October « 2010 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

October, 2010

Glomerata — Comments Off
28
Oct 10

Glomeratas

Beautiful, isn’t it? That’s the 1937 Glomerata, the Auburn University yearbook. I first shared that with you last week in this ongoing series. The Glomerata cover project continues today as we enter into a critical point in university and national history.

This week’s three covers round the corner from the 1930s and bring us closer to war. These are just the covers, but if you were to look through the books you’d see the Depression and the changing tone on campus. The ROTC students could see the writing on the wall. The nation wasn’t fighting yet, but it was only a matter of time. In the casual photographs the students look like they belong to the 1950s. The change from those two decades isn’t so steep. The change in the next two, of course, would be remarkable.

Go here to step back to 1939. You can start at the beginning of our little journey by clicking here. If you’d like a bit more depth than just the covers, try here.

Where I do another phone experiment

That’s my first ever attempt at time lapse photography. This was done on my iPhone using the free Gorillacam app. I learned two valuable lessons.

First, you need a stable mount. No, this didn’t interfere with the drive — promise — but wrapping the phone up in a Gorilla tripod isn’t the best solution. If anyone has an iPhone tripod idea, I’m listening.

The second lesson is shooting a drive isn’t the most dynamic choice. I didn’t expect it would be high art, but I got a lot of trees on a beautiful day. Somehow my time lapse managed to just miss every interesting thing — produce shacks, abandoned buildings, oncoming traffic, bridges with character — along the way.

But, I can now make a time lapse project. With the Gorillacam you can choose the number of pictures and the time increments. You get a bunch of pictures on your phone that you have to produce yourself. So, import, add to iMovie, edit the clips and add some music.

I went into Garageband and threw some beats together, made a few subtle edits and put it all together.

Once you get the workflow down this wouldn’t take long. The art, aside from the subject selection, is how long to make each image. And I’d guess that varies. Obviously, I don’t yet have the deft touch required for that.

Critiqued that study I mentioned yesterday. Here were my observations: the terms “young” and “old” were poorly conceived, the terms short and long (story length) were poorly defined and some of the hypotheses were more intuitive rather than conceptual. Essentially the study was about how story length and pacing impacted comparative recall in the case of young adults and older adults.

Young adults were defined as 18-22 — typical for an on-campus study where college age students are easy to draft as participants. Older adults were defined as 25-81. First of all, by this study’s definition I am old. And while I take playful exception to that, I argued that the idea of pacing and length in stories doesn’t vary that much between these simple measures. The median age in the older adults category was 44, but the remote control has been ubiquitous for most of those adults lives and their viewing habits have been conditioned to contemporary pacing, cuts, edits and story lengths just like the younger viewers. I’d buy the 81-year-old’s experience was difference, but not that the 25-year-old had that much of a marked change than a 22-year-old.

The idea of story length had some overlap. Stories were short if they were between 15 and 83 seconds. Long stories were defined between 40 and 185 seconds. Story length is an important consideration when you discuss cognition, recall and cognitive overload, so it is important to the study. But I can’t think of any good reason why a story that is 46 seconds could be called short, but a story that is 40 seconds could be called long.

And so on. It is a good paper and the results are compelling and practicable. It is one in a series by the Indiana scholars of which I’ve read several papers, so following the progression of their research is interesting.

The rest of the day was more reading, more writing. There was a trip to the grocery story, where I met a young man who was very excited about the football game this weekend. I looked for a business card I’ve hidden from myself. I’ve run out of places to search. Took a late evening nap — one of those drift away during the commercial break and wake up later in the same show affairs — which was wonderful until the 10 minutes after waking up where nothing made much sense.

Naps are funny that way. I seldom wake up disoriented in the morning, but a good nap leaves me confused. But it was refreshing, and now I’m wide awake. That’s always good.

And so I made the time lapse project. But that’s not all. I added a few more pictures to the Tumblr feed. That site is making a comeback and you can follow it there or see it on the right side of this page. The Glom covers will be added momentarily. And, of course, there will be something interesting tomorrow, too.

fair — Comments Off
27
Oct 10

1939 World’s Fair

Italy!

Turkey!

Venezuela!

What do these three great nations have in common? Besides conceptual art meant to explain and stymie? And late war turns against Germany? They are all featured in the 1939 World’s Fair section.

Pretty obscure piece of trivia, huh?

Start from the beginning, here.

iPhone / journalism / memories / photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
Oct 10

‘English is a tool for hiding the truth’

That’s part of a spam comment I received yesterday. They snare you with the first part of the phrase, a nice little comment meant to appeal to the author’s ego, and then snap you back with the hard realize that this is all just a lie and you are really just a tool for The Man, and we need to get our people out of Vietnam, man! Johnson is ruining everything.

And then the HUAC is re-formed and things get nasty from there.

I was going to really dissect the spam for fun, but something made me Google it. The 2,740 results suggested that this particular Russian server gets around a bit, but it problem isn’t the most prolific one.

Plus, Dr. Jim Pangborn, a English-lit, poetics, cultural and media history scholar has already done the heavy lifting stretches the idea beyond English. Pangborn takes the idea back to Socrates. You could take the thing all the way back to plumage and scales and cilia.

“Mine are better, softer, sturdier more colorful, more bountiful. Whatever you need, babe. Clearly life with me is going to be better than life with that guy. How droll.”

Then the female, having been impressed with the dance and the spontaneous sense of the male’s dance interpretation, takes a chance. And now the male is at the bowling alley four nights a week, coming home late reeking of booze and cigars. And she thinks Maybe, just maybe, the male with less scales or feathers wouldn’t have been so bad after all. She goes to look him up on Protozoabook and thinks Still less plumage/scales/cilia but he is a senior developer at Endoderm, so there’s that.

You never really think of Darwinism with that particular brand of cynicism.

Back to the Lomophotography. I took two pictures today on my iPhone for comparison’s sake, one using the Lomo app, and the other with the conventional technique.

I like the effect, but it is always going to be a novelty to me. I blame the years of rational empiricism training.

Critiqued the Crimson this afternoon. This year’s staff has grown into putting together strong papers pretty rapidly. Very proud. There was one or two minor problems, but I figure if the editors discover them before I point them out they are on the right track.

I showed them the new template for the website re-launch, as designed by the online editor. The mock-up has turned into a working page that will go live sooner than later. Now we begin the talks of more photography, more video, more social media, more, more, more. Dream big, I say, because the answer is frequently yes.

Picked up the Wall of Fame plaques today. They’ll be given out at Homecoming in two weeks. Another good class of inductees, and now I have to write blurbs for their displays. It is no easy challenge to distill a career of success into 30 words. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?

Studied. Read. For class tomorrow I am critiquing Lang et al. (2005) “Wait! Don’t turn that dial! More excitement to come! The effects of story length and production pacing in local television news on channel changing behavior and information processing in a free-choice environment.” This is not the longest journal title I’ve ever encountered.

My professor, an internationally respected scholar and a talented and kind man, studied under the author. (Lang is mentioned mid-way through this spiel from one of my former professors. I recorded that in the spring of 2009, which seems a long time ago now. Indeed, I’d almost forgotten I had it.) I know one of the co-authors. It is a good paper and I can only find three or four things to mention in class tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a worthwhile critique.

For this class I’ve now almost filled two large three-ring binders with papers on cognition, method and effects. My three-hole punch is getting dull under the strain. I didn’t realize you could do that.

More from the 1939 World’s Fair will come along shortly.

Auburn / iPhone / links / photo / Samford / Tuesday — 1 Comment
26
Oct 10

Stormy weather

Beautiful, isn’t it? That’s the library on the Samford campus. Spent a fair amount of time in there this evening. I shot that picture on my iPhone, running it through something called the MoreLomo app. I didn’t know what Lomo was, but I look through the app store every so often for the next big, free thing.

Lomo, or lomography, is a photographic subculture based on a poor quality Russian camera. Just think of them as film and slide hipsters. The finished product, legitimate in the film version or manufactured in the digital, is intriguing. You can get one of the camera’s here.

I appreciate the classic essence of what they’re doing. I miss the smell of the darkroom, as most old school print people do. (There’s one just down the hall from my office. Sometimes I linger, hoping to catch the chemistry in the air. But I’ve been shooting digital for a decade and I could never go back. Especially when my phone will try to give me random interpretations of a poor, but interesting, processing technique. I’ll take a few more, I’m sure. But I’ll also have to take pictures in the traditional style, because I’m a realist.

Now I’m looking for a good time lapse app. Let me know if you find one.

Taught my class, rushed through all those slides so they could have some time to work on a story they have due next week.

Spent time reading and writing. The student-journalists at the Crimson are putting their paper together tonight. We got a look at the soon-to-rollout new version of the Crimson site. That’s going to look nice.

Storms rolled through. Started with high winds this morning and seemed to storm all day thereafter. It isn’t just your neighborhood. This was part of a huge mid-latitude cyclone, probably one of the largest, stronger storms we have on record in the U.S. This graphic will have changed by the time you look at it, but just imagine the southeast lit up with lighting strikes.

I cause trouble again. The al.com roundtable is back:

Auburn question 2: Ole Miss has certainly improved since losing to Jacksonville State, but is still last in the SEC West. Any chance Auburn suffers a letdown after three tough games in a row?

The most heartening thing about Auburn, when it comes to questions like this, are the attitudes on the sideline. People watching on television saw it better than those in Jordan-Hare Stadium, Saturday, but Gene Chizik looked at ease at the half. Chizik and offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn were chatting late in a one score game like it was a 30 point blowout. There’s a calm demeanor in the leadership that bodes well for potential trap games. Of course that could have just been an appearance of peace opposite the Les Miles Psycho Road Show going on across the field.

Fifty-five incendiary comments and I didn’t even say anything controversial. Sports fans are entertaining. I suppose the Alabama side of that will be up tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be busy. I should start now.