Scriber http://scribing.posterous.com after dead-tree publishing ... posterous.com Thu, 05 Jul 2012 05:57:00 -0700 Want To See A World-Class Example of Scribing? http://scribing.posterous.com/want-to-see-a-world-class-example-of-scribing http://scribing.posterous.com/want-to-see-a-world-class-example-of-scribing

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

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Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:43:00 -0700 Blood Toys User Guide http://scribing.posterous.com/127730614 http://scribing.posterous.com/127730614

Thanks for your purchase (or interest) in Blood Toys. Watching this short clip will take you a long way to mastering playback of the title. There are some undocumented features. In addition to accessing the Table of Contents, demonstrated in this video, clicking the red droplets takes you to the front cover; tapping the "i" in the Table of Contents replays this User Guide. Additionally, there's a link to the Acknowledgments page in the lower part of page 3.

We have had scattered reports of audio playback problems.  There's a chance, shutting down the iPad completely, and restarting will resolve the issue.

Sometimes, instead of tapping, tapping, tapping a non responsive "Playback" arrow, playback is initiated by clicking a bit beneath the arrow, slightly outside the controller frame. If this fixes your playback woes, shoot us a quick E on the subject so we can rail at unnamed developers.

Hopefully, you won't have a playback problem. You shouldn't. We designed the title to work flawlessly, and only marginally disturb your peaceful night's sleep.

 

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Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:28:00 -0800 The Ecology of Language and Scribing * http://scribing.posterous.com/language-ecology-and-scribing http://scribing.posterous.com/language-ecology-and-scribing

The Ecology of Language 

Language_ecology_and_scribing

As it turns out, “literacy” is the problem. No, not in the sense of “a little stupid” versus  “a lot stupid,” but literacy with respect to how we understand human language.  In the 19th century we got really good at setting up assembly-lines to build cars, refrigerators and tractors; and somehow, we came to apply the same organizational tactic to educational models. If you were interested in mixing potions, you took chemistry. If you wanted to build things, you studied engineering. If you were interested in the stars, you studied astronomy.  It’s easy to understand how this approach worked, but you can’t help but suspect, guys like Socrates would be freaked out by our efficiency at segregating enlightenment.

To Socrates we might say: “But with the explosion in knowledge, how can one person keep up with it all?

In reply, Socrates might say:  “But with your info-segregation, you gain knowledge at the expense of wisdom. What advantage have you won?”

“Hey Mr. Socrates, what are you saying? That we’re an unwise generation? Well … okay then. You might have a point. But I can build a lawnmower ALL BY MYSELF!”  

In no place does segregated enlightenment bite us with more teeth than in our models of language. Say ... it’s 1969 and you’re looking to get a Ph.D. in the field of language. What’s your post-grad track? Well, you could focus on grammar. After all, you have to understand the rules of punctuation before you can legally violate them. Something softer, perhaps? How about literature? But do you really want to read Beowulf again?

If you’re slightly more with-it, how about a course-setting into mass media? Or lacking that sophistication, how about a degree in film-television production, with a little radio thrown in? Or … the relational values of throat-singing to modern dance?  Of course, if your head is seriously pointed, you might chase a Ph.D. in the psychology-of-language, or cognitive theory, or neuroscience. But take a look at your classmates before you sign on. Are your reading glasses thick enough?

Forget the Ph.D. for the moment. To understand human language, as it is practiced, you have to erase and redraw the boundaries. In its aboriginal state, language happens in real time between two humans, and Jack Russell terriers, on occasion. There are all sorts of language modifiers that enrich the words being said. Often misidentified as sub-languages, these modifiers include pitch, intonation, cadence, gesture, posture, body-pose and dialect. All these things, taken together, represent the landscape of language in its “aboriginal” state, or “context.”

But there’s more. There’s “extra-aboriginal” too. The 19th century model exalts written text, with its attendant grammar, as the solitary record system. It’s easy to see the temporal provincialism here, because today’s record systems include film, video, audio-recordings and … Morse Code. If “language record” refers to “just writing,” what do we call this other stuff? Well, we don’t actually have a name, nor even an accepted understanding for it, nor how it relates to grammar. Still, these elements are important to the landscape, or “ecology of language.”

Without a name, how are we to implement a revised strategy for enlightenment?

Well, ignoring the Morse Code bit, there is a fairly reasonable way to understand our post 19th century record-systems. Film, video and audio-recorders capture our aboriginal language transactions … wait for it … in “context.” Tell your boss, to his face, that he’s a “freak,” and say it within a context of: gesture (use of a single finger during the utterance, for instance), tone, emphasis, facial expression and/or posture.

Now, if you’re brave, call him a “freak” again, but do it in front of a camera/audio recording device. What kind of language record have you just authored? In addition to a possible letter-of-termination, your words were captured by a context-record system. This offers us a significant, revised understanding. A context-record, for all intents and purposes, is identical in terms of merit and meaning to its written counterpart. The “context-of-time, tone and gesture” modify the intentionality, however.

There’s another curious thing about context records. Given the evolution of technology, “authoring a context-record” is vastly dissimilar to the act of “authoring a written-record.” For one thing, written grammar is held together by rules and ancient rhetorical practices that provide the scaffold for transmission. “Context-records,” on the other hand, are held together by a “grammar of technology,” where discreet units of measurement run at about 30-frames per second, in the US -- a technical grammar, governed by chip logic and format standards.

If there’s an advantage to context-records, you might not ever have to spell “chrysanthemum” again. If there’s a disadvantage, the practice of context-authoring ranges from dismal, to non-existent. Until the last couple of decades, context-records have been somewhat limited to “event-capture” and playback. To author intentionality under these conditions, your option has been to butt-edit two pieces of surveillance footage together, trimming the visual “period-placement” in your “visual-sentence.”

Within the domain of context-records, there is one amazing and curious example of authoring. Animation. The word brings to mind Disney, Tex Avery, Terry Gilliam and maybe, Nick Park. The significance of animation is: it's NOT captured as a live event, but “iterated” into existence, just as the written word is iterated into a sentence. In a nutshell, everything on screen in an animation is given placement, much as every word in a written sentence is assessed and placed according to the author's intention.

Obviously, authoring context records at the level of animation is an extravagant enterprise, but it can be about as powerful a narrative-form as the planet as ever seen.

Enter the notion of scribing.

Related to animation is a rather recent language-form known as “scribing.” It’s a context-record in that it’s a specialized record composed of symbols, temporal placement and audio, all of which are wrapped in a grammar of technology. (A scribe without technical grammar is most-likely a cave painting)

ss_03_small_web.mp4 Watch on Posterous

As citizens in a post-19th Century setting, how are we to understand  “scribing, ” then? 

Scribing is a modifier, comparable to adverbs and adjectives, as well as metaphors, similes and analogies in written text  -- a parenthetical.

There’s so much that remains unknown about scribing, but there are a few attributes we feel somewhat safe in suggesting.

·        scribing is a zone of intention

·        scribing deals in sets and subsets

·        scribing plots relational value

.        scribing revels in demonstrating induction and deduction

·        scribing amplifies meaning through overstatement,     understatement, restatement and analogy

·        the best examples of scribing invite “user-completion” and “timed revelation”

At present, scribing is often described as a hand-drawn “whiteboard.” If you think about it, though, a “zone of intention” could be made-up of video, time-lapse photography, line-art, or … whatever else I’ve forgotten here. If there's one seriously important rule to scribing, and perhaps the only one at this point in history, it is that as a zone-of-intention, a scribe should not be a coma-inducing snippet of media production. The human brain seems to have been conditioned to go to sleep, analytically, in a media environment where every intention rides into the mind, fully digested and exquisitely rendered. A scribe should “demand” a cognitive transaction from the viewer, through interpretation, agreement, disagreement, or just plain effrontery. The viewer should be contextually-required to “complete the line or fill,” or infer meaning. Of course, this could be a preamble to sloppiness and nasty picture-making, but for the time being, the idea is the thing, not the visual aesthetics.

Post 19th  Century, human language should be understood as either text ... or context.

Now, excuse me while I go scribble a creepy little animation for what I’m trying to say here.

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* Feel free to quote any, or all of this article, but please include an attribution, somewhere. This particular excerpt was drawn from a production (MLTMB) in 2003, which was taken from an article written in 1974. My research over the years is just about the only thing I own, at the moment. Please remember me kindly by honoring me as your humble fan and contributor: © Copyright 2012 by Floyd Wray, All Rights Reserved

 

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Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:16:00 -0800 MBooks is now available from the APP Store. http://scribing.posterous.com/mbooks-is-now-available-from-the-app-store http://scribing.posterous.com/mbooks-is-now-available-from-the-app-store

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The new bookshelf application features media books written, or published by Floyd Wray. 

 

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The first title, LifePlanning, was created for the religious-education market, and tackles the question: “What am I going to be when I grow up?”  Designed for playback on iPad 2, LifePlanning comes in two editions: LifePlanning (S-Student) and LifePlanning (GL – Group Leader).  In addition to text, LifePlanning (S) contains more than 30-minutes of scribed animation and audio. LifePlanning (GL) contains text, and more than 3-hours of audio and scribed animation.

Coming soon to MBooks: Blood Toys, revised for iPad and Fire. 

 

 

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Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:50:00 -0700 LifePlanning User Guide http://scribing.posterous.com/lifeplanning-user-guide http://scribing.posterous.com/lifeplanning-user-guide

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Creating the User Guide is always a sign that you're nearing the end of a project.

I have to hack through bookstore-submission process; still, LifePlanning is the coolest educational title I've ever thrown my o'erlarge body at. I could be really really wrong on this ... but the title feels ... right. I hope the intensity of the effort hasn'tmade me delusional.

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Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:31:00 -0700 Scribbled Spaces -- An Excerpt http://scribing.posterous.com/scribbled-spaces-an-excerpt http://scribing.posterous.com/scribbled-spaces-an-excerpt

ss_03_small_web.mp4 Watch on Posterous
From Scribbled Spaces, a lecture on language, technology, Ebooks and scribing. Three Milestones is the third (of five) sections, with a focus on scribing and context records. 

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Sat, 26 Mar 2011 18:45:49 -0700 Scribbled Spaces April 7, 2011 http://scribing.posterous.com/scribbled-spaces-april-7-2011 http://scribing.posterous.com/scribbled-spaces-april-7-2011

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Sat, 01 Jan 2011 11:51:00 -0800 What Did Your Ancestors Know? http://scribing.posterous.com/what-did-your-ancestors-know http://scribing.posterous.com/what-did-your-ancestors-know

What if we tapped into a wormhole ...

... and went back to visit all our ancestors?  What Did Your Ancestors Know? asks the same question.

Previously, we posted Intro to LifePlanning. To be a bit more specific: the SCRIBED Intro to LifePlanning. During the process of recasting an existing religious production, we ventured into complete immersion – in a technical sense. We trashed the previous footage and redid the presentation as a scribed piece. Subsequently, things have gone slowly for the project. We’re rounding the corner on completion, and hope to have the title available sometime during the first quarter of 2011.

As you'll notice from the previous post, the production has a new series attached to it. My Scribed Journal. Other titles planned for this year include: ThePattern, TheBible, and if we’re up to it, TheUFO. That is … assuming we don’t get abducted, first.

 

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Sat, 16 Oct 2010 08:12:00 -0700 New Scribing Tool -- FREE http://scribing.posterous.com/new-scribing-tool-free http://scribing.posterous.com/new-scribing-tool-free

Having smart friends is a mixed blessing.
First, the really smart ones have solutions. The only possible drawback is how stupid you feel when one of them flicks a wrist, and produces – in this case – an incredible software tool in a matter of hours. Chipp Walters seems to be able to do anything he wants as a designer/programmer. I love it, but I have to admit, it hurts my ego. I can't even CSS, reliably.

With scribing, one of the most time-consuming jobs involves “sketching-in” a graphic so that it reveals itself over a series of frames. In Flash, the technique involves importing an original drawing, tracing the drawing with the Flash pen tool, erasing bits of the finished image, one frame at a time, then reversing the image string so that the last is first and the first is last. Sounds practically Biblical.

So I mentioned this to my friend Chipp yesterday, commenting on how much time such things took. He listened carefully. Invested a few hours, programming a scribe tool, and had it available for download. Free. This morning.

Currently, the program outputs pngs and jpgs, but he says transparencies might also be possible in a future rev. While the tool isn’t going to simplify the whole process of scribing, it’s an incredible step in the right direction.

Whether you’re interested in learning to scribe, or just curious about one of the vital scribing-treatments that defines the craft, go to http://blog.chipp.com/, watch the video and download the file. Pretty amazing tool. And did I also mention: it’s free?

 

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Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:09:00 -0700 Brink http://scribing.posterous.com/brink http://scribing.posterous.com/brink

Thanks to products like iPad, and software from Blio and Quark, the practice of reading may be on the brink of redefinition. A brink … and maybe, a new way to think.  Run-time 4:10

 

 

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Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:05:00 -0700 Bones At Lascaux http://scribing.posterous.com/bones-at-lascaux http://scribing.posterous.com/bones-at-lascaux

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The bones on which the practice of scribing hang have been around for millennia.

Case-in-point. The cave walls in Lascaux depict visual narrative, similar in many respects to what we witness in today’s practice of scribing. What you see at Lascaux is visualized meaning … graphics with intentionality.

 We inevitably hear the bromide, a picture is worth a thousand words. And it’s true. Partly. But also untrue. Take a tour of the cave; track the various images, dating back 17,000 years or so, then ask the question: what were the “authors” of these images trying to say? We can guess, of course. Perhaps the graphics were associated with magic, or remembrance of a specific hunt, or event. More than that, who knows.

The visual narrative at Lascaux, as fetching as it may be aesthetically, does little to advance the reason for its creation. It is conversely true: a thousand pictures may not be worth a simple sentence.

Take a string of raw, lovingly rendered graphics, throw them into a stream of associative-text, however, and something with incredible potential jumps out of the mix. Text and images, together, have the power to accelerate understanding. Power to conjure real magic.

Proceed to the next step. Add “time” to the architecture. Animation. Let the text reveal itself. Allow the graphics to construct intent through revelation and motion. Tease the user into acts of interpretation, evaluation and judgment. Engagement at this level is the highest expression of interactivity there is.

Today’s language client has been formed to a standard of high-velocity graphics, spectacular story-visions and cult-icons in starring roles. Scribing taps into this mindset. Lately, we’ve learned something else. Graphics for scribing don’t have to be spectacular, to work. Comingling graphics, video and animation as textual-modifiers, however, endow an author with a stunning new launch-pad for meaning, built with bones that have been around forever.  

© Copyright 2010 by Floyd Wray, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

 

 

 

 

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Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:05:00 -0700 Introduction To LifePlanning http://scribing.posterous.com/introduction-to-lifeplanning http://scribing.posterous.com/introduction-to-lifeplanning

 

 

A Slightly Long Explanation … But It Eases The Pain

After creating several titles based on our own mediabook format (MBooks), we faced an unpleasant reality when Apple introduced iPad. Online digital booksellers distribute products based on format-standards, often their own. This is okay if you’re selling books developed for .epub or .mobi. We weren’t. MBooks were based on blended narrative -- video, audio, text and animation – wrapped together in custom-program. No matter how worthy our years of research and programming, we had to adopt a new standard. The only format even close to what we’d been doing was the just-announced Blio standard, from KNFB.

Since Blio and its authoring requirements were unknown in the beginning, the only option was to spend the time wisely, breaking out media-assets from our MBooks products as we awaited the specifics of a new “wrapper.” This was when we did a crash-dive into “scribing,” also described as “white-boarding on steroids.”

We’d actually been doing a form of scribing for years. But it was geezer-scribing. Slow-paced and cheap in terms of effort. A funky little illustration here, maybe; a ten-frame animation, there. Inevitably, the graphical style was coarse and fairly screamed “the author is seriously lazy.”

What changed was seeing some of the stunning white-board work from RSA-Animate  

Since we were already retooling the files rather extensively, we decided to refry the new editions in the style of info-scribing. 

Introduction to LifePlanning is actually the test footage from our first effort at resetting the content. Excerpted from a religious production that runs approximately 30-minutes, we're generally happy with the new direction. The information scales perfectly to today's "media-mind," and conveys highly resolved content ... to any age-group. That was our goal all along.

After dead-tree books, what happens next? Click on Introduction to LifePlanning and maybe you'll see what's next.

 


 

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Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:01:00 -0700 Simple-Mindedness http://scribing.posterous.com/simple-mindness http://scribing.posterous.com/simple-mindness

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