Alternative Means of Presentation

Less than a month until the end, and I'm exploring different ways to present my final project that will do the rich multimedia content justice. The interactive PDF thing is ok, but I think I can make it even better. I'm exploring different ways to present the paper outside of a traditional full paper/PDF format. One idea I had was creating a modified blog with different sections of the paper being distributed as postings. I did some research, and couldn't find any interesting alternatives for presenting long documents on the web other than in PDF/publication form. I'm going to do a little more digging and hope I find some inspiration, but at this point I'm going to play around with the few ideas I have. Of course, I'd also turn in a regular word doc/pdf version of the paper, but I'd really like to find a more visually engaging way to integrate the rich media content I'm working with than just live hyperlinks.

Citizen Journalism

The actions of the last few weeks have led me to question the very nature of citizenship, activism, and journalism. I used to see journalism as a noble profession, willfully divorced from moralizing and dedicated to seeking the truth. With the ubiquity of technology turning many of us into citizen journalists, the importance of this nobility becomes less and less clear. Much has been written about the trust we place in the "truth" of the image, and its ability to manipulate. This idea of acting as a witness and a documenter, and intention behind that action, is an important piece of the technology and activism puzzle. While I initially set out to explore only the use of technology by activists, citizen journalists who witness and record political action are activists in their own right, and I will have to consider them as such in this paper.

New Occupation

A lot has happened in the last few days, with the students occupying another building—this time breaking in before the building opened. Because the action started with a break-in, the university did not treat it like a demonstration but as a criminal act, and called in the NYPD. There is a lot of conflicting coverage from different witnesses and journalists, but a really interesting article in yesterday's Times, which I'm going to draw on for the paper, explores it rather eloquently.

New School as Case Study

As I begin to write the paper, I'm deciding to use the current turmoil at The New School as the lens through which I explore technology and student action. The December occupation and subsequent student actions (press conferences and teach-ins) demonstrated the ways in which technology can be used by activists to quickly spread their message. I have a lot of material at my disposal. Now I just have to figure out the best way to illustrate it (screenshots of Twitter and web posts? live links?)

Interactive Documents

I'm trying to figure out the best way to build an interactive document. I'd like the words/sentences in the document to live link to web pages, images, videos, and other rich media content. I already know how to create PDFs with live links, but I was hoping to use a more intricate, newer software to create the final document. I've found a couple links to help me with the process:

Apple

Computer Arts

Delicious Bibliography

In keeping with the "social media is revolutionizing the way we interact and view events" thesis of this project, I've decided to utilize the social bookmarking service delicious as my bibliography. All web-based sources will be catalogued on my delicious page. This will allow me to easily categorize and share my sources with others, and view how popular those sources are with the delicious community.