One of the committees that I’m currently serving on has been charged with coming up with an end of year event display event for School of Print Students. This type of event, in theme, if not form, is pretty common across the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. For example, each year all the students and faculty members in the film department gather together and watch every student’s final project. Likewise most of the other arts have gallery exhibitions or studio walk throughs.

All of the above focus on an end product. But what is the end product of print? It’s easy to focus on the created artifact. But that often is reduced to concerns about the item’s graphic design. That focus is completely inappropriate for printing students – if for no other reasons that they are not training to be graphic designers. Arguably, the final products could be evaluated on choice of media and production aspects, but many of these factors are controlled by the assignments.

Frank Cost noted these problems with judging print production at the beginning of the chapter “The value of print” in his book The New Medium of Print (Cost, The New Medium of Print, 2005: pp95-7).  Cost reminds us that most printing industry awards are based on the quality of the final project rather than intangibles such as “was the job delivered on time? Was the customer please with the service? Did the product deliver the anticipated value to the customer?” (Cost: p95).

Cost goes on to suggest that while print quality is important, it’s also assumed. Thus, companies differentiate themselves on those other vectors. Likewise, our students are judged on far more vectors than simply “did the job print” and “is it pretty?” The challenge that we face is choosing a method of display that brings those intangibles to light.

The benefit, pedagogically, is that finding a method to display the intangibles serves to make the students more aware of their existence – that, as Martha says, “is a good thing.” The question is, what method is best?

I just noticed that the photo of Scott McCloud and  "How to draw comics the Marvel way" displayed below, has appeared on The Beat, a comics industry site. Unfortunately, I expect that Henry Jenkins will get more traffic from the article than I will (deservedly so — the dude is frickin’ smart). Either way, thanks for the nod Heidi!

Ok, since I still bleed yellow (and it’s not from jaundice), check out my Scott McCloud Lecture Kodak Gallery!

I’ve spent most of the last two days escorting Scott McCloud and his wonderful family around and about the RIT campus. The lecture yesterday went off without a hitch ??? in fact, it was better than I could have asked.

Ingle was filled with a combination of students, faculty, and community members. We’re estimating about 375 in all! Scott told me that was roughly the same turn out as at MIT. Not too shabby!

You can read Scott’s account at the 50 State Tour Blog.

Here’s a shot of McCloud lecturing. For those traditionalists out there, note that he’s lecturing in front of a page from Learn to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

After the lecture, a mini-lecture by McCloud’s daughter Sky, and a long Q&A session (facilitated by his other daughter Winter), we headed upstairs for the signing. As you can see above, the signing line wrapped all around the upper rooms. We sold out of Making Comics. In fact, I heard a couple disappointed attendees trying to bribe the bookstore to let go of copies that were on hold for people.

For more than an hour (by my count close to two) Scott greeted and talked with each person in line. He made every person seem like they are the only person that he’s talked to ??? regardless if they were at the beginning of the line or at the tail end of it (this is a quality that he shares with his friend Neil Gaiman). I can only imagine how tired his wrist is going to get on this tour.

Today was wonderful as well. Unfortunately, I need to grade, so that account will come tomorrow. Either way, I’m beaming that RIT seems to have matched MIT in turnout and hospitality.

Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter ‘em that Gods gonna cut ya down! - “God’s Gonna Cut Down,” Johnny Cash

In the midst of research for a side project, I discovered that not only is there a new posthumous Johnny Cash album about to drop (American V for those keeping track), but it’s got a MySpace page. Considering MySpace’s origin as a music site, this shouldn’t be too surprising. Still, it’s taking some time to reconcile itself in my mind.

The page is worth visiting, as it contains two of the singles from the new album — the afore quoted God’s Gonna Cut Down and Cash’s final composition The 309. Both have a stark, stripped down quality that was sorely missed from the overproduced American IV.

The album, American V: A Hundred Highways, hits stores on the 4th of July and I can’t wait.

Also, any musicphiles reading this blog should check out The Hype Machine — it’s an aggregate blog which draws content from a number of music blogs. Best of all, it takes advantage of Flash technology to stream some of the most diverse and interesting MP3 content I’ve seen in a bit.

Sorry friends and readers, I still have to wait on lots of news. Hopefully by weeks end things will be set and I can start posting about it.

In the mean time, I’m diving very deep into mash-ups — media were multiple "tracks" (typically audio, but also video) are juxtaposed against each other. Take for example DJ Mei Lwun’s Sweet Home Country Grammar — Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet home Alabama meets Nelly’s Country Grammar. This also ties into a lot of the content that’s popping up on YouTube and on MySpace. In particular I’m thinking about this in terms of new forms of "literacy" and "writing," as well as their roles as emblems of identity. More to come on all of that.

• 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

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.