I collect stuff, especially old stuff. Maybe it’s because I’m challenged to let things go but I like to think that I hold onto the old based on its ability to inspire the new. This is especially true when it comes to my fondness for old technology. Earning a living by making and creating within the digital realm demands an intimate relationship with evolving technologies.

Along with my peers, I conflate a technology’s accomplishments with its potentials. We look at technology differently when we help make it.  And in using and analyzing new technology in this way we are equipping ourselves to help navigate the transition from mechanical to sensory communication. Where an interface's buttons have been replaced by links. This transition from the analog to the digital is especially relevant to us children of the 80’s. We know what life was like before the internet and we also know how to use the internet. The technologies that bridge this gap therefore hold cultural and personal value to us.

For me, the pieces of antiquated technologies I have chosen to keep evoke memories of the things I’ve made and documented during this era of transition. I’ve endured the editorial discipline required to type an essay on a typewriter, remember the physicality of the rotary telephone and the chair that sat next to it, experienced the novel freedom of carrying my music on my Walkman, and was enamoured by the creative potentials of the point-and-click interface with the Macintosh. While these antiquated objects greatly influenced my productivity during my formative years, they aren’t simply markers of time, nor are they simply measures of my personal history with technology. These objects reference the freedoms of digital technology and the lost textures of the analog.

The nostalgia of antiquated technologies can cause us to overlook the ecological footprint of their existence. The cruelty of obsolesce, both natural and strategic, is waste. While many physical technologies, like the paper and pen, are being replaced by the virtual, their modern substitutes are driven to be light, small, fast and temporary. These devices are also supported and dependent on a variety of tethers, power supplies and media. Often these peripherals remain long after their devices have moved on. The ecological impact of today’s technology is evidenced in both its production and its disposal. It impacts the health and environment of those who build the technology as well as those who are left to dispose of it.

As a media maker I rely on many tools - some new and some old. New tools overcome limitations; old tools are reliable. The tools we use and the way we use them contribute to the character of our craft. Eventually we notice that some of these technologies start to limit our means, so we replace them. I'm reminded how mastery gives way to incompetence when upgrading my digital devices. As creators in the digital industries we should not be forgiven for contributing to the waste of our upgrading simply because we are helping to service the innovation of these products. We should be smarter in our contributions to the development of technology. Limiting the obsolescence of our innovations should be placed on an equal plane with profitability and ingenuity. A conciousness about where technology comes from and where it ends up is as much the responsibility of those who make technology as it is to those who use it.

To learn about other personal histories of technological use, disuse, and disposal or to tell your own, check out this great project established by some great people...

www.technotrash.org

I'm getting ready to present at a Rountable and Fishbowl in Denver at the end of the month as part of Internet Research 14.0 | resistance + appropriation. I'll be drawing from my experience at Archinodes and postdoc position to discuss the connection of academic training to the creative and cultural industries. How can a PhD be useful 'out there'? At Archinodes, as all members are formally trained in media studies, we place incredible value on theory and building from conceptual models, but perhaps unlike academia, we are not satisfied with perpetually prototyping or experimentation without end. The flipside is just as questionable; without decent critical thinking skills, how creative can you be? How solid is a concept if it's about making tools and apps to make money?

If this sounds provocative -- good -- because we've set up the entire fishbowl as a series of provocations! 

The title of our roundtable is: Bridging the politics of digital academic production and social entrepreneurship

Statement: Digital humanities scholars today are frequently challenged to reach out to non-academic communities and undertake entrepreneurial-like initiatives that connect to corporate agendas, prioritized social engagements or applied research, in order to generate the research funding that success in the academic environment relies on. Sometimes these are successful collaboratories that express complex social values and support cooperative work or start-up environments appropriate to industrial success and workforce-oriented life skills. In other circumstances, these particularly financial or social objectives get in the way of research that is able to resist stagnant or tired patterns of scholarly endeavour or civic involvements. How can provocative and/or collective research interventions fit into this constricted framework? How do marketing, design-thinking, and activism fit together with academic methods and processes, particularly with critical media arts practices and the DIY field? In what ways do research-creation, digital ethnography, self-critical observation and digital media art production help or hinder legitimacy and credibility in the academy? What is the intervention you choose to make as a scholar in the communities with which you engage, inside and outside the university, and how can you measure contributions and recognition that can be accepted at both types of sites of enquiry?

This fishbowl will be moderated by Dr. Vicki Mayer. She is Professor of Communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Mayer is author or editor of four books about media production in the new economy for creative industries. Since 2009, she has been director of MediaNOLA (medianola.org) to connect university students, professors, and creative sector professionals (archivists, preservationists, etc.) to a digital public history project.

Other speakers:

Jacqueline Wallace (PhD Candidate (ABD) in Communication, Concordia University, and HASTAC Scholar) spent a decade working in the media and tech industries at the intersection of commerce and creativity. She is a former founder of Veer, Inc. an award-winning visual media and design startup and a founding partner in the boutique social media agency, All Beef Media. Wallace is now pursuing research on the micro-economies of DIY design + craft, women’s creative labour and informal production networks. 

Mélanie Millette (PhD Candidate (ABD) in Communication, Université du Québec à Montréal, LabCMO) worked as a producer for TV, radio and new media advertising before getting back to the academy. Since 2006, she has worked as a freelance consultant in social media. A SSHRC and Trudeau Foundation scholar, her thesis focuses on the Francophone Canadian minority and how this community uses Twitter to get visibility and political recognition. 

Mary Elizabeth Luka is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and PhD Candidate (ABD) in Communication at Concordia University, and HASTAC Scholar. Situated in the digital humanities, her scholarly interests focus on research-creation as method, production practices and creativity in cultural media production, and the intriguing dynamics generated at the intersection of the arts, broadcasting and digital production. With more than a decade of award-winning work as a founder/producer/director of digital and television programming initiatives in public broadcasting, Luka has also worked with over 25 culture sector organizations as a strategic planning consultant.

In light of the platform we're building, I'm going over some of the Highlights of Eben Moglen's Freedom in the Cloud Talk from a speech given at a meeting of the Internet Society's New York branch on Feb 5, 2010, entitled: "Freedom In the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing." Worth considering in the segment "What is a Platform?" [18:00], Moglen says:

What we have are things we call platforms? The word platform, like cloud, doesn't inherently mean anything. Thrown around a lot in business talk, but basically what 'platform' means is places you can't leave, stuff you're stuck to, things that don't let you off. Once the net become a hierarchically organized zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, it becomes the zone of 'platforms' and platform making becomes the order of the day...

The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory-performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing-in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge. Repertoire, etymologically "a treasury, an inventory" also allows for individual agency, referring also to "the finder, discoverer," and meaning "to find out." The repertoire requires presence-people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by 'being there,' being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same.

I'm reading Jennifer Gabrys's Digital Rubbish: a Natural History of Electronics -- one of the best reads ever! She argues for a natural history approach -- channelling a variety of theorists like Sterling, Foucault, Benjamin, Kittler, McLuhan, Acland, Butler and Zielinski -- to situate e-waste within material and cultural discussions of e-tech.

Gabrys expands the definition of waste: it's is not just matter, it includes technological imaginings, progress narratives and material temporalities. She demonstrates this through a natural history approach that relies on gathering stories, as method. She focuses on 'remainders' and argues that virtuality can enable even more extensive consumption and wasting. She also discusses obsolescence and the ways in which decay and discarded objects force us to reevaluate the material present. Together these counter the idea of progress and the logic of onward and upward.

Materiality effects are indicative of the economies and ecologies of transience that course through technologies, and the cultural and political contexts through which they circulate. Materiality effects also highlight a complex set of material processes and relations, especially the speed and volume of the cycle of production, consumption and disposal of e-tech.

In Chapter 4, Museums of Failure, Gabrys discusses the ways in which some cultural objects are preserved in archives and museums while others are cast out and disposed. But preservation becomes a way to manage decay, to delay the inevitable process of disposal. Each instance raises questions of duration, value, and ultimately highlight the built in tendency toward termination of technology. Technologies fail to remain new and as such become records of material and technological imaginings. Digital archives and preservation repositories alike become museums of failure, evidence of what is no longer the dream of something better, faster, more...

Jennifer Gabrys's Digital Rubbish: a Natural History of Electronics is available for free online.

Design. Perpetually celebrated and criticized, it supports our sense of style and function. When charged with conceiving of a new design, we are guided by a list of rational requirements - the design must accomplish A, B & C.  But the process of design is far from rational. Whether creating or engaging with a design, it is our unique personal lived experiences, be they mindful or latent, that determins the outcome of one's engagement, be it positive or negative, with a design.  These personal biases must negotiate the technical constraints of the medium and the perceived demands of the maker and user alike. It is this personal association to design that challenges both the maker and user to connect despite never sharing the same space. It stands to reason then, that failing to make this connection can also be very personal experience. Attempting to avoid the potential of failure by relying entirely on rationality, the A,B & C, will only serve to alienate a product from its purpose and its humanity. 

I see good design as something that is novel and functional while inherently familiar and with character. It must be supportive but not obstructive. It should make you want to engage with it, but not necessarily consciously. Ideally it should help make you feel good about yourself and the world around you.  

The Nodes are in DC for four days working through several archival concepts toward the creation of an archival platform for everyday collectors. Our plan is to make available on our blog some of the concepts that emerge from our conversations, as a glossary of terms, toward producing something for the journal Convergence: Special themed issue Vol 21, no 1 (February 2015) Digital Archives & Open Archival Practices.

It is both essential to ask and sometimes difficult to wrap one's head around, but this little three letter word is and should always serve as a compass. It's when we loose sight of the 'why' that we distance ourselves from our purpose and more importantly our passion.

We live and work amidst a fervent stream of ideas and intentions, the products of which seek to impress by largely showcasing the boundaries of innovation. Increasingly it seems that the impetus for these innovations - the answer to the 'why?' - have been based on blindly seeking out that which is possible at the expense of that which is necessary. This is not to overlook the frivolities of life and their generous abilities to make us think, but rather suggest that we be more honest in our answer to the 'why?'. When we allow necessity to be conflated with possibility we are compromising our abilities to 'secure the gains of our day'. 

If we are to address the pressing needs of today we must be wild in our reach but purposeful in our execution - we must be honest in our responses to 'why?'. This pertains not only to the application of our expertise to this process, but more importantly to the investment of our hearts.

I wrote a post on the environmental impact of Facebook's storage centers.

There are plenty of ways to tell a story, but through each means there is a consciousness about who will be listening. The trick is to figure out how to expand that consciousness beyond just the storyteller.

Returning The Voices is a recently completed project that we created for Prof. Ronald Rundin of Concordia University's Department of History. As its name suggests, the project is seeking to return voices of an expropriated community to what is now a National Park on the eastern coast of New Brunswick. In taking on this project, we saw value and challenges in presenting established research to a potentially conflicted audience. As the curators of an understandably divisive topic, like land expropriation, both our methodology and eventual treatment required a sensitivity to respect (and not risk alienating) the stakeholders and audiences alike.

With audiences that might include former (expropriated) residents, park tourists, academics, and the historically curious, we sought to allow the project's artifacts to tell the story of Kouchibouguac. With many of the photographs and maps being of poor quality, and with no access to originals, the design challenge was to treat the content in a way that enhanced the quality of media, establish a cohesiveness, find contemporary relevance, and ultimatley contribute to telling a compelling story. A consciousness about making the content accessible to an audience with contextual biases lead us to create an interface that balances familiarity and discovery. In the end we hope we've created an experience that, through the presentation of artifacts, recounts lost stories to newly found audiences.

While developing a design interface for a new project, we're discovering a real world tension between guiding users towards content while fostering opportunity (and freedom) for exploration. We're charged then with creating an interface that is both compelling and clearly functional. But this ain't Al Gore's old internet anymore. Today's user is more interface savvy and increasingly impatient. Interfaces that obstruct will be circumvented or simply avoided. And with the navigational acumen of a public who has mobile devices seemingly welded to their palms, we are presented with both opportunity and challenges to maintain their gaze without insulting their sensibilities.

Combined with advances in platform development, designers are increasingly freed to allow content and instinct to guide interface design. And while we obviously don't all share the same levels of experience navigating digital interfaces, even designing to a broad spectrum of users can now rely on design that facilitates more that it guides.

It's important to remind ourselves that we've all been playing around on the internet for a while now. We get it. 

Over the past few years, most of the development projects we've worked on have been built on some sort of content management system. When a project comes across our desks, one of the first things we do is take a look at the goals, strategy, and requirements, and begin a discussion of what kind of tools we need to use to best get the job done. Having often used Drupal and Wordpress in the past, this has typically been a discussion of what type of CMS is best suited for the project. But on a recent project, we found ourselves questioning whether we needed a CMS at all.

The project involved presenting research and interviews that took place in the course of producing an academic book. There was a fixed amount of content, and the site wouldn't be edited or updated after it was launched. The site also needed to be responsive, adapting its layout and functionality to mobile and desktop displays.

While many modules and plugins were available and would make a CMS an easy way to quickly get the content up and available, I found myself, for the first time 8 years, considering building an HTML site without a CMS. It turned out building the features ourselves with a little javascript magic wasn't as time consuming as we thought and starting with a blank slate even gave us room to breathe and be creative. And perhaps most important to this project, not having our content stored in a database and meant not having to worry about security updates or what will happen when there's a new version of PHP. This made using a CMS more sustainable, not requiring upgrades and maintenence in the future.

But just because we're building a HTML site, it doesn't mean we're simply starting from scratch. Instead of starting with a CMS, we're starting with a framework. We're going to be using the HTML5 Boilerplate framework for this project, but there are many others out there worth checking out: Foundation, Bootstrap, Less, and Skeleton just to name a few. Whether your site is database driven or not, these frameworks provide an excellent starting point for front-end development and will get you on your way with some HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript best practices in tow.

Here's to thinking outside the CMS.

For the entire month of January, Archinodes is having a sale on our consulting services: mention this blog post and receive a free idea with the purchase of any two ideas. This includes all good ideas, great ideas, and excellent ideas, but does not apply to our inventory of paradigm shifting ideas.  And as always, be sure check out our clearance rack where all of our okay ideas are up to 70% off.

Alright, I know, that's a bit preposterous.

Consulting is funny business. In fact, consulting has become a bit of dirty word around Archinodes. One my favourite pastimes is spitballing ideas. The process of problem solving can be fun and exciting. Whether working with a client or just chatting over beers with a friend, there's nothing I enjoy more than working through a challenge and identifying creative solutions. And the process of freely sharing these ideas is always more fulfilling - getting a reaction to your idea, having your idea challenged, refining your idea - it seems the more an idea gets shared, the better it gets.

But therein lies the challenge of getting paid for your ideas.

Obviously, the concept of purchasing ideas in the same way one purchases a pair of shoes is ridiculous, but our ideas are central to the work we do. This challenge often rears its head during the proposal process when we first engage a potential client. Very few clients are willing to pay for a proposal and we often find ourselves reticent to give away our best ideas early on. All too often we've seen ideas taken from our proposals, repurposed, and then given to the lowest bidder to be implemented. We take pride in our proposals, but in creating them we're often risking a lot of unpaid work. This creates a tension between wanting to freely share our best ideas while holding our cards close to the vest to protect ourselves.

But to me, this illustrates a central principle of consulting: establishing trust. I don't see consulting as the business of selling ideas; when we're hired as consultants, we're getting paid to seek the best interest of our clients, regardless of how many good or bad ideas that will require. And it's out of that trusting relationship that the best ideas come.

So, here's a pro tip for anyone soliciting proposals for any kind of work: offer to compensate your prospective vendors for their time in putting together the proposal. Even if it's a nominal amount that doesn't match the labour involved, the gesture alone will speak volumes about your respect for their work, an essential level of trust will be established, and I guarantee you'll end up getting better proposals and better ideas. 

Omeka. Wordpress. StaceyApp. Indexhibit. Drupal. Joomla. Murkutu.

I'm thinking through all of these CMS -- not only the way they deliver content but also the politics that underlie the platforms and the communities of users they inspire. What follows is a preliminary set of reflections on the various CMS I've used, as well as the contexts that defined the delivery and shortcomings of each.

There are many many other options not mentioned here, perhaps for later consideration...

I've started working as a curator at Lori Emerson's Media Archaeology Lab (at UC Bouder) and one interesting conversation (happening also with the MAL Board over email) has been around the use of a CMS for the lab's upcoming website. For this particular project, the two favoured CMS so far seem to be Wordpress and Omeka... and so begins my exploration...

As part of the Archinodes philosophy, I tend to avoid thinking of online projects as mere mirrors of material collection, but rather as extensions of ideas and concepts already anchored in the material world, such as the MAL. What can the web offer this lab? A lot. The lab is filled with incredible machines, each with a rich but untold trajectory, and each with its own undocumented quirks and personality. The lab is also a space for artist interventions, media archaeological research, host to gaming nights and opportunities to play with what Johanna Druker calls "undead media." So which CMS can be best customized to highlight and bring to life the lab and its activities?

Omeka seems tailored to archive and museum collections because it prioritizes metadata handling. For large and ongoing collections of "web objects," this seems to be the way to go, if the idea is to uphold more traditional archival modalities. In their own words, they provide a

collections-focused web publishing platform that offers both rigorous adherence to standards and interoperability with the collections professional’s toolkit and the design flexibility, interpretive opportunities, and ease of use of popular web authoring tools.

I'm saying "seems" because I'm on my third (failed) attempt at installing the CMS, despite my prior experience with such processes. I will test it out properly and blog about it in a few days...

My first impression is that Omeka is heavy: it takes a very long time to upload -- depending on your internet connection, give yourself 30 minutes an hour (which is 5 to 10 times longer than Wordpress or Drupal for some reason.) However, I'm not sure that this is a disadvantage of the CMS per se, as you do this only once, but it's heavy! The real failure is due to the CMS being without its .htaccess file, which required some perusing through their forum to get the code to create my own and fix this seemingly common installation glitch. I feel like this step is above most users heads. I'll be able to report back soon on wether or not this is a proven solution..

From the examples online, I anticipate Omeka morphing into a very rich platform over time and as its community of user-developers grows, especially for institutional and academic projects. For now, I think its main competition remains Wordpress (or Drupal, for more advanced folks), which, while not metadata-oriented, still offers more flexibility, familiarity and extensibility. And loads way faster. 

Wordpress is currently my favorite CMS, especially with the growing base of html5 themes and the recent core release which makes managing large image collections very smooth (thanks for the tip, Matt Soar and Jeremy Clarke!) and also offers a lot of potential for dealing with maps and locative media. That being said, Omeka's Neatline feature blows my mind for the way it integrates timeline and map functions. Again, I haven't tested it out yet but from a viewer/user p.o.v, I'm impressed. I'm into maps these days, so while this may not be especially pertinent to the MAL project (but who knows?), map handling scores big with me.

Wordpress is great when you have a team contributing to several aspects of a site, with levels of permission/access. From experience, levels of permission are often used to limit what people have access to -- not in a strict permissions way -- but rather to narrow the risk of them f'in up anything by removing features they don't need in order to contribute their share to the project. Anyway. Wordpress integrates everything seamlessly -- maps, analytics, social media, galleries -- you name it. And it keeps getting better, with its huge user base and dedicated developers and designers. While you can always tell a Wordpress site from a Drupal site from an Indexhibit site and so on based on style and layout, Wordpress themes are so good right out of the box that sometimes they start to look & feel like... a box.

Onto StaceyApp and Indexhibit...

For my PhD research-creation project last year, I used a combination of Indexhibit and StaceyApp. The two merged quite beautifully design-wise though they presented important conceptual and technological differences for my project, both in terms of practice and final display.

Indexhibit first caught my attention because it came out as a portfolio-centered CMS while everything else at the time seemed to revolve around the blog. The CMS was developed in no small part out of frustration with clutter and gimmicks shaping the web. Indexhibit developers favoured the list view (i.e. index) and un- combersome access to content (i.e. exhibit). They explain:

The more websites that use this structure, the more archetypal / invisible the structure becomes, and the more emphasis is placed on content.

Back in the day, Indexhibit was free. While I happily donated the suggested 15 euros back then, I'm not sure the CMS will survive with its new mandatory pay model - we'll see. I hope so.

Indexhibit became my research archive where I stored mostly notes (in various media formats) -- an archive of an archive. The trickier (though not impossible) parts were creating a forum for comments and integrating social media. Indexhibit is ideal for a personal research archive or artist portfolio but it very much remains a personal repository, in my opinion. If you plan on having a community of contributors, this is not your CMS of choice.

For my PhD exhibition, I opted for StaceyApp. StaceyApp doesn't rely on a database, which made it extra easy to copy and share the contents of the site for both the University archive and the community with whom I was working. It also made it easy to set up again, on a different server. While it is possible to do this with a database driven CMS, the process is definitely more involved.

StaceyApp describes itself as "lightweight," and this attribute is indeed a major advantage of the CMS. It start you off with  three typographically-driven templates which is a nice touch. The CMS is simple: no login screens, no admin interface, just some fiddling directly on your server. Everything is organised according to folders and .txt files, and while it does have its own (always evolving) logic and vocabulary, it's very easy to learn through an iterative process. Their documentation is clear and 

While this is changing rapidly, at the time it was really the best CMS for dealing with video. Indexhibit also handles video very well, then and now. Other CMS still seem to have much more functionality dedicated to embedding third-party content, which is likely a result of those developments being funded by said third parties. Hard to say for sure, but embedding a video in Wordpress is still a workaround that highlights a bias toward YouTube and Vimeo hosting and streaming than serving video from one's own server. 

Drupal is where I first started my adventures into CMS years ago. It's been a long time since I've personally set up a Drupal site because I feel that as a designer I plateaued long before I achieved what I wanted, and got stuck up on structural decisions that impeded the site design I was trying to acheive. So while I still recognize Drupal as possibly the most extensible of all CMS (up there with Joomla, which I've never tested), for me it remains an overwhelming endeavour. That being said, with Archinodes we use it frequently and have been able to develop some of the most amazing custom tools, especially for internal communications and file management. Drupal requires more of a commitment to the platform and overall tech savvy.

Finally: Murkutu. I thought I'd get around to testing this one out too but it's late now and Omeka is *still* uploading so I'll save my thoughts on that one for a later post, along with my assessment of Omeka. I wanted to mention Murkutu here because as a "platform for managing and sharing
 digital cultural heritage, built for indigenous communities, archives, libraries and museums" it is sure to offer a lot to the conversation and comparison. To be continued....

• Strategy: Think of what you're trying to do, who you are trying to speak to and reach, and how you want to communicate your project before choosing a CMS (each has their pros and cons)
• Delivery: Combining CMS can mean not having to choose one to do everything you need. 
• Maintenance: CMS are dynamic, and because they change rapidly, consider updating your project with a new CMS is that's what the project calls for.

* Thanks to Corina MacDonald for her 2 cents on this topic.

One the people we're always happy to hear from is Daniel Hambleton. Dan is a mathematician, founder of Mesh Consultants, and he usually has a fun side-project to show off.

Dan works in 3D modelling and he's especially interested in dynamic simulations. While static 3D modelling provides a simulation of what a product or design might look like, these dynamic simulations allow designers to observe the interaction with a design. To Dan, these simulations are "curcial to providing the right stimuli to develop a really great design." By using these simulations to arrive at new and interesting forms, and then "embeding that kind of simulation with the construction logic," Dan is able to produce what he describes as "not only a very original form, but also a rational form."

To accomplish this, Dan says the first part of his process is to understand the immovable parts of the project - i.e. to identify the hard constraints of a project - to determine "a definition of the solution space or the total design space of the project." He then likes to "abstract things as much as possible and look to the source of where a particular theory comes from." And this is one of the things that makes Dan special - in his work at Mesh Consultants, he places himself at the boundary of mathematical theory and practice. His connection to the Fields Institute puts him at the heart of current math theory. His dream project would involve an aspect of mathematical theory that is unsolved: "(My ideal project would be) one that gives rise to a question that hasn't been solved before in a theoretical nature. If you tackle that and solve it, you give back to the theory that you using but you're also solving a very practical issue."

His unique perspective, his expertise, and his curious mind are just a few of the reasons why we consider ourselves fortunate to include Dan among our collaborators. Learn more about his work at meshconsultants.ca

GNIP: What are the big concerns among digital archivists?

Perhaps the most important skill learned by working with others is the ability to listen, process what is being communicated, and sincerely engage with the possibilities offered. This is not only a sign of respect for your collaborators, but also the most efficient way to expand your own mind, create new pathways in your brain, and become more creative. We are all the product of every idea that came before, and with that comes a certainty and resistance to change. But by being dedicated to seeing through conceptual problems and design challenges within a team, you are also doing yourself the favour of earning an invaluable human skill: communication.

Time's up to renew the domain name for the online component of my PhD project, but instead of dishing out the cash, I am opting to move my site -- to "archive" it. It took me a few frustrating hours to port over the database and web contents, when really, in the end, it was just one little glitch preventing the transition from being complete: that damn invisible .htaccess file! So I've decided to share my process here, though admitedly you will have to have some sense of how all of this works to follow along. There's a lot of helpful stuff online already dealing with this, so I've simly added what I thought was missing. But I recommend checking here, here, and even here for more details, to get started. Also, the migration process is different depending on the CMS you are using, so steps might differ for Wordpress etc. (I plan to document steps for WP in the next few weeks.) These are the steps for (the old) Indexhibit CMS, using Cpanel and phpMyAdmin. 

1. Back up your site. Download the entire www folder to your desktop.
2. Export your OLD database. Go to "Custom"; Format: "SQL" and save it with a .sql extenstion.
3. Import your database to the new space. 
4. Create a new user for this NEW database and enable it.
5. Note the database info: db name, user, password and localhost.
6. Change your config file so it speaks to your NEW database using the info noted above.
7. Upload content to your new site (including the invisible .htaccess file. *You might have to duplicate the .htaccess, name it htaccess without the period to copy it over, and then remove the period once it is in its NEW place.)
8. Manual tweaks: log in to your new indexhibit site (http://yoursite.com/ndxz-studio/) and adjust all the links you entered manually within posts etc.

There are many adventures to be had in one's life. But having the support, commitment, and sensibilities of partners, gives us the confidence, responsability, and company to embark upon greater adventures still...

Félicitations to node/4 on tying the knot!

Lots of love,

node/2&3

We're very happy to be able to toot Corina MacDonald's horn here, as we add her to the Node Network. Corina is one of the most understated people you'll ever meet but don't let that fool you; she is a super tech savvy expert on all things pertaining to art databases and archives in Canada. What makes Corina so smart is that it's never just about the tech, as she says: "it's not just databases but the way knowledge is organised in many systems. There are a lot of epistemological and cultural assumptions that people aren't aware of. There are tensions between database standards and more local knowleges that don't always fit." It's this logic that led to us inviting Corina into the network.

This is why Corina is interested in projects that challenge her and especially make space for problem-solving based on the specific needs of the people she is working with - no catchall solutions. Corina reserves her time for artistic, academic, and client-based interventions into the database and archive. She continues to push the bounds of what can happen through collaboration, technology, and tech literacy.

For more than a year Archinodes has been hard at work establishing a collaborative system to manage ideas and projects. Over this time we’ve come to realize that the success of any creative system is dependent on an inclusive and varied approach. In the next few months, we will be launching a network by and for researchers, makers, and creatives who compliment the work we have set in motion...

The Archinodes network is selective but growing, focusing on developing a close-knit community of collaborators. Our goal is to work with people with a range of practices, perspectives, interests, and skills pertaining to media, technology, and communication design.

Coming shortly will be special nodes about new members of the Archinodes network...

Sometimes the best thing to do is to go outside and recharge your human battery.

Tomorrow, I am heading down to Boston to participate in Console-ing Passions 2012. As part of the 'Opening the Archives' panel, I'll be speaking on behalf of NoMorePotlucks, Canadian journal of arts and politics, which I cofounded and maintain with Marie-Claire MacPhee. 

The main takeaway of my talk will be an attempt to shift ideals of ownership to ideas of inhabitation, of the archive. In other words, to stop controlling and possessing culture to instead offer up a definition of preservation that is embodied, creative, and in the present. This is my feminist proposal, which I offer up through a media archaeology of NoMorePotlucks.

Without giving away the punchline of my talk, this will connect to how the various iterations of the project have been documented, retreived and are circulated...

I will be showcasing early iterations of the site, coded in html in 2003, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For the second iteration, created using CMS Textpattern, I will navigate the site by way of backs up copies made onto CDs in 2004 and 2005. Following this, the site shifted to CMS Drupal, which is no longer available online, but for which I've exported the database for perusal (in PDF, SQL and XML versions). Finally, for the current version, I will show the site 'live' featuring issue 22: Record.

For more information on the conference, visit the conference website or read the write up on blog.commarts.wisc.edu.
Follow along on Twitter: @CPBoston2012 and #CPBoston2012

In the social sciences, triangulating one's research is the process of incorporating two or more research methods to cross examine the data and increase the validity and credibility of the results.  Triangulation acknowledges that any investigation brings with it particular biases, but the presence of multiple approaches aims to keep these biases in check.

In the same way, we have structured our partnership around this kind of triangulation.  By requiring each of us to sign off on conceptual decisions and their representation in project documentation, we've built this cross examination into our process.  This triangulation creates an economy of ideas and it means that, as one part of the triangle, I'm not always going to get my way. Every idea I propose may not be acted upon, but hopefully the best ones will. 

So we've got theses dots. Individually, they represent our interests and help us organize what we do. Together, they make up Archinodes.

Recently we made an important change to one of our dots. Previously representing 'Video', the orange dot now represents 'Art.' A broader term, we feel it better represents the areas we like to interact with and within.

While we still love us some video, art is fundamental to Archinodes.

Across the humanities and social sciences, academic publishing is in a state of crisis. University presses are rethinking their lines and adjusting strategies in response to cuts in budgets and changes in the industry. Not only are journal subscriptions increasingly expensive, forcing universities to cut back on their acquisitions, but journals themselves are struggling to secure the unpaid labor they once relied upon. As Antonio Gramsci would remind us, moments of crisis are also moments of great opportunity. In this spirit, this panel draws from lessons learned in the past, and projects into the future the full potential of the publication, as imagined through a feminist lens.

 

This past weekend I volunteered at Drupal Camp Vancouver and I had the opportunity to spend time with some of the brightest members of the drupal community.  It got me thinking about the chicken and the egg.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan described media technologies as an extension of man–the eyeglasses extended our ability to see, the automobile our ability to travel, and the cellular telephone our capacity to recall phone numbers.  In this sense, we employ technologies so that we may do better that which we're already doing seems natural–I need to go there and I want to do it faster–and the technologies we create embody our own desires, ambitions and aspirations. 

And I was thinking about this because as I attended the sessions, caught up with friends, and mingled with attendees, I couldn't help but reflect on how drupal, as a technology, has been uniquely shaped by the people who created it–shaped by their desires, ambitions and aspirations. From the conference organization to the way people engaged each other, the same spirit present in the community seemed to be embodied in Drupal itself.

Like many others, I was drawn to Drupal not because of what it did, but because of what it proposed. Out-of-the-box, Drupal was just an ugly blog that came with a forum. But as an open-source framework, I could do whatever I wanted with it and I was only limited by my time, patience, and ability. This open nature permeated not only the technology itself, but the community that supported it. And this culture of open source was on display at the camp as developers shared their code, project managers shared their strategies, and CEOs shared their billing rates.

While I say this as a fan of Drupal and what it represents, it's not to overlook the challenges the Drupal community faces. Drupal is far from perfect and its future is constantly being negotiated. While it represents the aspirations of a community, it's also shaped by the controversies, debates, and flame wars that take place within it. But the debates take place because the community members truly care and its the willingness to entertain so many voices in the debate that inspires me. My confidence in the future of drupal doesn't lie in the introduction of new technologies, but in the people themeselves who are introducing them. 

Getting back to the chicken and the egg, the conference made me wonder: how much the community has been shaped by the open nature of Drupal and how much Drupal been shaped by the open nature its community?

Hard to say. It's probably a bit of both. 

Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors who put this event together and continue to actively shape the future of Drupal.  

For a few weeks now I've been thinking about the fundamental incentives for creative labour online; much of it is offered for free and is done voluntarily. While the web has opened up possibilities for paid work -- endless possibilities, really -- there is an unprecedented amount of time dedicated to projects of the heart. Many theories have tried to explain, if not justify, why humans would dedicate leisure time to work, but my own is the following: the network is the product. We all fundamentally want to belong to something, contribute to something, make something happen...together.

Archinodes is juggling the most amazing projects these days, including conference presentations, app development, and communication design consultation work.

After spending a few days offline and eating tacos in Los Angeles, I am now settling in to a little nook in downtown Phoenix, gearing up for ICA 2012.

I'm here to co-present on a panel entitled Fembot & Ada: Exploring Feminist Digital Publishing, with Jacquie Wallace and the amazing folks from Fembot, spearheaded by Carol Stabile at the University of Oregon:

Across the humanities and social sciences, academic publishing is in a state of crisis. University presses are rethinking their lines and adjusting strategies in response to cuts in budgets and changes in the industry. Not only are journal subscriptions increasingly expensive, forcing universities to cut back on their acquisitions, but journals themselves are struggling to secure the unpaid labor they once relied upon. As Antonio Gramsci would remind us, moments of crisis are also moments of great opportunity. In this spirit, this panel draws from lessons learned in the past, and projects into the future the full potential of the publication, as imagined through a feminist lens.

I am also particpating on a session entitled Feminist Networking, Dissemination an Activist Strategies Via New Media facilitated by Paula M Gardner, OCAD U, CANADA:

By popular request across the division, the FSD extended session will provide a forum to discuss issues of pressing concern to the Feminist Scholarship division, and central to our feminist work in the academy, as mentors, and in practices of disseminating our work into the community. The session is divided into four discussion areas. Each discussion will be initiated by a range of brief “teasers” from panelists and followed by dialogue among all session members.

Spy on #fembotica12 and #ica_fsd to follow these talks.

Archinodes meets every few months for a general meeting where we tackle issues pertaining to our site, workflows, documentation, processes and so on. In the next few weeks, we will be revealing various exciting changes we are putting in motion with the project. This time around, we've had a chance to meet up with various amazing creative people in the city, which may very well inform the most exciting upcoming Archinodes initiative...

Be sure to follow us @archinodes to keep up to date!

In the process of redefining our mandate at Archinodes, we've also made adjustments to our colour coded dots. Pink is now C=0, M=56, Y=21.66, K=0. Green is now C=55, M=0, Y=78, K=20.

Archinodes is a research design labratory. We design archives, applications, and publishing tools to help creative people tell compelling stories. We use a process-oriented approach in our design and we are selective in the projects we take on. More than anything we seek to do good work with good people. If you're thinking about hiring us, take a moment to learn more about how we work. If you think we'd work well together, get in touch with us.

Archinodes was founded by Mél Hogan, Paul Juricic, and Jeff Traynor and includes a growing network of collaborators.

Email us at info at archinodes dot com

The nodes have once again converged in Montreal for our Archinodes General Meeting. 

Topics to be discussed include: 

• 'In our Expert Opinion': Exploring the realm of the 'consultant' 
• Maintaining organization while promoting flexibility: C'est tu possible? 
• Dots and Lines: Expanding the Archinodes Identity 
• Exposing that which is often hidden: How transparent can we make this whole process thing? 
• Is twelve enough?: How many warm Fairmont bagels can one human eat in a single sitting? 

We'll be together in Montreal for a couple of weeks so if you wanna get together for a coffee or Gros 50, please drop us a line.

Tonight I participated in the Intro to PHP Workshop offered for free by Montreal Girl Geeks. More than 130 women registered and close to 90 showed up - an amazing sight! It was an interesting commentary on feminism: a woman-led workshop for women, but for which all the assistants (and hence those who actually know how to code) were men (save for @nanananini). I would really like to know why those guys volunteered (how they see women coders as beneficial to society) and how they perceive the discrepancies (as potentially detrimental to society). But of even greater interest was why there were so many women present... I'm not sure it means anything is really changing, but it was nice to witness it and be part of the momentum.

At the start of the night, everyone got a chance to quickly chat with their neighbours and get a sense of where everyone is coming from and why they are at a PHP workshop -- interestingly, nobody I met was a self-defined coder or even worked in the tech sector. Of the two women at my table, one was a community organiser; she said she was there to "just generally understand the world better." The other had just finished a computer science degree, which she described as the "theory behind the code" (did I do the wrong degree?? this sounds awesome!!!) Both women (who had never met each other before) had boyfriends working at UbiSoft. Funny.

For me the other interest in PHP is in thinking about how the language got written, how the process of writing a language for computers works, how variables are decided upon, how code speaks to machines, and so on. I'm fascinated by the weirdness of code -- that humans invented a language we can't read and that we've invented machines who can read code better than us -- but PHP is really pretty to look at, I'll give it that much.

Anyway, all this inspired me to also think about the relationship of my job, graphic design, to code. Why should graphic designers know code?

I work with coders and programmers and wireframers and information architects, but my job as the graphic designer is to breathe life into our work, make it feel intuitive to the user, and at its best, erase all traces of the design in and of itself to leave nothing but experience. It is to project a certain emotion and create the desired connection. That said, the way we work at Archinodes, is that there is very little distinction between functionality and form. We always keep these two in conversation. As a team, we make decisions together, and function and form are carefully crafted in unison, and meticulously documented. So for me this has meant that I need to acquire and maintain more than rudimentary coding skills to mock up websites and apps. In other words, what I learn about the back end of databases, social media, and content management systems, changes the way I conceptualise, draft, and produce the 'design' component.

Internal Memo

From: archinodes
To: node/2
CC: node/3, node/4
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2012
Subject: Congratulations

Archinodes would like to acknowledge node/2's successful defence of her PHD dissertation. We offer our sincere congratulations on this momentous occasion. Your hard work, discipline and creativity continues to be an inspiration to your fellow nodes.

In her talk 'The Ways We Read and Write Now,' Rita Raley of UCSB uses various examples of SMS-based installations to make interesting points about how our relationship to écriture (writing, typing and so on) has been transformed, as highlighted by public and social art interventions. More precisely, Raley's work is on large public screens or displays that showcase text-based messages sent from largely random passers-by, as intentional art intervention rather than to commercial ends. In these art installations, text messages are pooled and showcased in real-time on a monitor for the public to see and become part of the city's broadcast points (See: Wi Journal).

Cityspeak uses their lab's custom Java library, NextText to display the text on a public screen:

This treatment consists of visually animating the text in such a way as to semantically reflect certain characteristics about the user’s input method and the local environment. The text is displayed in three levels. New messages fade quickly into the foreground, in a large font size. The background is composed of text from previous messages, scrolling right-to-left and upward. As the text transitions from being a new message in the foreground to becoming part of the message history in the background, it goes through the ’pixel eater’ in the lower-right corner. The pixel eater pulls new messages into it, creating a chaotic mass of jostling pixels. (Ref: Cityspeak)

Of special interest to me was Raley's use of the local (Montréal) OBX Lab Citypeak project, as one example of the kinds of social "ephemeral graffiti" Raley theorizes. Raley's work seems really focused not on the writing itself but on the practice(s) these kinds of social media interaction enable, including the boundaries of the form: real-time, live, eventful, refreshed, impermanent, not likely to return, and so on. These boundaries are what make the projects she investigates unlike Twitter, or graffiti, for example.

A really interesting moment of the talk occurred during the question period, when someone asked about the perceived anonymity of (and by) contributors, when in fact their personal data was being collected, simply by virtue of participants using their cell phones to submit work (which is necessarily attached to a phone number and thus traceable to a person). Raley's previous work is on surveillance so she was in a good position to address such issues, but it does (or should) remind us how something seeming as innocuous as participating in a social art project means once again surrendering personal data.

As part of the Mobile Media Lab at Concordia University, I recently attended a talk by Antoni Abad, an artist from Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.

His work is parked at megafone.net, but the site itself is a mere fraction of Abad's intervention and social impact. Abad left his practice as a sculptor in favour of a kind of social media art intervention practice.

Since the early 2000s -- way before cell phones were cool or accessible to the general public in many places -- Abad used the device, which he deemed the perfect broadcasting machine, something that you can hide and put in your pocket, to give voice to individuals on the fringes of society or from within diasporic communities. Using mobile phones, taxi drivers in Mexico city, Motoboys in São Paulo, sex workers in Madrid, people with limited mobility in Geneva, etc., have been able to conceive of and express an alternate reality, often a counterpoint to the mainstream media which tends to depict fringe groups unfavourably, if represented at all. The cell phone allows people to record, share, and broadcast their point of view.

My particular fascination with this project is that it identifies a communication problem first, and relies on technology as solution -- there's no gimmick, no technofetishism. For more on this, check out his conversation with Kim Sawchuk at Wi: Journal of Mobile Media. Well worth a read if your're curious about issues of intensity and affective involvement, ethics, collaboration, ownership, etc., in these ongoing interventions.

*Archinodes and the Mobile Media Lab are currently collaborating on the Audio-Mobile App project.

By now we're all familiar with the concept of the "like" button. Many social networks have incorporated this simplified feedback tool into their user experiences. It provides users with a simple form of agency and in turn an effective form of feedback. Facebook has very effectively used 'liked' data to help foster social connections and refine user profiling. But in its basic form, to 'like' content is to simply say, 'I like this'. It promotes positive feedback by omitting the negative - the 'dislike' button is much less ubiquitous.

So could the liking of content be an effective tool outside of social networks? What happens if we were to say incorporate 'liking' into a design process?

“The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.”

William Deresiewicz - The End of Solitude

NMP is a regular volunteer side-project for me at Archinodes.

At midnight, NMP launched its 20th issue: the theme for March-April is Witness.

Each two month we bring forth a web publication and later make the contents available through print-on-demand. The print issue is only available for purchase directly from the printer, but we do send a copy each 2 months to Library Archives Canada for safeguarding. We are pretty sure that NMP is Canada's first and only p-o-d arts journal to be deposited at LAC.

NMP20, Witness features:

 
"Mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, MP3 players, and tablet computers such as the iPad) represent new opportunities in terms of ubiquitous field recording and audio production potential as they are ready-to-hand while on the move. These new opportunities involve not only creative dimensions, they also allow for tactical explorations of the political, technological and cultural economies in which mobile media technologies are embedded and continuously (re)defined."
 
Audio-Mobile is a research project being developed by Concordia University's Department of Communication Studies that Archinodes is excited to be a part of. Join Owen Chapman at Montreal's Oboro on February 17th, 2012 for a workshop on the Audio-Mobile project. Details HERE.

We have just handed in the files to our client, Life Stories Montreal, and are eagerly awaiting their feedback. We designed a series of profile posters to reflect the diversity of participants invited to share their 'life stories' at the Rencontres 2012 conference taking place in March 2012 in Montreal. The event is the culmination of a seven year grant, which has produced a number of incredible resources addressing the experiences of people displaced by war and genocide, by and for refugees and immigrants to Canada. Will write more with a report on how the posters look in the metro stations!

 
Archinodes recently began work on an exciting location based mobile app and website project for a client. The initial research and discovery phase of the project has got us thinking about the relationship between a mobile application and an associated website. Nowadays there are several examples of location based application all but abandoning an associated webspace and keeping all features on the mobile application itself. Instagr.am is one of the most visible example of a popular mobile app with location based features seemingly abandoning an online version of its service. And while this is in many ways keeping with general trends around mobile development, such tendencies seem to overlook the potential of developing unique feature sets that share content but use them in ways that make best use of each platform. In the case of instagr.am, the absence of web interface has resulted in the growth of third party sites attempting to provide users services the app maker has deemed seemingly unnecessary. Perhaps this is strategic on Instagr.am’s part to allow these third party sites to guide this development allowing them to then choose one as an investment target (see tweetie), but it seems like a missed opportunity to have done something neat. 
 
This is all to say that while a mobile application may contain a feature-set that demands it to be closely tied to a mobile device, abandoning an associated web-based component risks missing opportunities to encourage a diversity of participation. From a development perspective, an online companion to an app provides an opportunity to reenforce the overall spirit of a project while embarking on a challenge of flexible creative development. 

1st Place: Foursquare
With just under 500 checkins, I checked in somewhere more than once a day on average. In practice, I had isolated bursts of frequent checkins and ongoing conversations with friends in the comments. While foursquare gives its users the ability to share their location with the world, I ended up using it to communicate specifically with a small circle of friends who were using the application in a similar way. I found myself rejecting friend requests and trimming my contacts down to a small list of people I actually cared about. It provided a means to passively communicate with people I cared about in real time - like text messaging without expecting a reply. And because the group was small and communication was meaningful, I ended up having the most fun on Foursquare this year.

2nd Place: Path
Path launched in November of 2010 as a Personal Network with a simple but unique constraint given to their users: you can only have 50 friends. Path chose the limit based on the research of Robin Dunbar, an Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, who suggested that the human brain can sustain a maximum of 150 social relationships at any given time (Path later increased this limit to 150). Path was intended to be a private social network and while this friend limit ruled out any chance for fame that other social networks could provide, it created opportunities for more intimate communication. And it was also beautiful. The first version of the application showed a care for detail not present in most popular applications and the update for Path 2 continued to raise the bar for application interface design. The user interface made using the application fun. And Path is now branding itself as a Smart Journal instead of a social network, and rightly so. With just under 200 moment shared, Path came in a strong second place, losing out to Foursquare only because my Blackberry friends who couldn't use it.

3rd Place: Instagram
Instagram is fun, plain and simple. Professional photographers may despise it for allowing any hipster with an iPhone to feel like they've bypassed art school, but Instagram isn't putting any photographers out of work. The application is easy to use and the photos are cute. With just over 100 photos, I wasn't as prolific as many of my friends, but Instagram probably made me take more photos than ever before. And more than anything I enjoyed the artistic intrusion into my daily life,

Honorable Mention: Fantasy Hockey
My first entry into the world of Fantasy sports was the 2006-2007 season when I was invited to join a league that had already been in place for some time. It didn't go very well. I was "banned for life" from the league for failing to participate. Four years later, that same commissioner graciously let me back into the league on a probationary membership as a team co-manager and after earning my way back into the league and learning that, like many things in life, you get what you put in, I was given my own team this year. Fantasy Sports aren't typically included under the banner of social media, but it's a very social experience with a small group of people and I end up spend more time online there than I do on Twitter and Facebook combined.

Speaking of those other big social networks...

On Twitter, I've been pathetic - 20 tweets in 2011. Here's why.

On Facebook, I've been entirely absent. A year and half ago, I gave up on Facebook. I updated my privacy settings and posted a note on my profile page telling visitors they were better off emailing me. Aside for a few inconsequential appearances and periodically trolling the site to catch up on the lives of old friends, I stopped using facebook. And I don't miss it very much. It's kinda like a shopping mall, I hate being there but still end up having to go a few times a year.

On LinkedIn ...I ... ....yawn ...sorry, I drifted off for a moment there....

On Google+, like many people, I have an account, but I really don't care about it yet. I probably should, but don't yet feel the need to occupy a new space just because it exists. For now, I'm willing to wait until I have a good reason to be there and I haven't found that reason so far. Google will eventually find a way to get their hands on all of my personal information, so I don't feel any need to rush and give it to them.

On Diaspora, I was excited when I first heard about it and had such high hopes, but then I had to wait a year for my invitation, during which period Google+ came out (with a surprising similar design) and began to suffer from a social media fatigue. I still want Diaspora to succeed. Fingers crossed...

Conclusion
Looking back at my last year online, there's a notable inward trend in my social media activity. I've gravitated towards social networks with smaller audiences and shunned interacting in where places that afforded the greatest potential for popularity. I enjoyed social media in 2011, but derived most of my enjoyment from the meaningful communication that took place private networks. Perhaps 2012 will be the year of the social network built for two.

We are in the midst of designing an important educational toolkit including activities, media examples, evaluations guides, etc. The main purpose of this toolkit is to serve high school teachers by providing them with tools to discuss stories of people displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations, now living in Montréal.

Designing this toolkit has proven to be challenging (and we like challenges) on a few fronts. First off, as a consideration of the project's limited budget, we have chosen to use only two colours (black and blue) for the layout (instead of four). This has been especially interesting for working out the style of the images, opting for a largely abstract and shadow intensive aesthetic. It works. Secondly, we have accounted for the use of the document: teachers need to photocopy documents to make copies for their students. This has meant all text is highly legible both on screen and on print, and especially with low resolution copies. However, the kit has to also be fully functional online, and as such, we decided on a standard format, 11 x 8.5 inches landscape, which allows for easy photocopying as well as the best format for reading on a computer screen. Hyperlinks are also clickable in the PDF version online.

The total kit will consist of more than 200 pages and is due out early 2012. We will report back will full details of the launch.

We've been working on a logo, which has required I sketch trees. Plum trees and cherry blossoms. Trees of life, healthy trees. While we're in the midst of creating this logo, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on and share with you the various steps involved.

Of course the 'process' begins the moments a client says they think they might need a logo. BOOM. Immediately the mind rolladexes through every known reference, each connotation, sorting clichés from perfect, simple, ideas. OK, so sometimes it's not that immediate. Sometimes it requires flipping through books, taking a walk, looking around, cooking, sleeping, and so on. So I can't say for sure where the process begins, or if and when it is on 'pause'... or if it ever really ends.

Anyway. I started the design process for this logo by walking around. I was in Oregon at the time, so I could think of no better place to think like a tree. I took photos of trees -- any kind -- from different angles, to get a feel of branches, flower or fruit, and leaves. After that, I Google-searched images. Trees come in all kinds so we had to narrow down our pool to trees that were especially relevant. West Coast trees. Trees of life. Happy trees. Based on these two kinds of images -- photos I'd taken for angles and points of view and photos used for research -- I could start bringing pencil to paper. I sketched trees -- close up and in full -- borrowing elements from various photos that had components I needed to create this iconic logo. Once I had a something drafted, I took a photo with my iPod Touch, uploaded it using Dropbox, retrieved it on my laptop, dragged it into Illustrator, and traced it, to transform the sketch into a resolution-less vector-based image. And there it was, a curved prune tree, leaning in the wind, flexible and flowing.

After recently expanding their distribution nationally, our friends at SNAP! Magazine have been getting more attention and it was time to revisit their artist galleries. Due to limited resources and a time crunch, we needed a way to quickly and easily build out the functionality. But it also needed to look nice.

One of the easiest ways to get a head start on development is to use a contributed module or existing codebase as your starting point. The volume of contributed modules is one of things that makes Drupal so wonderful. But the ubiquity of 'plug-and-play' functionality comes with a curious side effect: once a developer realizes they can just switch on a feature and their clients are happy, everything starts to look the same.

A common sighting online is the popular Lightbox2 image overlay: an image appears, expands vertically and horizontally over a semi-transparent background, scaled to fit the browser window. It's a great feature for image galleries, but all too often it's just turned on with the default settings and left as is. Because we were working with an old Drupal 5 site and we knew this feature would work well, we wanted to use it. But we needed it to look good. In this case, SNAP! wanted a stripped down, simple gallery that reflects their clean aesthetic.

It turns out that it doesn't take much to spruce up (or strip down) your gallery with a some basic configuration changes and few lines of CSS. After installing the Lightbox2 module, we got rid of the animation, disabled the zoom, removed the default close link ("X"), hid the slideshow pager, turned off the download link, disabled the image details stuff, and made the background white without any transparency. The result: a simple, clean, easy-to-use Lightbox2 gallery that doesn't look like every other Lightbox2 gallery out there. Click a thumbnail and you just get the full sized imaged, centred on a solid white background; click again and you're back in the gallery. Nice. Easy.

Open source software projects are shaped by their contributed modular features and I encourage developers to consider using them whenever they can. But these modules are often built to best accomodate as many use-cases as possible and will often include features you may not need to use. If you don't need the feature, turn it off.

Sometimes less is more, more or less.

Archinodes is pleased to announce that we have completed the english version of Mapping Memories: a 160-page, full colour, perfect bound book!

October 12th, 2011, there will be a book launch in Montreal for Mapping Memories, an educational book to be integrated into school curriculums and community projects addressing refugee youth experiences. Their objective is to produce creative work that will have an impact on policy, art, education and on the lives of the youth involved. For more information about the book or launch, please contact Mapping Memories.

You should take the work while you can get it. The economy is bad; you should save for a rainy day. You never know what kind of work is going to come out of this. This will look great in your portfolio.

Over the course of my career, I've done a lot of work for free. Sometimes it's a friend in need. Sometimes it's an artist or a cause in which I believe and want to help along. Sometimes it just sounds like fun. And most of the time, it ends up being more work than I expect. For the most part, that's okay. At Archinodes, we've always had at least one pro bono job on the go and believe it's an important part of the work we do. It allows us to give back in a tangible way and affords us the opportunity to experiment with new technologies and design approaches. But we've also learned to put limits on what we can provide. With both paid and pro bono work, our tendency is always to provide as much as we can. In the past, this has resulted in projects rapidly swelling beyond the estimated scope. There's always going to be a few more features that could be implemented. As such, we've had to learn how to say no.

When presented with a estimate, clients often have difficulty gauging how the number of hours corresponds to the actual delivered product and sometimes this can be difficult to explain. Parkinson's Law states that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," so it seems reasonable that clients would want to an estimate based on deliverables instead of hours. Hours can disappear quickly. But we don't do our work in a vacuum and more often than not the client's engagement and responsiveness serves to determine the expediency of the project's completion.

So we've learned that in order to managed these contracts, we need to be better communicators than our clients. We need to be able to communicate when projects are approaching the limits of the scope estimate. We need to keep our clients, both paying and pro bono, informed of the progress. And sometimes we need to be able to say no.

Creative people hate paperwork.

NMP presented at “We Demand” History/Sex/Activism in Canada. As part of the Archives, Museums, and Queer Collections panel, we presented a paper entitled Taking the Archives Down with Us, in which we talked about the archival potential of NMP. NMP is an archive of people, or as we've said in our slogan from the beginning, NMP showcases portraits of proclivities. Feedback from the conference was incredible and we look forward to beginning new collaborations and continuing the ones well under way. We are getting ready to launch the 17th issue, Sept 1, 2011, from Vancouver...

Archinodes is a strategic media making agency.

Meet us in Vancouver to celebrate our launch. 

Email us for direction to the super secret party.

Stopped by the Apple Store to try out the Archinodes website on a couple of devices and with the new Lion osx - for the most part things are looking great. The site works really nicely with that ipad thing and the image grid looks pretty sweet. Only issue seems to be geting the Views Infinite Scroll module to kick in when you scroll down - same issue on the iphone. While it does kick in with some prodding, it's nowhere near as useful as it would need to be. This glitch will likely be addressed in future updates to the module and as more development for Drupal7 takes place there will likely be other options out there soon. At this point having the infinite scroll feature working on mobile devices isn't a major issue as we anticipate building a mobile version of the site which will likely use a completely different design. As for using the site on the Lion's version of Safari, it's fun. Loving the swipe gesture for navigating back and forth between pages and also can't help but feel that the invisible scroll bar will become the norm on other OS. As a side note - the Apple Store is kinda a horrible place.

Coming off our time in Montreal where working in the same room was so good, being once again spread out across the country finds us having to navigate through work via the technology. While it's common to nowadays work with colleagues and clients via Skype, Facetime or even 'hang out' Google style, there's nothing quite like sharing the same space to work on projects. Don't get me wrong, the the fact I can skype from my iphone and even collaborate on documents online in real-time is amazing, but there's still those intangibles of personal interaction that just can't be transferred in Mbps. This preference to communicate in person does create a bit of a paradox considering that I'm largely in the business of mediating communication. And maybe this is where a combination of age and experience comes in handy. We may have grown up on really bad food and even worse tv, but we knew of a life before the internet.

Making our business cards we realised we wanted to apply the "process concept," without overdoing it. Overdoing it would have been to create a dot pattern to match each of our personalities. Bad idea. New idea is better. To be continued.

A week of intense work at the Archinodes Montreal HQ has been a lot of fun and got us really excited about things. Starting the process of re-establishing Archinodes and redesigning the website has been a cathartic process. While there's still a ton of work to be done, but it's work that we're all eager to get to. We feel that some great ideas and energy has come out of this week - world domination seems well within reach.

Achinodes talks a lot about process. This is because we think it's really important. In fact, we think process is so important that we've come to treat the documentation of its trajectory as a fundamental focus of how we work.

There is quite literally a line (it's a yellow line) that is drawn though our work. It points to where we've been, where we are and where we're going. Our projects are documented as a collection of needs, challenges, timelines, concepts and ideas. This methodology allows for effective communication and transparency among project stakeholders and allows us to trace the origins of an idea, distinguish realities from possibilities, and show the trajectory of a project from start to finish and beyond. 

In the process of branding ourselves, Archinodes created a text logo based on the Udo font, using a dotted colour scheme to organise content according to the following categories: process, web, print, social, mobile, video, and research. These categories are used to make sense of our overall workflow: from inspiration to production to implementation to measuring impact. We've adapted the logo for social media uses: Twitter, Instagram, etc. For social media, we have attributed the yellow, green and purple dots, highlighting process, social and research.

DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots | DOTS | dots |

While exploring the idea of including our ‘about page’ and bios within the grid/blog of the site has made us feel like we should really build the site around the nodes - kinda reverse engineering of site. We also feel that it both appropriately represents the individual blog posts (site nodes) and it gives some props to our name and history with Drupal CMS.

An experimental project of sorts created by Jeff and I for the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver, Artifact2 was our effort to create a social media scrapbook of what it was like living in this city that was hosting this big global event. In the period leading up to the games there was excitement and uncertainty about how social media would be represented and used during the games - this was after all touted as being the first true test of social media during an Olympics. Initiatives by both True North Media House and W2 (initially a joint effort between the two) were created to be hubs of social media during the games.  At the time Jeff and I had been talking through a few projects related to mapping and social media and developed Artifact2 on a very limited timeframe (two weeks before the games) in an attempt to put a few of these concepts into action.  
The technical premise of the project was to create a scrapbook of social media content for each day of the games.  It was designed to suck in favourited content from a select number of social networks feeds and include our own first had account. The result, it was hoped, would be that one could flip through the days of the games and get a sense of what was going on a specific day based on accounts from the social network community along with our own. In many ways it was an effort to somehow preserve “real-time moments” as a means determining their value in representing experience over time.
While limited time and a few technological barriers prevented the project from fully functioning as was intended, it was no doubt a valuable exercise which continues to inform many of our design and ux ideas. You can clearly see where we got some of the concepts included in the achinodes.com redesign.

While Archinodes works out of both Vancouver and Montreal, Montreal holds significance for us because it’s where we all met. It was during our mutual pursuits of grad studies at Concodia University a few years back that we got to know each other. It was only after shooting some hoops that we began to work together creatively. This past June the three of us decided to meet up in Montreal to both work in the same space for a change and also discuss the future of Archinodes. I think we each see the tremendous opportunity that our combined interests and energy can provide us. It's interesting how one pursuit can lead one down different and unexpected paths - how shootin' some hoops help build Archinodes.

One of the great things about building projects for Archinodes is the variety of projects that we get to work on. While on the surface there may be types of projects that we might tend to gravitate towards more than others, different projects provide different challenges and learning experiences. While the design and site architecture for William White's site was pretty straight-forward, content management was the challenge of this project. As Chairman of the Economic Development and Review Committee (EDRC) at the OECD in Paris, William White has written - and been written about - extensively in his career. In creating an archive for these resources, that was both easy to contribute to and equally easy to navigate, we learned a ton about the value of accessibility and scope in building a site.

VIDEO CACHE was an event held at Groupe intervention video as part of my doctoral research creation. Along with the public event, I created a month-long online showcase of the works, allowing different contexts for these videos. The works were chosen by SAW Video Director Penny McCann and were part of the now defunct Mediatheque project. The Mediatheque back end server crashed in 2009 and they had no back up of their database. So selecting a CMS was an important part of my research process. I reflected on the loss of the database and chose a CMS that avoided the database. To do this, I created an online showcase using StaceyApp, from which videos were stored and streamed from my wayward.ca server (rather than a third party site like Vimeo or YouTube). I also wanted to be able to easily transfer the exhibit: self-contained and easily set up again which would allow SAW Video to archive it. Secondly, I was searching for the most efficient way to host an online event for one month, which could easily be deactivated, without being lost or links broken.

Download the catalogue here, designed by Archinodes.

This is an interview Corina MacDonald did with me about my research-creation project VIDEO CACHE, for Artengine.ca VIDEO CACHE took place on November 24, 2010 at Groupe intervention video. It was a public screening of ten works selected by Penny McCann from the SAW Video Mediatheque collection. The Mediatheque is Canada’s first large-scale attempt to use the web as a ‘living archive’ –its server crashed in 2009 and the project has been offline since. VIDEO CACHE was also a month-long online exhibit showcasing these ten works, carefully documented and recontextualised for the web. The documentation for VIDEO CACHE remains online, and the event catalogue is available via print-on-demand.

This is the event catalogue designed for VIDEO CACHE. It's based on the interlaced aesthetic of video.

Download the catalogue here, designed by Archinodes.

A lot of my 'spare time' is spent collecting things online. I collect Google suggestions. I collect responses to craiglist ads. And I collect comments from blogs, newspapers, and ugc sites, on various topics like wikileaks, sampling, and 2012.
My collection process is simple: I copy & paste comments into Powerpoint and export the PDF for safekeeping, and then make virtual books using Issuu for people to flip through. But a friend of mine convinced me to carry over this concept into a video - that way more people could watch it, together. Turns out that was a good idea: FIFA picked it up--my video based on a YouTube comment collection about 2012 predictions--and screened it last winter. This piece is also going to be shown at WNDX :: Winnipeg’s Festival of Film and Video Art in October. Score.

Expire was a 10 day installation at Fonderie Darling in Montreal, by artist Nancy Tobin. For this, I did the photography which consisted of a shadow silhouette of the artist on a one-legged stool, next to Butterfly speakers. The shadow effect invokes the presence demanded of the installation. The font is a Public Domain font called "Blooming Grove" that I downloaded from dafont. This font requires particular attention to tracking and kerning, but once set right, it's a beautiful thing. We also used this font for the gallery installation wall, which you can get a glimpse of on node/19.

For issue 1 of Media Fields Journal, I conducted an interview with Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot and Su-Ying Lee, a collective of cultural producers working in contemporary art under the moniker MUSE. MUSE is a collaborative project that places experimental strategies at the forefront of their creative process and practice, which stems from over ten years of combined experience as artists, curators, programmers, educators, and administrators. MUSE’s launch of Under New Management’s Video Rental Store in Toronto, Canada from August 2-15, 2010, is part of a larger project that hybridizes exhibition-based practices and experiential methods examining the relationship between art and its vast milieu.

When I was began working on the Life Stories Montreal project with the Department of Oral History and Storytelling at Concordia University, my plan was to build a podcasting platform. Sometimes, it's better not to reinvent the wheel. Instead, through a partnership with NFB's CitizenShift site, we were able to host and distribute the video and audio displayed on the site. This not only saved on development costs, but exposed the Life Stories content to NFB's audience and distribution network. Partnerships are a good thing.

The Wooden Lightbox was a project put on at Concordia University by the Mobile Media Gallery, with Alex Mackenzie, Zoë Constantinides, Kim Sawchuk, and Marie-Hélène Lemaire. Together, we set up an Indexhibit website and generated a poster for the event, featured here. Both were in line with the lightbox feel, and the collage aesthetic of Mackenzie.

Calling the Voice-O-Graph was a musical project by Owen Chapman, an DJ, producer and academic who sometimes goes by the moniker O-Positive. Chapman released his music for free online with one small request: in order to get a free track, you had to leave a comment. It was a fun project for us to work on, both in developing the concept and finding a way to make it happen, but we were so focused on the concept itself that we ended up with a big problem in our blindspot: spam. In an effort to encourage participation, we created an environment that was susceptible to and targeted by spammers. And while the idea of requiring a comment for free music seemed good at the time, it created a problem: we were valuing the quantity of comments over the quality of comments. Lesson learned: don't be a bully and try to force the user's hand - just be thankful for the comments you get. After all, didn't someone's mom once say "if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all." callingthevoiceograph.net

Digitally distributed music using samples from recordings preserved on vinyl records demands a website design that samples real world textures. In this case we used manipulated scans of original documents to create the background imagery for the site, giving it tactile aesthetic. callingthevoiceograph.net

We are currently entering the final phase of the Mapping Memories book design... a process that was as intense as it was rewarding. I think we all learned a lot by taking on this project with such a quick turn around. The expected launch date is September 2011. The main points to remember in doing a book projects are: make sure your text is as close to final as humanly possible before importing into InDesign--I love InDesign but it's not copy editing software. Plus, you'll want a clean copy of your final text in another format. For text, it's important to create paragraph style sheets to make changes that apply across the document. This is why you need to layout the entire book conceptually first, and then come up with an appropriate design for each type of text--highlight boxes, main text, title, author names, quotes, and so on. Prep images--especially for darker skin tones--carefully. The rule is to reduce the midtones by 10% but each printer has their own colour intensity and so it is absolutely necessary to make a few tests before signing off. Colours are also highly unpredictable, from monitor to print, it barely matches up. Finally, it's important to get your book, promo materials, DVD, website, etc. to all follow the same design strategy--which is easier said than done--and requires a lot of time for re/vision and adaptation. There you have it - lessons learned. In sum, changes you have made are more expensive than changes you take on yourself–so again, it's important to let clients know that details have to be sorted as much as possible before it gets to the designer, and before it gets to the printer.

Back in early 2005, a plucky little start-up company called YouTube launched their video sharing service. Originally conceived as a video dating service, their easy upload process and flash video player provided an easy way to get video up on the web. Prior to flash, there were competing video formats and files uploaded to the web typically required browser plugins to work. But because of the high penetration of flash support in modern web browsers, the videos worked everywhere. And more importantly, they could easily be put anywhere on the web by copy and pasting the embed code YouTube provided. This had much to do with YouTube's success, as the popularity of MySpace was exploding and by using embedded videos from YouTube, people with no experience managing a website could suddenly upload a video and have it appear on their page. By 2006, video was everywhere. Today, YouTube's dominance of the online video market is obvious and in a sense it's become the de facto standard for sharing and consuming video on the web. But there are still many other services available. While their features are often quite similar, their communities are remarkably different. Vimeo's early entry into HD video cultivated a community of indie filmmakers and camera nerds. By providing robust file conversion features and a revenue sharing program, Blip.tv built a community of dedicated video podcasters and citizen journalists. Viddler and Brightcove have built tools that appeal to advertisers and brand promoters. And niche services have emerged around content genres, such as aspiring comedians finding themselves a home and chance to go viral on sites like Funny or Die and Crackle. For the Mapping Memories project, we decided to use Blip.tv because of the ease with which it allowed us to export multiple video file formats. There's likely a video solution for everyone, it's just a matter of choosing the service and community that will best serve your content. Of course, that's as long as your not too concerned with sharing some of your rights to the content with the hosting provider. But that's another topic for another post...

This was a very large banner made for a sex workers' march. The banner was hot red with white silhouette cutout and b/w text. The goal was to have something punchy and simple - and I guess that worked because it looks good even as a photo of a photo in a newspaper!

This was one of the best design experiences, ever. I worked with (dream client) Owen Chapman (DJ O+) - he gave me total artistic freedom for concept and visuals of his album covers. I used water paint, a scanner, and ink from a ball point pen. This is a 6-sided folded cardboard CD container. This is a limited edition CD and a collector's item.

NMP participated in a round table discussion on e-publishing at the amazing Htmlles Festival, hosted by Studio XX, moderated by Sophie Le-Phat Ho, and featuring: Caroline Kelley thirdspace Corina MacDonald Vague Terrain Dina Vescio .dpi Mél Hogan, M-C MacPhee NOMOREPOTLUCKS Paule Mackrous magazine électronique du CIAC

Design is communication. Design is colour. Design is potential. Design is space. Design is texture. Design is possibility. Design is experience. Design is new. Design is purpose. Design is shape. Design is future. Design is immediate. Design is thrilling. Design is essential. Design is research. Design is anticipation. Design is interaction. Design is creation. Design is ideas. Design is flow. Design is language. Design is use. Design is contrast. Design is unity. Design is organisation. Design is dominance. Design is form. Design is function. Design is rules. Design is vision. Design is attention. Design is utilitarian. Design is order. Design is grid. Design is rhythm. Design is timeless. Design is affect. Design is fun.

This is one of the first Drupal projects we took on. It has evolved into a bright, clean-cut, and punchy online magazine, matching the style of its beautifully crafted print issues. SNAP! is a free and independent quarterly magazine dedicated to art, fashion and culture in Canada.

I first encountered Drupal in mid-2006 when I was a student struggling to navigate the waters of grad school. I had entered the program with the intention of studying online collaborative tools (vague, I know), but had never actually built a website myself. At a dinner party that fall in New York, I met David Kraftsow, a brilliant programmer and interactive designer (who , among many other interesting projects, created first person tetris). After bumbling my way through an amorphous explanation of what I hoped to study, he encouraged me to take a look at Drupal, an open-source content management system that had been recently used to power the Howard Dean campaign.

At the same time, Liz Miller, one of my professors, was looking to have a website built for one of her many projects. When she approached me, I didn't know how to actually build a site, but I knew enough to say she should check out Drupal. That was enough for Liz and it turns out she was willing to pay for it to do it for her - bonus. After a few months of getting my head around Drupal, getting lost in the community forums, learning the language and logic of the CMS, and generally banging my head against my desk in frustration, we launched www.documentaryconcordia.org. It wasn't pretty. In fact, the first iteration was downright ugly. But it was my first chance to get my hands dirty and my first exposure to this fascinating Drupal community that seemed to share the same values of openness and cooperation as I did. And for the first time since returning to school, I felt like had actually built something. That first site was likely seen by very few people, but it was a start. And I'm forever grateful to Dave for planting the seed in my head and to Liz for taking a chance on me.

"I don't know anyone who learns faster or is so good at so many things. I wake up happy knowing I work with this guy." - Mél 

"The man has mad Drupal skills and a knowledge of early hiphop that is of Nardwarian proportions. Maintains Archinodes' balance between creativity and functionality. Will sweep your mom off her feet - all around great guy." - Paul 

"Jeff feels bad that he hasn't spoken to you in a while, but please know that you're in his thoughts and he's probably feeling guilty for not being in touch." - Jeff

"She's a fearless designer and a real live person. We know we've stumbled upon something great when Mélanodes gets excited - I love it when she gets excited. She's kind, smart and creative - oh yeah, and she got a wicked uppercut." - Paul

"In addition to being an academic, a boxer, and a publisher, MH has also put over 80 species of birds on things over the course of her design career." - Jeff

"Wants to create your logo, layout your interface, design you a book cover, conference program, event catalogue, and typeset your business cards... and maybe help you with your outfit, too."- Mél