Back from RSA

For the last few days, I have been at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, conducting a workshop on visualizing activities in digital workplaces with Bill Hart-Davidson (Michigan State) and Mark Zachry (University of Washington). These are two of the smartest people I know, and it was a real pleasure to present and workshop with them, explaining our visualization models to the participants, and seeing the participants develop their own applications.

Now I'm back, just in time to conduct the workshop again - this time, for my undergrads. My Summer I class has just finished data collection on their field studies, and now they're absorbing these models to make sense of the data. I really can't wait to see what they come up with.

Mark and Bill will be conducting a similar workshop at SIGDOC 2009 this fall. I won't be able to make it, but they're going to do a fantastic job - if you're at all interested in this sort of work, please do join them.

Street texts

I've been telling students in my field methods class that we're so surrounded by texts, we don't even notice them. I've suggested that they take a walk around their neighborhood and notice the texts - and think about how different the neighborhood would be without them. Normally I think of street signs, street numbers, and other permanent texts.

But the other day I was walking in my own neighborhood and saw these temporary texts spray painted on the street. One looks like it has something to do with a telecomm company; another seems to delineate property lines and/or water meters; the third, I'm not sure. They're not meant for the general public; they help some service workers navigate the streets to do their work. I'm constantly intrigued by little traces like these, little traces that indicate other overlapping activities of which we know little.

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots