog, flickr, and del.icio.us and that seemed like quite enough. Turns out Silicon Valley was just getting started with me. I started editing Wikipedia pages when I found things that needed work. I've already linked here to my documents on Scribd. I became dabbler in Digg, I've been known to Stumble, and there is a Facebook page with a goofy picture of me on it, search if you must. I have a MySpace though there's nothing there and the only MySpacers who friend me are girls who seem to think I might be interested in, you know. And there's YouTube. I shot some home videos and posted them there. I'm not going to link to them because my sister was embarrassed enough when her third-graders discovered them and she's not looking for more exposure.

And what about RSS? Most earthlings seem to manage without, but these days I'm using three separate RSS apps. NetNewsWire Lite is the one I use most often at home on my desktop computer because it's fastest. (I am subscribed to 285 feeds, which seems like too many.) Netvibes is another I like because it shows me so much in one place and it's just so awesome and cool. And Google Reader works well when I'm on a computer away from home and want to scan just a few feeds in a short period of time (Netvibes takes a little longer to fire up).

Twitter! How did I ever manage without twitter! I love it so much I signed up my mom! Now she twitters too. Friend her if you like. She does lots of interesting stuff, as you will find out.

Now there's this new web app that I just started playing with called Tumblr. A Tumblelog is a kind of stripped down blog--more like a scrapbook than an essayistic or diaristic blog--and it's a form that's been around awhile. One of its distinctive features is that it has different formatting styles for different types of entries: posts, links, quotes, conversations, pictures, videos. When you find something on the web that you want to share, you add it to your tumblelog, so this makes it similar to a linklog like Kottke or Fimoculous. Tumblr is a new, free, Blogger-style service that allows you easily to create a tumblelog using premade templates. (To view examples, see Tumblr Radar, which aggregates recently updated Tumbls.) And like Twitter and del.icio.us, posting to Tumblr is much easier than creating a blog entry using Blogger (or WordPress or other alternatives). You click "post to Tumbl" on a toolbar button and up comes a window that allows for quick entry. Like Twitter, Tumblr makes posting things to the web very easy, easier than a typical blog. But unlike a blog, a Tumbl lacks many social features like a default setting for a blogroll, comments, trackbacks, profiles, etc. It's easy to use in part because it has a small number of features. But a small number of features is actually a virtue, because it allows you to focus on certain things but not others.

I can foresee the term "blog" fading away or shifting meaning as these new forms like Tumblr and Twitter emerge. Lately so many blogs seem to offer magazine-style content, articles and essays in polished prose. I have written some such entries here. Maybe this very entry. But another form of self-publishing online is more about collecting or curating or tracking an ongoing experience than it is like expository writing or punditry. I want to participate in all of these things, but the blog as it is now may not be the best option for the fast, ongoing, process-oriented web publishing. When I find something online that I want to save or share, I may not have much to say about it aside from, "look at this." The form of the blog and the means of posting to it put pressure on the content to be of a certain quality, to be significant and relatively thorough, and to fit the blog's theme. If you're going to take the trouble to blog it, it had better be good. Often I just want to post things I find, though, that don't rise to this level. Often I want to save or share something about which I have no big point to make, and I feel that pointless (or, more like it, point-poor) blog entries are lame.

So I have been playing around with the Tumblr interface and testing its possibilities. I think it's potentially incredibly useful and fun. I don't know that I want to keep doing it for the long term. Maybe it will get tiring. Who knows. The site I created just yesterday is called Fraktastic in homage to Battlestar Galactica (which just jumped the shark, unfortch). It's nothing much, but it suggests what sort of thing one might do with the tool.

The problem, of course, is that I have too many of these things running at once and I'm going to have trouble keeping track of them all. I can't imagine you want to keep track of them all, either. Maybe what I really need is an integrated personal data stream, a consolidated RSS feed that combines all my stuff. But not all of my stuff really belongs together. My pictures and videos, my Wikipedia work, my scholarly work, my non-scholarly writing (e.g., twitter), etc., don't seem to me to all belong in one omnibus Michael Newman place. I'm not sure why, it just doesn't seem appropriate. Making sense of the relative integration or fragmentation of the personal web experience might be a challenge facing those at work on web apps of the future.

Additional reading:

Emily Chang on the personal data stream, with lots of links.

Kottke on tumblelogs in 2005.

Lifehacker review of Tumblr.

Another Tumblr review, at heyblog, with this intriguing design-y passage:

I’m sure you’ll agree that the world hardly needs another blogging or meta-blogging service, but it’s worth signing up for Tumblr just to check out its design. Like online portfolio service Carbonmade, it nails some current design trends—big fonts, gradients, “simplicity”, clever writing—in really thoughtful and appropriate ways, without looking merely trendy. In both applications, stuff you do once is big and easy, and stuff you do often is accessible and quick. Even the sign-up confirmation email is lovely. It’s also nice that Tumblr’s not overly Ajax-y, too, except where it’s really useful (like previewing your design changes).

VHS Lives!

_{Shorewood Public Library, children's section, Shorewood, WI.}

I thought we were through with tape, but not so fast. We share our home entertainment with a 3 year-old named Leo, and Leo's favorite thing these days is to walk to the public library down the street to borrow video cassettes of his shows (these days, Teletubbies and Thomas and Friends are the ones he gets out of the library, though Disney's Little Einsteins--too new to be available on tape at all as far as I can tell--is his hottest passion at the moment). At first when he discovered the public library's collection of his shows he was ecstatic and I was dejected. Not tape! I said goodbye to all that! But it quickly became apparent that VHS tapes of children's shows have several advantages over DVDs. They lend for a week whereas DVDs only go out for three days. They're more suitable for a young child to handle. I don't want him putting his fingers on discs, but he's actually good at jockeying tapes. They play automatically when inserted and he knows how to use the stop/eject button. By comparison, he's not yet sophisticated enough to control the DVD player, to know the menu button and the magical means of skipping boring previews.

And to be honest, I kind of like tapes. They make me nostalgic for the old days. And having to rewind them before we take them back to the library makes me feel like I'm doing a good deed.

Anyhow the point of this is: reports of the format's death are exaggerated.

Netvibes (Wikipedia) is a personalized homepage like Google's, to which you can add RSS feeds and various other useful things (weather, e-mail, eBay auction-tracking, etc.). One thing netvibes can do that other similar apps can't is apply the social dimension of web experience: it lets you share your personalized pages with other like-minded people. The screenshots here are from a netvibes tab I made of feeds of blogs by people who study film/media or that might be of interest to them (it's also available in a new button on my sidebar).





If you set up a netvibes account, you can add this tab and then reconfigure it as you like. This kind of remixing, personalizing, and sharing of modular content is one of the most exciting things about the contemporary web. And yet, many websites are keeping their full RSS feeds from us, making us click over to them to get the full story. Increasingly, I am interpreting this lack of full feed as a kind of arrogance or passive aggression, as though people are saying, "you come to me, I don't feel like coming to you." Increasingly I am avoiding partial-feed websites in favor of full feed ones. I would rather be able to read it the way I want. According to some authorities, blogs that switch to full feeds often get more readers. (I am too lazy to track down where I read that this afternoon, sorry.)

Here are some more newfangled web tools I have recently been playing around with (or contemplating playing around with) and a little bit of scholarly prose to put it all in context:

-Peel, an MP3 blog reader for the Mac.

-Pipes, the new masher-upper from Yahoo!

-OttoBib, an online automated bibliography generator in the citation style of your choice.

-FeedYes, to create an RSS feed for a site that doesn't have an RSS feed.

-"Remix and Remixability" by Lev Manovich.

For my Principles of Media Studies class, I have created a glossary of terms on copyright. Feel free to use it, remix it, adapt it to suit your needs. Leave a comment here if you have thoughts about how it might be improved.

if:book blog on the academic conference:

the traditional conference which is structured around the presentation of papers might be putting the emphasis on the wrong aspect; focusing on the presentation of the author/speaker while leaving the discussion for the hallways, dinner tables and cocktail lounges. conferences officially capture the one thing which you don't need a conference to capture - the written record of the formal paper. we can do better than this.

Indeed.

Like academic publishing, academic conferencing is stuck in an old mode and needs to get with the information age. The twenty-minute paper, read word for word off the page, is the standard format for conferences in film and media studies and many other fields in the humanities. Courtesy aside, listening to these papers is often boring. It’s hard to deliver a paper well when reading off the page. (It’s probably even harder to present a paper well when not reading off the page, so I’m not advocating that everyone start speaking extemporaneously.) Worse yet, presenting papers in this fashion uses our time and resources inefficiently. As the if:blog suggests, perhaps circulating papers electronically is preferable to having them read aloud.

And even if people are still going to read their papers, why not also circulate them on the internet? They all exist in electronic form, so let’s get them into each other’s hands--let’s make them avaialble not only to people who happen to show up at the conference panel, but to anyone out there at any time who might have an interest in the work. Scholarship belongs online. What is avaialble online will increasingly be the scholarship of first resort for anyone doing research. This might be regrettable in some ways, but it is the new reality. I am more likely to read things if they are online. I am more likely to assign them for my classes if they are online. And since putting things online is so easy, so fast, and so inexpensive--practically free--I can’t think of a good argument against it. And yet I'm willing to bet that almost none of the conference papers I have heard in the past few years exists in an easily accessible online form.

There is another way of applying digital technology to updating the academic conference. I haven’t participated in one (yet), but there are online conferences like this one on the convergence of web culture and video sponsored by the New Media Consortium to be held March 21-22, 2007. They're taking applications until February 23. The conference will convene entirely in what used to be called cyberspace. Here is part of the call for papers:

Video as we know it, produced by experts and consumed by viewers, is metamorphosing into a different genre altogether, blurring the lines between producers and audiences. New video-based forms of self-expression are emerging, with notable examples like video mashups, jumpcuts, and video blogging. Nonlinear narratives abound in this format, in which stories unfold across a series of 1 to 3-minute clips and web viewers are drawn into mysteries such as the story of Lonelygirl15. Brand-new forms like machinima are emerging that bridge virtual worlds, gaming, and storytelling, all through the medium of the small video.

The singular focus of the Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video, part of the NMC's Series of Online Conferences, is to consider how these developments are impacting our lives, and how they are affecting the ways we work, learn, collaborate, and even socialize.

The conference is designed to spark an examination of this phenomenon that explores both the positive and negative aspects of it on learning, social interaction, self-expression, and more.

Conference Format

The conference will be conducted entirely online. Sessions, which will be conducted live, can incorporate a variety of visuals and rich media, and are generally about 45 minutes in length, with about half that time devoted to dialog with participants using voice over IP.

Designed for both synchronous and asynchronous participants, the event was conducted entirely online using an innovative conferencing environment provided by NMC Distinguished Partner LearningTimes. Attendees of NMC's online meetings enjoyed a wide range of features commonly associated with their traditional face-to-face conferences, including interactive sessions from engaging presenters, "hallway" conversations, chances to ask presenters questions, and more.

I imagine that the problem with an online conference is that the hallway is a "hallway," but having never stood in a conference "hallway" I will hold off on judging the idea. And if I participate, I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Everything is Miscellaneous:

Helvetica is a movie about a font.

Lawrence Lessig says that Congress needs to do something about the internet.

There is an X motif in The Departed. I didn't notice it when I watched the film. To me this says that the filmmakers did a bad job of exploiting the motif. That or I wasn't paying attention the way some people do.

Jonathan Lethem wants you to adapt his short stories into plays or short films; you pay him $1.

Goodstorm is an online t-shirt design app.

All the press for The Sarah Silverman Program is making me eager to watch tonight: The Watcher; an interview on NPR's Day to Day; Tad Friend in The New Yorker (more on that here). Watch it.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report on tagging which is as good an introduction as you will find to the topic. It includes an interview with David Weinberger, whose book-to-be is has the excellent title Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

My new splitscreen:



I have been experimenting with Firefox's Split Browser add-on as a way to watch videos online while doing other things at the same time. Before today I was often clicking on other tabs while listening to the audio from a vid clip. This way, I keep keep an eye as well as an ear on what I'm watching when my attention is divided. You can split any tab off right, left, above or below by right-clicking on the tab and calling up a "split tab" menu. The open tabs can be expanded or shrunk quite easily. Lifehacker notes that this add-on would be especially useful for people who have ample "screen estate" (i.e., really big monitors).

The pages you see above are an article at TeeVee about how some current shows are adding extra scenes of this season's episodes for viewing online (eps of The Office are available in extended versions from iTunes; Battlestar Galactica has an extra scene of its most recent ep up on its website); and a video of sand art by Dato and Ilana Yahav on YouTube (via MeFi).

What's new in new media?

Rupert Murdoch: "News Corp. will try to concoct the next YouTube on its own." Good luck!

YouTube 2.0: We're going to rape your eyes and ears with advertising! We're going to share our revenue with you!

MTV is now, among other things, a 3D virtual social network. (Yeah, the NYT had this story four months ago.)

A kind of manifesto-cum-rant on "vernacular video": "the vernacular domain is a noisy torrent of immense proportions." Can't argue with that.

Some people are making money from web video. Some are even managing to be funny.

Fun with Amazon! ZonTubeß mashes up Amazon (music) and YouTube; Amapedia is Amazon's new wiki.

Does the Long Tail apply to the television industry? A debate begins.

What everyone else seems to be talking about in the world of audiovisual technology:

-Netflix to offer streaming video service, "free" to subsribers (with a time limit, a limited library of available titles, on Windos/IE only...).

-The bloom is off the iPhone.

-Joost, formerly known as The Venice Project, is to be a rival to YouTube (it hasn't been released yet except to an exclusive group of beta testers). NewTeeVee has a few screenshots and last week had background info including lots of techie details I don't really get about how the thing is supposed to work. (The new site: Joost.)

-HD-DVD has the edge on Blu-Ray, say the tech-trackers, because the porn industry likes HD better. Here's an interview with porn director Robby D. The favored historical analogy is Beta and VHS: Like Beta, Blu-Ray is Sony's format and Sony is apparently threatening to take away licenses from replicating houses that do Blu-Ray if they do adult.

Random:
+Apple: Kottke rounds up the iPhone buzz on the web. Pronounces the Zune dead, bitches (persuasively) about the sorry status quo for celphones, asks some provocative questions, and links all over.

+Annals of globalization: new Bombay movie Guru is having its world premiere at Toronto's Elgin Theater (where Cats will always be playing in the Toronto of my idealizing nostalgia), with top tickets at $500. (via Cinematical)

+On the indie trail: Sundance is the hipster's Disney, reports Wired News (what else is new?); The Hwd Reporter rounds up a year of "seismic changes" in independent film--hits, misses, new kids on the block, money money everywhere; Variety reports that IFC will move away from independent film, toward original programming--its first drama, Pornopolis, "revolves around an average family in the L.A. 'burbs -- whose parents happen to run a porn business." (That sounds like something I've heard before--have I?)

+Telly: Les Moonves says that CBS is transforming itself into "an audience company"; in an apparently unrelated story, CBS's sit-com The Class will offer live video of its table reads online.

+Futurology: Robert Scoble predicts that Netflix will be killed by new, improved p2p video delivery using Flash; The Truetalk Blog describes how YouTube is having a hard time maintaining a good community...loyal users are turning away...some say YouTube can't last.

Apple's new widescreen media player, which is also the new iPhone:



Lots more pics at Engadget; flashy demo at Apple's website.