Poet Ponders the Digital

When I read academic job listing for "Digital Humanities" the skills range from HTML coding to video editing. Some list audio editing. The jobs are so varied that you cannot pinpoint what the phrase means. Is my doctorate in rhetoric, scientific and technical communication sufficient? Often it is not. Some posts suggest an MFA or Ph.D. in media production. Starting January 2016, I am going to be working towards completion of my MFA in Film and Digital Technology. This feels like a last-ditch effort to revive my academic career, while also giving me more credentials to support my creative writing. With or without an academic revival, I'll benefit greatly from the courses and the exercise of creating and editing digital works. One of the frustrations I've had on the job market is that nobody seems to know what the "Digital Humanities" are or how to prove you have the skills to teach the courses. My age and my experiences are a serious obstacle on this...

A drawing made in Tux Paint using various brushes and the Paint tool. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 2, 2015 Deadline December 2015 Issue Randomly clicking on letters, the young boy I was watching play an educational game “won” each level. He paid no attention to the letters themselves. His focus was on the dancing aliens at the end of each alphabet invasion. Situations like this occur in classrooms and homes every day. Technology appeals to parents, politicians and some educators as a path towards more effective teaching. We often bring technology into our schools and homes, imagining the latest gadgets and software will magically transfer skills and information to our children. This school year, I left teaching business communications to return to my doctoral specialty in education, technology and language development. As a board member of an autism-related charity, I speak to groups on how technology both helps and hinders special edu...

Zork I cover art (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 6, 2015 Deadline August 2015 Issue “This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. A rubber mat saying ‘Welcome to Zork !’ lies by the door.” These familiar words, which I once read on the blue screen of a Commodore 64, now appeared on my iPhone. Considered one of the first dozen computer games ever developed, Zork has a special place in computing history. Zork launched what is known as interactive fiction or text adventures. In 1977, four programmers working in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science created the interactive fiction story “Zork.” Some of these friends would go on to create one of the earliest video game publishers, Infocom. From 1979 through 1986, Infocom was one of the leading game publishers, marketing games for every major home computer. Purchased by Activision in 1986, the Infocom brand and its classic games live on, a...

Lego Digital Designer (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley April 6, 2015 Deadline May 2015 Issue Building things provides me with hours of relaxation and a sense of accomplishment. As children, we appreciate the creativity expressed by Tinker Toys, K’nex, Lincoln Logs and LEGO bricks . As we age, we discover new building kits, from detailed plastic models to advanced robotics kits. Yet, for many of us nothing beats the plastic, stud-covered bricks. Though LEGO remains the undisputed king of plastic bricks, interesting kits are available from Best-Lock and Mega Bloks. And recently, I discovered the challenges of working with Nanoblocks from Japanese toy company Kawada. Nanoblocks are one-eighth the size of standard blocks. Following standard plans, the resulting models are incredibly small. The real joy of bricks, however, isn’t in following a plan designed by someone else. Completing a Taj Mahal or Empire State Building model feels like a huge accompl...

An Apple II advertisement from the December 1977 issue of Byte magazine, pages 16 and 17. The second page was described the features of the Apple II. The ad originally ran in May 1977 and was updated that December. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 5, 2015 Deadline February 2015 Issue BYTE magazine stopped appearing on newsstands in July 1998. The name lived on for a time as an online publication, without many of its best columnists and without its definitive test lab reports. Finally, in 2009, the real BYTE ceased to exist. Other online publishers revived the name, but it was never the same as the legendary print publication. In November 2014, my favorite online technical resource for Apple power users and developers, OS X Hints, went into archive mode. A month later, on December 16, 2014, Dr. Dobb’s Journal followed BYTE into the virtual sunset after 38 years of publication. In fact, they call it “sunsetting” the publication: Dr. Dobb’s wil...

If you decide that learning computer programming offers students much needed critical thinking (and job) skills, then the next question is which language(s) should be taught to which students. Computer programming changes, so any opinion I offer will be bad advice in a few years. What I offer below are my views at this moment, and they reflect my biases as a programmer. Suggestion One: C It's not flashy, it's not trendy, and it isn't the first choice of most programming courses. Yet, C is the language of operating systems, programmable controllers, and a lot of portable logic. When you learn C, it's easy to transport those skills to almost any modern language. C compilers are free, there are many integrated development environments (IDEs), and lots of resources are available for learning. You can code C in any text editor, too, and compile from a command line. For OS X and Windows, I suggest using the tools from Apple and Microsoft to learn C, C++, and either...

English: Flowchart example of calculating factorial N ( N! ). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley Aug 4, 2014 Deadline September 2014 Issue Think, Code, Solve: Programming as Career Skill “Until I had to code it, I didn’t understand how many perspectives there are.” This spring, a group of my statistics students attempted to model the return on investment for various degrees at several colleges. To develop their model, they had to ask themselves what is “value” and how would they measure “return” for those students not seeking financial wealth. Developing their computational model, they learned more about what college provides society. Creating variables and functions, collecting data and creating output, the task of creating a computer program opened up new ways of considering the question these students sought to answer. Was a degree from one college better than the same degree from another school? Was one degree better than another? If you want...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 5, 2013 Deadline September 2013 Issue Desktop Databases: Still Great for Many Tasks “dBase LLC is very excited to announce the new and updated version… dBase Plus!” When I received an email announcement that dBase Plus 8 had shipped, compatible with Windows 8, I had to double check that the press release wasn’t a hoax. As a teenager, I loved experimenting with dBase III . Sure enough, dBase is back, trying to compete against Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Easily one of the five most important personal computer applications of all time, dBase was the best database engine and development platform for many years. It spawned great competitors, too, from “clones” like FoxPro and Clipper to innovative databases like Alpha Five, Clarion, Revelation and Paradox. Even today, the many applications on your smartphone likely use SQLite , a relational database with tables similar to dBase IV of the 1990s. While Ashton-Tate’s dBase was not th...

Pittsburgh TechFest was Saturday, June 1, 2013. For me, this is like going to a county fair or theme park… minus the junk food I adore. Technology captures my imagination, and I do love new hardware, software, gizmos, and gadgets. But, reality has set in, yet again, and I cannot immerse myself in tech and do everything else I enjoy doing. As readers know, I've been trying in fits and starts to relearn programming concepts, and then teach myself Objective-C for OS X and iOS applications. I really do love code almost as much as I love creative writing of the English variety. The "almost as much" is the problem. Annually, TechFest features seminar "tracks" on everything from careers development to Web development. You can go from database sessions to object-oriented programming. It's wonderful, the skills on display and the discussions. Yet, I am forced to choose between writing or coding, because both require more than a full-time effort for success. ...

I like comments in computer programming source code. I've never been the programmer to claim, "My code doesn't need comments." Maybe it is because I've always worked on so many projects that I need comments  to remind me what I was thinking when I entered the source code into the text editor. Most programmers end up in a similar situation. They look at a function and wonder, "Why did I do it this way?" Tangent : I also like comments in my "human" writing projects. One of the sad consequences of moving to digital media is that we might lose all the little marginalia authors and editors leave on manuscript drafts. That thought, the desire to preserve my notes, is worthy of its own blog post — so watch for a post on writing software and notes. Here are my rules for comments: Source code files should begin with identifying comments and an update log. Functions, subroutines, and blocks of code should have at least one descriptive comment. ...

In my earlier posts (I, II, and Intro), I explained that I'll be using Xcode to learn Objective-C and the Cocoa Frameworks to learn about programming OS X and iOS applications. If you look back at those posts, you will find how to create a new command line application in either C or Objective-C. This blog entry compares "pure C" to the C code I'll be using within an Objective-C file. Because Objective-C is a superset of C, you can use any valid C programming code in an Objective-C file. After this blog post, I'm going to be doing all coding within Objective-C projects, for simplicity among other reasons. Hello, C Programming Begin by creating a new "Command Line Tool" project in C. Apple's Xcode handily creates the code to output "Hello World!" to the command line. Run the code and you'll see the results in the "debug area" of the Xcode window. Ah, for the old days when aspiring young coders had to type the "Hello W...

If you're going to develop iOS or OS X applications, you're going to be using Xcode, Apple's integrated development environment (IDE). The blog post is an extremely simple introduction to Xcode. It's so simple that I'm only going to discuss one command in the IDE: the "Run" application button. Before starting to program on a computer, I create a folder (directory) for my programming projects. I call the folder "Programming" to keep the contents obvious. You can name your programming projects folder anything, but be sure you can locate it easily. I like to keep programming projects outside my "Documents" folder, at the top level of my personal user folder. Most of the folders within the home directory for a user are created by the operating system. For example, Apple's OS X creates the following: Desktop, Documents, Library (usually hidden), Movies, Music, Pictures, and Public. The home folder for most users won't have as ma...