Show Menu

Iso-Phone

After our class discussion last Monday, Jonah recommended I check out iso-phone. I guess it was my reference to letter writing and how I’d noticed the effect that your environment can have on the letter that you write. Personally, I find this effect to be not only interesting, but also essential. It’s part of where you find your voice when you sit down to write a letter. isophone is an experiment that deals with just this phenomenon. After all the talk about how the context (the form of a method of communication) shapes the content (that is, what’s actually said), it’s interesting to see that there is a whole other…

Read more

AtoZ Midterm Ideas

It’s funny how the simplest things can be the most inspiring. Last week we parsed through some text files and calculated how many times each word appeared in the file. Simple enough. But start doing it with text that you’ve written, say, in email, to other people, and you start getting an interesting sense of your communication that goes beyond how you think you present yourself to others, and forces you to look at what you actually say to people. I think it would be interesting to take this same data, and group it by contacts. First, by specific people, but people who represent a different type of contact in…

Read more

Thesis Presentation 2 (Sort of)

So last week I had to present more on the “context” of my thesis, but I didn’t really get into the details of the projects I showed – why I loved/hated them or how exactly I saw them fitting into my area of research. I also thought of/discovered a few more after the fact. Most importantly, though, I never managed to post ANY of that here. So here goes. Oh, and just in case you forgot, I’m exploring how communication technologies shape interpersonal relationships. Or how they shape our conversations. Or how our social interpretations shape communications technology. Or something. They’re all related you see! Ze Frank was on to…

Read more

Personal Essay

Unfortunately, I don’t think it will fly for this semester’s projects. But I enjoyed writing it for Nancy’s class last semester and didn’t want to see it “go to waste.” There’s a story my mother likes to tell us. By us I mean my sister and me. And by story I don’t mean so much an account of factual incidents as a rendering of isolated historical events and permeating ideas strung together, over time and through much retelling, to resemble a tale so solidified that its events very well could have happened all in one day. It goes something like this: As a child, when my sister wanted to learn…

Read more

Thesis Experiment 2: Email to SMS Converter

It’s recently occurred to me that, while I’ve been busy being a good thesis student – researching, reading, talking, experimenting- I’ve completely neglected to document any of my thoughts or findings online. Bad ITP student! So here was last week’s experiment, the Email to text message converter. I’ve been taking what I’m calling the “Ze Frank” approach to my thesis. That is, every week I’m doing at least one mini-project related to my topic. So far it’s been fun! I’ll post all of the others in a bit, but this one was also a weekly assignment for Daniel Shiffman’s Programming A to Z class that’s due tomorrow. It’s not very…

Read more

Thesis Background

The first day of thesis class, we were asked to prepare a 10 minute presentation, just introducing ourselves and giving the basics of our thesis topic/project. My slides aren’t so telling, in and of themselves, so I’ll write some quick notes on the gist of what I said from the presentation. Not having a specific project yet in mind (in fact, not even feeling sure wether or not this thesis WILL be a project) I basically went through the background of what I am interested in, why I am interested in it, what previous projects have led me to realize my interest, some projects that I felt inspiring or that…

Read more