Transliteracy Research Group

Diagramming transliterate spaces

I've just had a great conversation with Toby Moores, Visiting Professor at the IOCT and CEO of Sleepydog, makers of the Buzz quiz game. We were talking about transliterate spaces - what they are like, and how they change. This reminded me that way back in 2002/3 at trAce I tried to map the relationship of traditional writing to new media writing. With Simon Mills' help I came up with this:

But things have changed since then, and my conversation with Toby today has helped me understand how.

New Transliteracy GoogleGroup

There's now a GoogleGroup to discuss transliteracy and plan future events. Read or sign up here.

Transliteracy Unconference - A Personal Reflection

Howard Rheingold kicked things off for us and then we just had to decide what we wanted to spend the rest of the day talking about. The day was divided into three sessions and each session had four groups. We could flit between groups and attend the various discussions but I found myself staying with each group for the duration of the session. That way, as

Dave noted, we could really develop our ideas.

Mass Collaboration Event

I was part of the herd that went to hear Howard Rheingold and Mark Earls speak about collaboration.

Howard began with some tales of collaboration, or rather lack of: politics is about "your side winning," and biology is war...

Web 2.0, deep hippiness, and joyful transliteracy

Last week I went to two very different conferences - what joyful transliteracy! First, Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 at York on Wednesday and Thursday, where Bruce Mason and I presented some early findings from our folksonomy project Tags Networks Narrative. Keynote speaker Charles Leadbeater presented an upbeat history of the early development of Web 2.0 ideas via early West Coast radical communities such as the Well and the Homebrew computer club etc. Then Andrew Keen berated the very same communities as they are embodied today in Web 2.0 culture by individuals like Tim O'Reilly et al. Keen scorned their 'hippy' ideologies - although my own sense of personhood was destroyed during question-time when I laid claim to my ageing hippiness only to be informed by him that I 'don't look like a hippy'. Who am I then? My ego is shattered. Anyway, for two days I listened to social scientists discuss the principles of Web 2.0 from various levels of familiarity, and I had a good time. Then I spent Friday and Saturday at the Lapidus conference on creative writing, health and well-being - a very different kettle of fish indeed, and much pervaded by the kind of hippiness that so upsets Keen. I participated in two writing workshops - one where we chose a piece of cloth to write about our childhoods, and one where we walked in the nearby Leicester Botanic Gardens and wrote about our responses to that somewhat barren landscape. I enjoyed both sessions very much. My own talk was about nature and cyberspace and involved some wandering around LambdaMOO and the story of when I went to Esalen to do bronze-casting high on the cliffs of Big Sur. I had expected most of my audience to be somewhat antagonistic to my enthusiasm for computers, but in the event they were very receptive and we found many meeting places between the twin sublimes of nature and virtuality.

Howard Rheingold & Andrew Hugill in conversation about tools for collaboration

Rheingold and Hugill will appear in the first of a series of cafe style conversations on creativity, innovation, and transdisciplinary work at the IOCT, De Montfort University. This weekly series of informal discussion sessions held at the IOCT that will focus on topics within the areas of creativity, innovation, and transdisciplinary work. They will run every Wednesday to the end of November from 17.30 to 18.30. Each session will be led by two people with a particular relevance to the topic. Entry is free, though we recommend you reserve a place to avoid disappointment. To do this, simply go to http://www.creativityconversation.co.uk and click on 'Schedule'. You can also find out more information about the speakers and forthcoming conversations.