Two weeks ago I was in Vancouver for the ETUG Fall 2014 Workshop, what a great gathering and with their un-conference format, a refreshing experience from the typical conference grueling treadmill present-o-rama format. I was not sure I would stand up an pitch a session, but I was sort of prepared, I had brought the […]
Here I thought I caught up on my back blogging from the trip to New Zealand, but I have yet to talk about the digital time capsule that appeared at every stop. In this post, I’ll give a bit of review about what happened, what was collected, in a subsequent long scrolling gibberish one I […]
creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Having found the perfect container for my new PirateBox, I now have the desired wiring in place (thanks to my friend Ken in Colorado) to operate what I will put into play soon as a new iteration of the 2011 Storybox. What you see […]
The StoryBox has been sitting for a few months in my closet. All alone. But it is about to go on a big trip with me starting Friday, and I am revving it up for a brand new round of media collection. I’ve not yet put out the details on this, and many of them […]
I’ve still not come to a grand idea what to do with the media I collected last year in the StoryBox. Some I am using as I work on spinning new stories and tales in Cowbird (where I continue to lag a month behind last year’s schedule). One of the gifts that has continued since […]
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by alexkerhead I’m toying with a new idea for a public interaction device with the StoryBox/Piratebox but the DIY part is something I could use suggestions on. The idea is to have a device out in a public space, that is within range of the wireless network […]
In exploring some new tools for rich media publishing, I took a return visit to http://jux.com a site for publishing magazine style media sites, that fill the screen. In many ways, it could be a blog-ish like thing, or a portfolio, or a tumblr that is not just another tunblr. Maybe I don’t know what […]
Uh oh, the people in my session are just tuned into their devices.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Awesome, that is what I wanted, my session was billed as a BYOT one. This represented the new plan I hope to have for the content I collected last year during my travels. I first thought when I got back, I would turn all the content back to the open… but one person in particular clued me into the thiung that made the content special was that is was NOT on the internet.
The “slides” for my talk are actually all housed on the StoryBox (it is a series of images and a jQuery slideshow gizmo) but I put a copy online as well. I also broadcasted it to ds106 radio and have an archive (hey @mgershovich, Always Be Archiving!)
Create Something from the Storybox presentation
Besides referencing my original video for the call to participate
The future of the StoryBox is subject for a new post. Let’s say my new approach is to find ways to release the content by making it available for people to create remixed new works out of the pieces. The original media shall remain in the box, in the time capsule, but can be released by remix.
Here I wanted to share three things I made out of the StoryBox content, as the first public examples.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
The StoryBox project will end its gathering of media at the end of 2011, so there is still time to share any media before the time capsule closes- see http://cogdogblog.com/storybox for ways you can drop media files.
During my 15,000 mile, 5 month 2 country, 29 state/province travels I collected a Shareskian “wack sock” of media- 1230 image, video, audio, document files:
And there is room for more! But to keep it true to the time capsule concept, the last media I will add will have to get to me by Dec 31, 2011 (at 12:59:59)
What happens then? My plan is to return all of this content online, in a yet to be created web site that would allow, ideally, people to add tags/descriptions to help characterize the content and use tools to build new content out of that (e.g. remixes). I am hoping this is something that Omeka might provide (expect an email soon, Patrick! I might need help).
I realized early that the default file list view might be unwieldy, so from the start I have been moving content into subdirectories by media type. Still, even shorter file listings are hard to scan, so over the last few months I have been creating graphic browsers for the media types.
I did find that the single view of 800 icons for the photos was a drag to load (e.g. when I had Vicki Davis’s students all hit the box at the same size, that won for a PirateBox stress test), so I have been adding a paged pagination, involving some dusting off of my Javascript skills- because the PirateBos is a python based server, and I neglected to learn python, andy interaction I have done has been in HTML and JavaScript – but I have a lot of things humming now.
For the photos I run a local php script on the mirror of the StoryBox on my laptop; this script (based on one from WebCheatSheets) is used to generate 800px preview and 100px thumbnail copies of all photos. What I do is have a directory for new photos I plan to make thumbnails for, and another one to write the new files to (“thumbs”), and this make_thumbnails.php script at the top- I can call it from a localhost/makethumbs.make_thumbnails.php url on my machine:
