When introducing my thesis topic back in November, I started with a personal story:

"This is the story of Nancy MacIntyre, a Tale of the Prairies.

My connection to this book began in 1912, when a soldier named Felix picked up a used copy on his way to enlist in the army. He carried Nancy with him while fighting in WW1, and he became known for gathering fellow soldiers together around the campfire and reading the book aloud. When he returned to the US, he continued this tradition with friends and family, but as Nancy's popularity grew finding new copies got harder and harder. So Felix financed a special edition, and spent the rest of his life carefully choosing friends and family worthy of their own personalized copy.

Each book included a history of the Nancy's travels, Felix's connection with her, and the following instructions: "You are to read this book ALOUD to yourself and your family. Then you are to read it ALOUD to a few carefully chosen friends on certain occasions when the time is appropriate. Thus, you will repay your debt to an important era in American civilization. With all good wishes, Felix Harris."

Jump forward to 1999 -- half a century after my great grandfather settled and published his book -- I began my own generation's version of reading around the campfire:

I started a blog. It was called The OnGoing Effort, and I started it at the request of my grandfather, who wanted to know what I was up to in college. Over the last eight years, it became a place for everyone to know what I am up to, and it has become an important archive of both the trivial and monumental events of my life over that time.

If you look at these objects independently, they aren't anything special. Its not like Nancy MacIntyre is a great work of fiction. But this little book, and the tradition of reading it aloud, brought people together in a time of great turbulence, and gave them a connection to their culture and their homes that no form of technology of that time could give them. The OnGoing Effort, too, will never win any journalistic awards. But it has been a place that, in equally turbulent times, has connected me to friends and family all over the world through writing and pictures.

But if you put them together they form a sort of technological spectrum - from highly analog to highly digital. And this spectrum became the genesis of my thesis topic: what is the nature of place if both a 50-year old book and a 10-year old blog could both evoke a sense of it?

When my grandfather Rex built the house I grew up in, he made sure there were fireplaces in every room. If 1960s fire code had allowed for fireplaces on the second floor, I'm sure he would have put them there, too, but as it was, the total count today stands at three. Never forgetting that the house was situated on the solid limestone bedrock of north Texas - a place that rarely saw sub-freezing temperatures, much less snow - he was infamous for jacking up the air conditioning on Christmas morning so that he could have all hearths blazing together when the family arrived for dinner.

In later years my parents added a chiminea in the side courtyard, which brought the active fireplace count to four on Christmas morning. To say my family has a fascination with the fireplace would be an understatement, as evidenced by this tableau on Christmas morning:



As if four weren't enough, the crisp, vibrant colors of the Yule Log in HD were on continuous loop during the festive gathering. This holiday tradition, once limited to the New York area, but broadcast across the nation in the wake of 9/11, is now something of a cultural phenomenon. InHD broadcasts the crackling fire along with two spinoffs - a snowman, and snow falling on cedars. It has its own fan website. And, for a mere $1.99, you can have the Yule Log on your iPhone.

Mostly I find it all pretty entertaining, but it also makes me think about the ways that we use our gadgetry to recreate the basic human experience of sitting in front of a fire.

What compels someone to film fire and put it on television?

As a final project for Participatory Networks last year, I proposed a small web network called Can Do, with the following mission:

Can Do is a collection of small steps everyone can take to enact positive change in the environment, based on the belief that building a community of people interested in taking some of these small steps can a powerful motivating tool, and empower us with the knowledge of our collective impact.

Beyond a working test site, I was never able to actually build this project and see how it lives out in the real world. In the year since proposing it, I have also reconsidered the idea of this as a stand-alone site. In my explorations of the notion of place online in my thesis, I have often wondered about Facebook, and why it is that its particular blend of features and tools beat out so many others like it, and somehow transformed into the social center of the internet for so many people.

Regardless of why it happened, I would like to take Can Do and redesign it as a Facebook application, to take advantage of its strong infrastructure and the built in connection that so many people already have to it. This would involve redesigning the basic flow of interaction to fit into the Facebook architecture, as well as reconsidering the graphic language used within FB.

(Week of) Jan 5:
class proposals
Research Facebook architecture
Redraw Can Do site architecture

Jan 12:
Design sketches
Coding begins

Jan 19:
More coding

Jan 26:
Finishing up coding
Small scale testing

Feb 2:
Testing, tweaking, etc.

Feb 9:
final presentations
Show the project!
Invite people to add it

Even when you have nothing in common with someone, you can always talk about the weather. I am interested in weather's ability to transcend space, and yet I feel like a lot of interactive technology acts as a buffer against the communal experience of weather instead of a conduit. I would like to spend wintersession exploring the ways in which technology can react to, and interact with, the weather outside, with the goal of using data to create a sense of place online by strengthening the awareness of, and the connection to, the natural world.

My raw materials for this research will primarily be live data feeds - such as those provided by Yahoo Weather, Weather.com, and the National Weather Service - and secondary information from sources like geotagged images from flickr and text from blog or twitter updates.

I have started experimenting with web-based versions of this idea that use rss feeds and javascript, and I would like to continue with that, as well as integrate some Processing into the mix. The thing that I find interesting and challenging as a novice programmer is how to generate form from data that doesn't look data-y. How do you introduce visual randomness into a program? I wonder if by keying off of random natural phenomena that unique form might result.

My time will be broken down into a series of experiments (vignettes?), and will be a test bed for learning some new technical skills in the process. Ultimately I want to see if I can generate interesting form and/or patterns from the weather conditions outside, that can then be used to evoke the experience of weather online or in other design work.

Inspirations:
I Wanted to See All of the News From Today - Martin John Callanan
Suns from flickr - Penelope Umbrico
Infome Imager - Lisa Jevbratt
Nine Patch Generator - Jared Tarbell


(Week of) Jan 5:
class proposals
present prior experimentation

Jan 12:
refined web experimentation

Jan 19:
final web experimentation
first stabs at Processing

Jan 26:
refined Processing sketches

Feb 2:
more Processing
start documentation

Feb 9:
final presentations: series of web and Processing pieces
poster-size printouts of the most successful?
written documentation of code/process

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Robert Irwin*

I've always liked the quote, and enjoy the idea of becoming as aware of the way we look at things as we are of what we're actually seeing. Its a concept that has floated to the surface many times over the course of the last semester, but this week, as my two home towns begin to overlap each other, I have seen this idea of Irwin's in a new way.

One of my primary "jobs" over the next couple of days is to gather a collection of images to put onto a digital frame, which will ultimately become a Christmas gift for my paternal grandmother, Mina, who is 87. Not only am I to gather them, put them in some sort of order, and format them for the 16:9 aspect ratio of the screen, but it is also important that I add in an easily-readable system of captions.

Captions like:
"Katy. Your granddaughter."
"Easton, your great-grandson."

My grandmother is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease. For her, forgetting the name of the thing she sees is a daily occurrence, and has nothing to the perception of art, or with a willing phenomenological experience of the world around her. It frustrates her, that she can't bring the words she clearly used to know into the part of her brain where she can speak them. Memories of her childhood and early adulthood are strong and clear, but the conversation she had an hour earlier is gone forever. Her socializing instinct is still strong, but in her condition that means she initiates the same conversation again and again.

What happens to your understanding of place when you literally cannot remember it?

* I have seen this quote a few times in the last few months. Once in my friend Elana's most excellent thesis presentation, and again in some of the phenomenology reading associated with my Network Landscapes class this past semester. As an artist, Irwin is interested in the way we perceive space, and my favorites of his of work attempt to shift the way viewers are experiencing the environment around them using light and color.

I am sitting here, in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by boxes. I am staying at home for the holidays for the next two weeks, and in the few days I've been here, I have not been able to stop myself from opening up a few of them and poking around inside. One was filled with reams of sheet music, and another filled with shoe boxes neatly packed with cassette tapes. The best boxes are marked with that magic word (for me, at least): genealogy.

[Although I never met her, I know from experience that these particular boxes contain the collected work of my great-grandmother Millie, whose passion was researching the family tree and collecting stories and photographs from the generations past.]

The first one I rummaged through yielded a photo album in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a short collection of every contribution my great-great grandfather, Frank Albert Ernst, wrote to the class letter of McCormick Theological Seminary, class of 1892. They start in 1893 when he was called to the then-new territory of Nebraska, and continue well into his eighties, just one paragraph a year describing what church he was serving, how many new members they had added, and the state of health of his immediate family. It shouldn't have been as interesting as it was, but I spent several solid hours reading it from cover to cover.

Other than that, the stuff in that box was a completely boring collection - old letters, random snapshots, and newspaper front pages from important dates like JFKs assassination or the moon walk.

Knowing that they more than likely contain piles of useless paper, what is it about these boxes that I find fascinating? And once inside, what is it that distinguishes a single meaningful piece of ephemera from a pile of old rubbish?

I am once again pondering the idea of place, and how this new set of questions fits into it. In my thesis presentation in November, I talked about my working definition of place as a set of four things:

• about people
• built out of narrative
• instills belonging
• develops a history over time
  

In my review afterwards, several critics felt that I emphasized time way more than place in my talk, and Andrew pointed me towards the very interesting concept of the time capsule. Later, in a great email from Rob, he wondered how place related to the concept of setting in theater, and how place online might be related to the setting of a stage.

Having had several weeks to ponder it, I begin to wonder how much place, for me, is becoming space with memory.