No theory (or navel gazing) today. Not too much is currently going on. We’re about to enter week 8 and I have a ton of grading ahead of me. As far as the interview, I haven’t heard anything and don’t expect to for a bit.

In general, my days are pretty busy with school work, which often bleeds into my nights. Weekends are spent either on school work or helping over at Wild Wings. Perhaps that’s the reason for all of the academic/research blogging… namely, I’m look for an excuse to research and write on these topics.

On the fun side, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. While it’s more convoluted than The Big Sleep, so far its a bit more fun too.

• Recognition
  Unlike most wiki’s that I’ve encountered, Marvel "credits" fan authors. At the bottom of each entry is a list of its contributors. This is an example of how individual authorship is celebrated in this particular Wiki (and not necessarily in others).
  
• Hero Points
  Note that the Hero Points are on display at all times. Marvel’s putting your social "worth" front and center in the interface (note that as a new member, I’m a big 0).
  
• Editorial Guidelines
  They’ve done a great job writing editorial guidelines for posting. It lay down both basic rules (no citation of specific issues in the character histories or discussion of fan fiction) and also breaks down editorial style ("Never Send a Phrase to do a Noun’s Job" — ironically this is a rule that Stan Lee has never opted to follow). That plus the wanted and stub listings are example of how fan friendly they’re trying to make this.
• Discussion & History
  They’ve opted to leave article discussions and histories available to the public. This is and area to watch. Considering how heated Wikipedia debates and edit histories can become, this may be the first feature to disappear. Marvel’s Wiki, and its evolution (as far as which features and available and which are not), will be an interesting testbed for other companies considering this type of fan collaboration strategy,
• Interdiscursivity (or lack there of)
  Writers are instructed to "imagine that you are a commentator in the Marvel Universe, witnessing the events, the battles, and the drama first hand. By doing this, you’ll be creating an entry that will not only be exciting for others to read, but exciting for you to write.” I’m a bit surprised that they missed an opportunity to  reference their own Watcher characters, whose job is to observe and record events that happen around them (while never participating in the events themselves).

This one’s long, but worth it. In one fell *swoop*, or rather *Wiki!*, Marvel Comics has dealt with a nagging editorial problem and created an amazing goodwill generator. Best of all, this was done at little-to-no editorial cost to Marvel, using resources who are not financially compensated (in fact, many whom have been writing about Marvel charaters for years, just elsewhere). All Marvel had to do is trust their fans. Allow me to explain:

Like any comic company, Marvel struggles with the daunting issue of continuity – the convoluted histories of its characters. While Peter Parker might not have aged much since his introduction in 1962, he’s had a heck of a lot of adventures. Since his story is told as an ongoing epic, each episode building on the past one, that means there’s a lot of history, filled with villains, allies, clones, and costumes, all of which have come and gone, died and come back from the dead (yes, even the costumes). Now, take all of those continuity issues and multiply them across the countless characters in Marvel’s comic “universe.”^[1] What you get, at least according to industry pundits, is a daunting barrier to entry that intimidates new comics readers.

Marvel’s original solution was annotation and cross referencing. When the Sandman lamented a previous defeat at the hands of Spider-man, it would be accompanied by a plucky editor’s note like, “* See ASM #140, True Believer!”^[2] Later, in the 1980’s, Marvel came up with the brilliant idea of doing an encyclopedia in comic form –  a 32 issue series called The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe. Based on the style (genre) of Baseball cards, each issue was made up entries featuring an image of the character accompanied by their stats (Name, Age, Height, Group Affiliations, etc…) and a biographical sketch. The handbooks sold like gangbusters and were incredibly popular while I was in Junior Highschool. But, they were only a “snapshot” in time and continuity. As soon as they were published, they were out of date.

Today, the problem is just as bad, if not worse (as there is another decade plus of continuity to deal with). Trying to keep up with an ever expanding continuity is a full time task, let alone trying to come up with an easy method of keeping it all avaiable for new readers (epsecially given the fact that, according to recent stats, overall circulation numbers are down across the industry). And, most importantly, how could all of this happen with a minimal amount of time and investment?

The answer, turn to the people who would be doing it any way. In otherwords, *Wiki!* (note that *wiki!* has that nice Marvel sound like *snikt!* and *thwip!*) Some savvy person at Marvel realized that the folks who have the best handle on their continuity are their readers, who, like the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy,^[3] were already obsessively documenting and discussing it online. 

Now, using the base Wiki engine (and some great .css work), those folks can go to Marvel.com and compose and edit character profiles. Over 800 character profiles have already been added. And that’s not counting other fan created entries on various topics like Marvel places, things, and storyline summaries.

This plan is a win for everyone. Built into the structure of the system is validation for the fan qua contributor. If your work is approved by a Marvel editor you get “Hero Points:” accumulatable tokens of social capital. Acquire enough points and you can approve and edit other fan submissions. Also, points can be used to access yet to be specified “super-cool and exclusive stuff” on the website.

From Marvel’s perspective they get good will and, more importantly, free content creation. Instead of maintaining a writing staff, all they have to do is edit the work generated by these fan "freelancers.” Further, they being to establish more control of properties in the online space. For years, fans have undertaken similar projects on personal webpages. Google “Amazing-Spiderman” and what comes first is not Marvel.com but:

Amazing Spider-Man .Info
The Definitive Spider-Man Reference & Image Web Presence featuring News, Covers, Rogues Gallery of Villains, Heroes & Allies, History, Entertainment, …
www.samruby.com/ - 37k - Cached - Similar pages

While these fansite might have generated good will and some publicity, Marvel couldn’t capitalize (or rather monetize) on the content they contained. With the Wiki, Marvel owns everything. While I haven’t dug into the legal agreements, I’m sure that they’ve sewn up all of the distribution rights for anything that is created for Marvel.com. In otherwords, they’re building a vast database of information (at low cost) that can quickly and easily be converted for publishing in other media, including future print updates of  The Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

Now, will there be background squabbles between hero editors? Of course. But, judging from the success of similiar projects like the Homestar Runner Wiki, what they’ll gain in content will be worth far more than any related headaches this creates (provided the legal side has been handled correctly). In fact, the argument can be made that this would be far more successful than any internally created project as they’ll get an “unbiased” (at least internally speaking) perspective on their own properties. Chances are that the fans will document things that Marvel never even considered.^[4]

Now, the next question is: what other media providers will get it and jump on this bandwagon? How soon until we see ABC hosting a Wiki for Lost? Or perhaps General Hospital is a better choice. After all, aren’t comic books and wrasslin’ just soap operas for boys^[5]?

For more information see:

• Marvel’s Press Release on the Wiki
• The Marvel Universe Wiki

A note before proceeding: this post may read as a bit of a “duh” to some folks. To others it may seem like the height of naval gazing. These relationships have been bouncing around in my head for about a week and I needed to get them out in order to sort these concepts out and begin making them my own. Like any good spark of an idea, this needs to be taken as a beginning and not a definitive standpoint. As with all models, there are holes in this one. My overall goal was to create a jumping off point for future discussions about what it is that we’re doing here at RIT and where we are going.

Last week, after my interviews at RIT, Frank Cost and I sat discussing the School of Print Media (SPM) and its relation to the field of communications. In particular we were trying to situate our position in the ever expanding world of technologically mediated communications. We both agreed that we weren’t simply in the business of facilitating communication, as that’s too broad a category. Nor are we in the business of Publishing, which has specific industry and process implications beyond the (re)production^[1] of a text. So, from an academic perspective, what exactly are we specializing in here at SPM?

The field of Computer Mediated Communications divides interactions into two categories: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communications are those in which all individuals are “present” at the time of interaction. The most common example is the proverbial face-to-face conversation. The notion of “present” refers to a temporal and interaction collocation rather than a geographical one. Telephones, live-chat, and video teleconferences are all examples of technologically mediated synchronous conversations. The key thing is that wherever the participants are, they are communicating in real time.

In asynchronous communications, on the other hand, the participants are not temporally co-located. This blog is an example of an asynchronous communication. I’m typing this at ten minutes to noon on Monday April 24, 2006. Who knows when you’ll read this. It might be later today (Monday April 24, 2006). It might be later this week. Or you might have found this through a Google search a year or two after I posted it. The key thing is that you are not looking over my shoulders as I’m typing this – though, speaking as the author, it often feels like you are.

In order to work, all asynchronous communications must produce artifacts^[2] (or artefacts if you’re using the Brit spelling) – “Anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product.” (artefact, n. and a., 1989) Without an artifact, be it this blog entry or the post-it note left on someone’s computer screen, the communication cannot take place. Note that the artifact does not need to be long-lived or physical. As already mentioned, a blog can function as an artifact, and that post-it note isn’t intended to hang on that screen forever.

Asynchronous communications can be seen as having (at least) two phases – production and dissemination. I’m currently producing this entry, undertaking the action of translating ideas in my head to a static form within a word document. That’s just half of the process. When I press <crlt – s> for the last time and save this in its final form, the artifact is finished. But, from a communicative sense, it’s latent – unshared. It doesn’t have value until it’s disseminated – published to the web. And even then it isn’t truly a communication until someone reads it – thank you for completing the process.

Acts of dissemination are not created – or are intended to be – equal. The vast majority of artifacts that we create and distribute are not intended for mass consumption. E-mail, and letters before them, are by and large considered to be private communications, disseminated to select individuals. On the other hand, my blog and the books on my office shelves are written for larger audiences. Hence we have terms like “mass media” to denote channels of communication with access to large number of people. I think the prefix “macro” might work better than mass for what I’m getting at. Thus we can differentiate between a micro-dissemination and a macro-dissemination. What is useful about “marco” is that it denotes both large scale and “the existence of smaller individuals”  

Relating this back to the conversation I had with Cost, the School of Print Media needs to be concerned with the (re)production and macro-dissemination of artifacts (forms of asynchronous communication). This (re)production and macro-dissemination can take place across multiple technologically-mediated mediums – paper, web, and portable media devices.

There are two key ideas here: (re)production and macro-dissemination. Digital media often blurs the line between the production and reproduction of an artifact. For example, take this blog: there is no reproduction of this entry, at least not in a physical sense. In the background my words are tagged and entered into a database. When the entry is called, my words are retrieved, and then have design styles applied against them in order to render a finished page. But, ignoring RSS feeds for the moment, no additional copies of my words are created. Yet those words can still be, and are, fact, macro-disseminated. Thus we cannot only be interested in the reproduction of artifacts.

Macro-dissemination is used to differentiate us from visual artists whose job is also to produce and disseminate artifacts. The differences between their work and ours is a matter of scale (and perhaps reproduction). In order to be financially and culturally successful, an artist must not only produce work but also to get it disseminated (installed in galleries, patron’s residences, or other exhibition locals). At some point, that act of dissemination may include reproducing those artifacts in a macro-dissemination medium, such as print. In doing so, those existing artifacts are used to create new artifacts (note that artifacts often beget other artifacts) and at that point printers often come into play.

What I also like about macro- is that it doesn’t contain some of the cultural baggage of “mass.” In particular, mass contains the notion of uniformity – mass production. We don’t think of mass communications as particularly personal. One of the most talked about areas of print, on the other hand, is Variable Data Print. Facilitated by digital technology, we can create jobs where each artifact is customized (personalized) for a different recipient. The end result is a macrodissemination of individualized communications (hence the value of macro’s acknowledgement of “smaller individuals”).

artefact, n. and a. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1989. cited March 28, 2006: available from http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50053052?query_type=word&queryword=artefact.

macro-, comb. form. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1989. cited March 28, 2006: available from http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50053052?query_type=word&queryword=macro.

Dre forwarded me this article from McSweeney’s: Scott McClellan’s Replacement: AOL Instant Messenger Bot SmarterChild. It’s a well done piece. SmarterChild is, in fact, an actually chatterbot available on the AOL IM network. Based on reading the article, it looks as if SmarterChild’s response script is based on the Eliza code with a number of tweaks.

I’d love to know if Michael Brady actually used SmarterChild to generate the final text for the article or if he’s simply writing using the style of the "bot genre." If that’s the case, then it’s a pretty nasty recursion: a person writing like a bot who, is in turn, is written to appear if it were a person.

So I’m just getting this to the point that I like it and I’m considering totally switching templates. The choice is not so much because I don’t like the look of Connections (this theme). I like it a lot — btw, the new banner image is of the magenta inkwell on a sheet-fed litho press. Unfortunately, it’s doesn’t have some of the back-end interactivity of Kubric.

The other thing that currently is ticking me off about WordPress is that anchor tags¹ seem to get edited out of my HTML (possible leading to the accusations of crufty URLs).

¹ - Anchors are used to handle footnotes. If the browser jumped to this footnote, then it means the latest version of WordPress recognizes them.²

² - Woo hoo! They got it fixed!

Since I had a moment to breath today, I figured it was time to tweak the blog a bit. In part that’s because I’ve been following The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. It’s a web guide based on Robert Bringhurst’s excellent work. Mainly, I’ve been really dissatisfied with a number of things about this design. And since I’m attempting to get a gig in a printing school, I should at least practice what I preach when it comes to type.

What you see below are character counts. I was attempting to restrict this text column to approximately 60 characters (the golden rule is between 45 and 77 characters).

1234567891123456789212345678931234567894123567895123567896

1234567891123456789212345678931234567894123567895

1234567891123456789212345678931234567894

123456789112345678921234567893

While the site address hasn’t changed, the .RSS file has. You can now find out the latest in my life at:

http://www.waking-dream.com/?feed=rss2

Thanks for the switch.

- Matt

If you tuned in for a few moments, you would have caught the old blog index up for a moment or two. I’m switching around my .RSS feed and have had a couple issues. It’s all resolved now… I think.