think outside the screen
For televisions fixed in living rooms, what’s outside of the box adds nothing. Out-of-home media makes media context more significant.
Consider Doug Aitken’s SONG 1, now showing on the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Much of its art is in its relation to what’s off-screen.
Out-of-home video should play well within its particular physical circumstances. More mobile apps should encourage users to look up.
Tagged: video
making music and video creation easy and fun
Music and video editing programs have been bulky, buggy, and frustrating. I use Adobe Premier Elements for editing video. Despite my quite powerful desktop computer, Adobe Premier Elements runs sluggishly. The interface for doing simple, standard tasks like making titles is harrowing. I’ve stopped buying updates for Premier Elements because the program is never made better, only worse. I enjoy making videos despite the continual annoyances that Adobe Premier Elements provides.
Magix Music Maker for making music is even worse. Magix Music Maker never ran correctly for me from its first installation. It crashed with “Visual C++ Runtime error! …abnormal program termination” and “can’t find file” errors. After wasting much time in futile correspondence with Magix, I decided to uninstall Music Maker. Music Maker did a dirty uninstall, leaving much Music Maker crap on my computer. I would enjoy just playing around with making music. My experience with Magix Music Maker was about as enjoyable as a harsh flogging.
Companies that offer an enjoyable way to transform creatively music and video have a large potential market. Much established software, e.g. Abode software, seems mired in the idea of editing as a painful chore. Magisto’s solution is to automate the whole editing process. YouTube is also providing new means for easy, fun video creation. The new GarageBand for iPad apparently is an enjoyable application. The challenge isn’t just to produce software that actually works. It’s also to enable users to enjoy performing creative transformations. Much space exists for software to deliver more value in that way.
sumptuous books in antiquity
An early sixth-century edition of Dioscorides De Materia Medica and the circa-800 Book of Kells are merely two of many sumptuous books that existed in antiquity. In a fire in Rome about 192, Galen lost many books, including “dearest to him — the books written on white silk, with black covers, for which he had paid a high price.”[1] The Romans imported Chinese silk via Egyptian ports after the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BGC. In Rome, silk was a luxury which, among other uses, provided transparent clothes for women.[2] Galen’s silk books were probably illuminated Chinese scrolls. Such books would have been exotic and precious to the Romans.
Illuminated manuscripts that have survived from the European Middle Ages are examples of an ancient tradition of manuscript illumination. In mid-ninth-century Baghdad, Hunayn ibn Ishaq copied text from:
works of the ancients in letters of purple, which is a red colour like wine, written with gold and silver, and letters written in gold, and designs written in other colours. At the beginning of the volume was a picture of the philosopher on a couch, and the pupils were represented in front of him. Till the present day the Greeks {Byzantines} do this with their books and psalters, writing (them) with gold and silver in letters of these colours, with a picture of the wise man represented at the beginning. If the volume contained several discourses, a distinction was made between each, and a picture of each philosopher was represented before his words. The books were covered with skins of leather and shagreen {a fancy binding material} in gold and silver.[3]
About 938, the Byzantine Emperor Romanos gave Caliph `Abd al-Rahmān “gifts of great value, including the book of Dioscorides, with pictures of herbs in the marvelous Byzantine style.”[4] The Byzantine style apparently meant beautifully illustrated.
Humans have highly valued knowledge, whether associated with persons called shamans or philosophers, since the beginning of humanity. Luxury goods are part of the common human currency of status marking. After the invention of writing about 5000 years ago, artifacts of knowledge made for particularly potent luxury goods.
Related posts:
- luxuriously illustrated Shahnamas from the 14th to 16th centuries
- huge, illuminated choir books from the 13th to 15th centuries
- ancient pictorial story-telling
Notes:
[1] HP p. 164.
[2] See Wikipedia on Asian silk in the Roman Empire. Seneca the Younger early in the first century declared, “I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body.” Declamations, vol. I. Traders and traveling scholars moving between China and the Mediterranean may have also transmitted West some Chinese cosmological ideas.
[3] From Muhammad b. al-Ansari, Kitab adab al-falasifah (MS. Escorial 760), quoting what Hunayn ibn Ishaq stated. Trans. Dunlop (1952) p. 467-8, n. 2. I’ve removed a “(?)” inserted after the word “design” (which seems to me a plausible translation) and excised the descriptive phrases in the text, “Hunain b. Ishaq said.”
[4] HP p. 633.
References:
Dunlop, D. M. 1952. “The Dīwān Attributed to Ibn Bājjah (Avempace).” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 14,No. 3, Studies Presented to Vladimir Minorsky by His Colleagues and Friends, pp. 463-477
HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.
Tagged: illuminated manuscripts
historical reason for doubt about Internet TV
In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a radio equipment pioneer, purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, the leading American phonograph company. By 1938, RCA Victor was selling a living-room radio with a fine wooden exterior that was about 4 feet tall and 2.5 feet wide . Two jacks in the back of the radio were labeled with the following text:
This instrument is design for use with
- Television An RCA Victor television attachment plugged into this jack enables you to receive television programs. You see the picture on the attachment, you hear the sound accompaniment on this radio.
- Records With the RCA Victor record player plugged into this jack, the radio becomes a fine record playing instrument. You may then listen to your favorite artists by means of Victor and Bluebird records.
That business direction evidently failed. The radio business, the television business, and the record business have remained largely separate businesses through to today.
RCA Victor’s radio in 1938 occupied a similar physical and economic space to today’s big-screen televisions. Occupying the living room and economizing on high-performance hardware seems to have been less important than diverse device forms and circumstances of use. While Internet TV is currently generating a lot of excitement, it’s future is far from certain.
Related posts:
wartime mobile communication
In World War I, a truck carrying this Model 5 linotype followed U.S. General John Pershing through battlefield action in France. It printed maps, charts, reports, and orders. It was part of the 29′th Engineers mobile printing battalion. The battalion consisted of nine printers and one pressman. I’d guess that a general’s communications technical staff is much larger today.
early history of the codex
The shift from scroll to codex in the Roman Empire seems to have been more a matter of perceptions of fashion and authority than of economic and technological advantages. About 85 GC, the Latin poet Martial boasted that his epigrams were available in a convenient parchment codex:
You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages: give your scroll-cases to the great authors – one hand can hold me.[1]
Despite the advantages Martial described, codices amount to less than 20% of surviving literary and scientific books from his and the next two centuries.[2] The great authors existed on scrolls. The prestige they gave to scrolls seems to have outweighed the advantages of codices for centuries after codices were produced and promoted.[3]
An authoritative forerunner of the codex was Roman legal documents written on wooden tabulae. Codex is a Latin term that meant “block of wood.” Roman legal documents written on wooden tabulae made written contracts and themselves served as artifacts of those contracts. These codices were “prestigious documents, carefully preserved by their rightful possessors and familiar by sight to others any place that Roman citizens or those granted Roman legal privileges lived.”[4] Unlike Homer’s epics, Roman legal documents did not offer a memorable story along with moral instruction. Roman legal documents depended on Roman administrative machinery and ultimately, the rule of the Roman emperor. They had legal authority, but not literary prestige.
Early Christians early and uniformly used the codex for high-value copies of scripture. Christian New or Old Testament scripture from the early centuries of Christianity does not exist in a new (non-recycled / recto side) roll form. Yet in the first three centuries after the birth of Jesus, pieces from more than fifty Christian New or Old Testament codices have survived in Egypt, including fragments of an estimated 130-page codex of the Gospel of John probably from early in the second century.[5] Christians didn’t invent the codex. Christians, however, apparently used exclusively the codex for recording their scripture.
Roman codices, meaning legal documents written on wooden tabulae, plausibly were the prototypes for Christian papyrus codices. The Jewish Revolt against Rome, 115-117 GC, resulted in carnage in Alexandria, a leading center of closely intertwined Jewish and Christian life. Perhaps political fallout from the Jewish Revolt prompted Christians to differentiate themselves from Jews and signal affiliation with Rome through the use of the codex for Christian scripture.[6] But another possibility is more in keeping with the upside-down Christian vision. Christians rejected the elite status competition centered on Greek literature. With codices, Christians set themselves apart from that type of literature and life. Moreover, while Christians did not seek the violent overthrow of the Roman Empire, they envisioned a higher kingdom and a greater savior than the Roman emperor:
the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.[7]
Christians putting such scripture into a papyrus codex may have been a silent, but successful, revolt against Roman authority.
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Notes:
[1] From Nick’s translation of Martial’s epigram, I.2. A codex book consists of uniformly shaped rectangular writing material bound in an order along one edge. Writing is typically present on both sides of the writing material, usually the writing is parallel to the shorter dimension of the (rectangular) material, and typically the codex book has a cover.
[2] Kraft (2008), p. 37. The share of codices are for Greek literature. The number of surviving Latin books (text artifacts) from the first three centuries is relatively small.
[3] As a text storage technology, the codex has important advantages over the scroll. Because the rolling of a scroll is not easily reversed, a scroll typically has writing on only one side of the writing material. Hence for the same text, a book requires only roughly half as much writing material as does a scroll. In addition, the scroll is a sequential access technology. Just as for a magnetic tape, you have to scroll through to access a point in the middle. The codex, in contrasts is a random-access technology like a disk drive. You can access the text from any book page by seeking to open the book at that page. The main technological disadvantage of the codex relative to the scroll is that the codex requires slightly more skill to produce (the skills to cut uniform writing material and to make a binding and a cover).
[4] Meyer (2008) p. 311. For her path-breaking work on Roman legal documents, see Meyer (2004).
[5] Bagnall (2009) pp. 72-79. The Gospel of John instance is P52 = P.Ryl.3.457.
[6] Meyer (2008) pp. 325-8.
[7] Philippians 2:9-11 (RSV translation). This text is replete with imperial terms enlarged in application to Jesus. Matthew 22:15-21, with reference to a Roman coin, undermines the divine pretensions of the Roman emperor.
References:
Bagnall, Roger S. 2009. Early Christian books in Egypt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Kraft, Robert A. 2008. The Gestation of the Codex, stage one adaptation of Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex London: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Meyer, Elizabeth A. 2004. Legitimacy and law in the Roman world: tabulae in Roman belief and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, Elizabeth A. 2007. “Roman Tabulae, Egyptian Christians, and the Adoption of the Codex”. Chiron. 37: 295-347.
Tagged: antiquity
luxurious mobile tablet more than two centuries ago
This pocket-sized tablet from Switzerland, circa 1780, features an ivory writing surface, a small wooden pencil, and gold and enamel covering a steel case. Its gold inscription, “souvenir d’amitié” {souvenir of friendship}, indicates that it was a personal gift. It currently is in the collection of the Walters Art Museum.
Today most smartphones and tablets have the capability only for child-like finger-painting gestures. HTC, however, offers HTC Scribe with its Flyer and Evo View 4G models. Stylus-enabled mobile tablets, also known as notepads, have long historical precedent.
Writing with a stylus doesn’t readily produce standard, structured data (keyed text). A stylus instead offers much greater freedom for visual design and expression. The demand for images surely is great. On the other hand, most persons seem unwilling to exert much effort in content creation and personal expression. More freedom for visual design may not be worth the cost in data structure. Perhaps stylus devices will survive only as niche, high-end products.
measure mobile photo integration via Monday/Sunday posting change
Photo-sharing activity on Flickr jumps on Monday and then gradually decreases to Sunday. Averaged across 10/9 May and 17/16 May 2011, the Monday/Sunday change for DSLR cameras, point & shoot cameras, and camera phones are 36%, 26%, and 23%, respectively.[*] Uploading to Flickr photos accumulated over the weekend plausibly explains the Monday/Sunday increase.
Flickr is working hard to develop good mobile applications. Good mobile applications would allow simple, immediate transfer of photos from a camera phone to Flickr. If Flickr camera phone users were using such mobile apps, one might expect to see a lower (and possibly even negative) Monday/Sunday posting change. The Monday/Sunday posting change might serve as an indicator for Flickr mobile integration.
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Related post: photo sharing via mobile phones
Statistics: Needle database of Flickr camera use statistics
[*] Flickr camera statistics are updated every day about 5pm EST. Needle collects the data at 3am. Hence in the Flickr Needle database, the data collected on a given collection date refers to Flickr data posted about 5pm EST on the previous day. I’ve defined the data day (which determines the day of the week) as the day prior to the Needle collection date. That appears to be more plausible than defining the data day as two days before the Needle collection date.
Tagged: telephones
photo sharing via mobile phones likely to grow
Camera data for flickr show that camera-phone users who upload photos to flickr upload about 7 photos per day at the median rate across different camera-phone models. More capable smartphones have higher photo uploading frequencies. For example, the photo upload frequencies among iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 users are 7.0, 9.7, and 11.1 per day, respectively.[1] The highest photo uploading frequency among devices with 100 or more active users on flickr is the HTC Evo 4G. Its users upload 12.6 photos to flickr per day. The Evo 4G is a highly capable smartphone released in June, 2010. It has a 4.3 inch (diagonally measured) screen with 480×800 pixel resolution, a front-facing camera for video calls, and an 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with dual-LED flashes and a variety of camera exposure controls for photos. That’s industry-leading technology. Evo 4G owners seem to be putting it to frequent photo use.
The flickr photo upload frequencies for camera phones are roughly comparable to the U.S. average of 13 mobile calls per day per mobile phone user. flickr photo uploaders are likely to be more technically savy and web-engaged than a representative sample from the whole population of mobile phone users. In addition, voice call frequencies depend on ill-specified accounting rules for uncompleted calls and calls reaching voice mail services. Nonetheless, the data suggests that for some share of mobile phone users, photo sharing is an activity with frequency roughly comparable to voice calls.
Looking at the data by camera technology aggregates, camera-phone photo uploading frequencies are only about half that for DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras. DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras are less oriented to ordinary communication among family and friends than are camera-phones. The former also generally have less capable photo communication capabilities than the latter. One can reasonable expect that in the future camera-phone users will have higher photo sharing frequencies than roughly comparable DSLR and point-and-shoot camera users.[2]
Unlike traditional wireline phones, mobile phones enable communication via voice, text, and vision. Text messaging exceeded voice calls in frequency in mid-2007 in the U.S. Photo sharing via phone is becoming quite popular. Video calling technologies are also developing rapidly. The value advantage of mobile phones over traditional wireline phones is much broader than just mobility.
* * * * *
Data: flickr camera data on Needle. The Needle dataset is loosely coupled to flickr, continually acquires data, and allows anyone to query the data. Tools like Needle welcome everyone to the technological frontier of an open, real-time web of data.
Notes:
[1] Calculations based on data from May 5 to 15, 2011. These and other figures above may change slightly as Needle acquires data for subsequent dates and automatically updates the calculated statistics.
[2] The characteristics of DSLR and point-and-shoot camera users are likely to differ from the characteristics of camera-phone users. Camera-phone users are also a much larger population. Users characteristics undoubtedly will affect frequency of photo uploading. The point is that camera-phones are more oriented toward photo communication than are DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras.
Tagged: telephones
new standards for being informed
Today, a public service advertisement presents a laptop/netbook as the icon for “be informed.” Next year, the retail price of today’s high-end smartphones is likely to drop under $100. Then the icon for “be informed” should become an image of a smartphone.
Tagged: news