novel models

Having made explicit the container-shapes-content truism, I want to know what non-traditional containers have researchers adopted to communicate their (performance-based) insights? What are the alternatives to ink on the page? What do they look like? How do they work? Really look like? Really work? I’m speaking from my limitations here, but it is terribly hard to imagine something into existence without reference to what is already known. I have identified a sample of ‘digitally framed’* research outcomes and I'm now tracking down copies to explore. These documents are novel in terms of their container (pioneering, even) and I hope that they help my concrete mind engage with something—that they offer me models to critique.

In chronological sequence, the documents are:

Chameleons Group, The. 1995. Chameleons 1: theatrical experiments in style, genre and multi-media. CD-ROM. Studies in Theatre Production, Exeter University. Volume 13. [http://dpa.ntu.ac.uk/ “believed to be the first theatre CD-ROM to have been published in a refereed academic journal”]

Kolb, D. [<2003] Socrates in the labyrinth: hypertext, argument, philosophy. CD-ROM. Eastgate Systems Inc.

Valentine, L. 2004. The activity of rhetoric within the process of a designer’s thinking. PhD thesis, Dundee University. [Louise’s thesis takes the form of a ‘regular’ PhD (hard-bound, paper sheets … you know the sort of thing) and CD-ROM which opens to reveal the entire ‘regular’ PhD text plus imbedded still, moving and interactive images.]

Meyn, N. 2006. Excavating the future: acting and the art of classical song. DVD. London: GSMD.

* Why did I not go with the apparently relevant word “multimedia”? Digitally framed is intentionally broader in scope: I mean to include digital documents that are wholly comprised of text and include a query interface, which, if not present, would significantly reduce the usefulness of the report. Following a different argument, something might be ‘multimedia’ in the everyday sense, but still not achieve the quality of allowing content to be appropriately media-ted in the sense that I am trying to articulate.

back to School

It's already week six of the new term at Guildhall, which has flown by. In the second half of this term, I shall concentrate on research activities, both my own (the December MIDAS paper in Holland and now a firm date to speak in Valencia as part of the international research seminar series which Héctor López hosts there for the Universidad Politécnica) and working to establish and develop two student research groups at School, one for BMus and one for MMus students.

I had a very enjoyable lunch with Mark Bernstein (the designer and main driving force of Tinderbox) over the summer break; we met while he was en route to a conference in Denmark. As well as passing on many helpful ideas and comments that day, Mark has kindly offered to make introductions between the musicians and musicologists who he knows use the programme in their work: there are a fair number of us, it turns out. Organising this, and getting in contact with Eva Nässén (who teaches at the Göteborg School of Music and Drama and who is also talking at MIDAS in Holland) are my immediate priorities.

I am going to trial using Tinderbox in the research groups as a 'thinking out loud' tool; blogging will also get a look in today and tomorrow, when I will be talking with all of the new postgrads about the whys and wherefores of developing their self-reflective skills (on which they are assessed as an integral part of their award).

accessibility and fragmentation

Remember these? My iBook doesn't have a drive to read 3.5" discs, let alone something that can lift data from their 5.25" ancestors (born in the days when floppies were floppy). Even the most cursory survey of the history of storage media will reveal that we are living in a period of rapid flux, and there's no sign of long-term stability on the horizon that I can see. If research communities are to admit the usefulness of multimedia and hypermedia in their reporting practices, then that very usefulness demands that the data they encode must remain readily accessible in the future--and not just in the next five or fifty-five years, but preferably in five-hundred-and-fifty-five years too. Once the thing itself has been located, it's just about as easy to read from the pages of a book printed in 1451 as it is from one that rolled off the presses yesterday. The same is most definitely not true for digitally encoded texts: notes I made on the sources which I read for my PhD and typed up little over a decade ago in I-forget-which DOS word processor are severely mangled when I try to open them in any of the currently mainstream programmes that sit on my laptop. Books published on paper can be opened and read pretty effortlessly; 'books' published electronically cannot.

In recent months, I have been looking at software designed to assist us make, sift and exploit research notes, especially those applications that can handle multimedia data efficiently. The package that I've lined up to explore in depth is called Tinderbox, but I'll not write about it in detail yet. (A couple of days ago, I booked my place at the Tinderbox workshop for researchers that meets later this month in Denmark; as an out-and-out novice, I'm very much looking forward to seeing how more experienced users work the programme.) There are plenty of other apps to consider, many of which are freely available, being the result of collaborations between academic researchers. Here's the snag, though: we face the problem of fragmentation. Ideas encoded in this programme are almost certainly not going to be legible in that one. These programmes are unembarrasingly experimental, but most of them--even those that are presented by their development communities as relatively easy to get started with--have fallen at the first hurdle of having me use them because they are dependent on software I know nothing about and cannot prioritise time to learn. This is my loss, I realise, but also a sign of something not yet having come of age. Two that I would really like to explore further (at least as far as getting them running on my laptop) are: Compendium (built to run on OS X 10.3, which is not the current one; I'm ignorant enough not to know whether running it on my 10.4 machine might involve risks I'm not prepared to take. "When in doubt, don't" my nan used to say, which has stood me in good stead during many an IT crisis) and ARTware (which requires VisualWorks Smalltalk to be installed first--the download and installation instructions for that were sufficient to put me off).

Software stays still for such a short period of time (a year or two at most) that it seems unlikely that the number of users ever clustering around one or two of these niche programmes will reach the critical mass necessary to elevate them to effective community tools. A tipping point may emerge if 'agnostic' data format standards can be agreed, which would allow ideas to be encoded in a manner which is utterly transparent to a variety of software packages. There's a biting point to be found between short-term improvements in data richness versus long-term (in)accessibility issues. For a community that has developed its insights on the processes of publication and peer review for several centuries now, this matters a great deal!

back online

I've been without broadband for a week or so: one of our next-door neighbours moved out and it seems that someone flipped the wrong switch at the exchange. I was surprised to learn that there are any physical switches left to flip these days, but it turns out that there are.

I'm posting an image here to check that I have understood how to: it's relevant, but I wasn't aiming for 'a picture conveys a thousand words' status this time, as you'll see! Orange Tupperware as a nod to Orange, who have now reconnected me to the outside world.

I received my grant from Guildhall, so it's full steam ahead with this project. I've got stuck into articles that discuss the history and future of multimedia documents, because I find that engaging with those background issues always helps me to focus. There's lots to come to grips with and I must remember not to get too side-tracked: those discussions form the backdrop to my work but are not centre-stage.

hyperlinks

I've discovered how to make hyperlinks now: the reason why it wasn't obvious before is that Blogger doesn't function fully in Safari. In Firefox, I have a toolbar full of buttons. For good measure, here's a link to Umberto Eco (always worth reading) on The Future of the Book.

Pictures next: I need some screen shots of the different programmes I've mentioned so far.

an aside

It's been hectic at work--the academic year finishes for us on Friday and there's been the usual push to tie up loose ends, say goodbye to the leavers and start to fix landmarks for the new term / new year with colleagues.

I have learned that my grant application was successful, so I have funds available from Guildhall to make research trips and purchase resources over the summer vacation. I'm very excited by this, particularly as I can now definitely attend the 'Tinderbox for Research' meeting in Denmark in August. Note to self: must book my place and my travel...

I'm currently in awe of my own ignorance of this whole 'container' topic--there is so much recent work to review! I came across two websites today which are the home of fascinating projects and are going to be worthy of close attention:

The Institute for the Future of the Book (US-based)
Knowledge Media Institute (at The Open University, UK)

I must also learn how to post links and pictures here. I'll do that, then add them to everything so far before proceeding any further.

software, part 1: composition

In the next few posts, I'm going to gather my preliminary thoughts about the software I've mentioned so far. I use Tiger myself, so apologies to users of other OSes if this gets too Mac-specific: a Windows version of Tinderbox is nearly ready, however, and that is the single most important tool which I shall be investigating during this project anyway. I'll organise these notes working from the software that I've explored the least (composing) and end up with the one that seems likely to be the most revolutionary: Tinderbox (for 'thinking out loud'). This will take three posts, I think (in the middle one, I'll focus on an archiving and database system). I am not offering a comprehensive survey of all the good products that are out there; these are my notes on the four software packages which caught my imagination the most after a quick survey of maybe three times that number.

Copywrite and Ulysses
These are text editors designed to help writers prepare material for publication. Their designers have drawn similar conclusions about what authors need, and--perhaps more tellingly for those of us habituated to writing in what has become the 'standard' processor--what they don't need. I'll start with the latter point. I'm fully capable of wasting hours fiddling with subheadings and font sizes and indented paragraphs and other such decorative decisions. I'll admit that I have even been silly enough (once or twice, you understand) to construct sentences on the basis of how they appear on the screen (how can I avoid that block of white at the end of the line because the next word is too long to fit?; do I really want only a single word or two on a single line at the end of a paragraph?). I clearly have a severe case of WYSIWYG-itis, which brings precisely zero benefit to the work as it is printed, for it's always completely altered by the typesetting process. In these two programmes, I have to go cold turkey on the design front. I'm there to write; to construct ideas as elegantly as I can. How all of this looks on the page is not my proper concern, and, of course, that is entirely right. It has been liberating not to engage with all of those formatting matters on a visual level, which the programmes simply don't display in any depth. Both environments also feature 'full screen' modes, where it's you and your ideas: no toolbars, no dialogue boxes, no distractions. Unsettling to start with, for me at least, but this is now my strong preference for my working space.

The biggest advantages that these programmes offer over Microsoft Word and those influenced by it are are found in the structuring solutions that they feature. Rather than providing you with a single page at a time, CopyWrite and Ulysses both offer a central space (the single page equivalent) with additional panes for notes and comments that you expand, contract, dismiss, or add to as the need arises. My writing plans and/or my review comments are clearly in view alongside whichever section of prose I'm working on that moment.

Next, filing: using a three-pane window as the default set-up (think Outlook or Mail), you are encouraged to think of your writing as a project to be worked on chunk-by-(more or less substantial)-chunk. Each section of prose (introduction; method; literature review; main points; appendices; bibliography; whatever you like) deserves its own folder. Moving between these is a synch. Elsewhere, there's a pane which lists the files held in the open folder, named as you like and with easily read 'draft' or 'version' tags to show you your most up-to-date attempt. The single biggest pane (all of this is tweak-able, of course) holds your writing space. As the Ulysses project managers put it: "No extensive text is written at once, in a single document. A story consisting of 200 pages results from fractions, starting points, discarded ideas and many more--all neatly distributed along a total of 800 pages, most likely with over 100 different documents, combined with notes, Post-Its, scribblings on the margins of numerous daily papers, beer covers, napkins and the back sides of photos." These two working spaces manage that sort of real-life research and writing process very well.

Personally, I find this system wonderful (it's similar in both programmes). Like a good host at a potentially imposing function, these interfaces are so discrete that you quickly forget that you are being looked after extremely well and you are freed up to get on with the business of enjoying yourself.

Auto-archive and backup features are comprehensive in both programmes: not only are potential slips of the 'close-without-saving' type harder to make, but you are expected to want to keep old copies of early drafts alongside whatever you currently think is the most successful version of that section. This has been very helpful.

Now, I know I could get a Word-style programme to work in similar ways--or, rather, I could work around what these offer by default to achieve a similar working environment--but why bother? I'm happier using a programme that has been built from scratch to offer these features.

Export: this is the one potential snag. The dot doc file format has become dominant in the workplace (in my experience, at least), and only MS programmes can manage it 100% reliably. These programmes help you to get your article or book out of your head and down on the page very successfully, but printing these out or saving them in a format that pretty much anyone can read requires that you take a couple of unfamiliar steps. First of all, you have to organise all of your chunks into the finalised sequence. This is no more complicated than doing some filing, but in reverse. My introduction comprises of v 3 of that section, v 8 of the part about method &c. It's not difficult, it's just not how I used to work, which was much more linear, never moving on to a new section until the one before it was 85% right (and never holding more than one version at a time).

CopyWrite uses the dot txt format, which is easily readable by most software out there so you can open it, edit it, print it out, save it as you need to. Thinking of emailing speed or space on your HDD? Txt files are around a fifth of the size of their doc equivalent. Ulysses offers something similar when you want to talk with the outside world (including the dot txt format), and something beyond that which is rather more complicated than I've got to grips with yet, whereby you can take your (plain) text and then code layout features (this is a quotation and should be indented; that is a subheading and so the font should be bold and 14 point) before exporting (to LaTeX and via that as a PDF).

Both developers offer demo versions and have good, comprehensive websites. I've not yet settled on which I'll buy for myself: because they are really quite similar it'll probably come down to money, in which case CopyWrite will win. Ulysses's interface is a bit classier, but not *that* much classier.

"what will this container contain?"

I nearly used this as the name for my blog, but "Tupperware Research" won the moment I thought of it. I have fond memories of the plastic tubs, being a child of the "Tupperware Party" generation. I've ended up with a quasi-C17th English book title instead because there were things about my first effort that I still liked. The rest flowed from there.

I hummed and harred for a while trying to spot any meaningful differences between "what will this containter contain?" and "what can this container contain?". The single most obvious distinction (the future-orientated nature of "will") isn't the most interesting to me at the moment, although it's not unimportant. It strikes me that "what can this container contain?" is a question posed to reveal the nature of the container itself. The answer will be something like: "it has these characterstics, as revealed by its capacity to hold this but not that". My primary interest is in *content*, however, and I purposefully don't want any slippage to take me away from that concern. I could try instead: "what does this content demand of its container?". We're approaching chicken-and-egg territory here though, because I don't know whether content can emerge independently of a container. If it can't (which is what I suspect), then we have no easy way of discerning whether the characteristics we have found in the content--which we are now trying to house in an ideal structure--are *actually* internally organised, or have become that way under pressure from the walls of the (temporary) container.

My thinking about this--and my use of the word "container" in this slightly technical sense--derives from the work of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who developed a sophisticated theory of thinking ("The Grid") early on in his career. These are ideas I'll develop another time.

Why these questions? I've taken a rather back-to-front route through this. One of my responsibilities at work is to oversee the management of our practice-based research degree programme. In common with all doctorates, these awards appeal to those who have progressed through their earlier training with some obvious success and who now want to get their teeth stuck into a significant final project as a supervised student. Our degrees are practice-based, so we are concerned with better understanding some aspect or another of what goes on when we, as musicians, perform. How are the insights that have been identified over years of detailed research to be revealed? My answer to this as a PhD candidate in musicology was easy: write a thesis. There was nothing I wanted to communicate that I couldn't get down in words relatively neatly. Content and container were well suited to one another. But, as a performer? Is it possible to communicate my artistic insights in prose? And, if it is, what is being assessed when someone reads that work? My accomplishments as a musician, or a writer? Given that we want to elucidate the former, it had better not be the latter. Content and container are perhaps not so well suited in this scenario.

Hopefully, my question about containers now has more urgency. What will make an appropriate container for a performing artist to illustrate the working method ("research") which preceeded the resulting "product" (for musicians, this is typically a performance, whether live or recorded). What tools will help capture research data, provide space for its analysis and offer a benign scaffold in which a report of findings can be constructed?

start here...

I have lots of new tools in my life this year. At different times, I feel tremendously supported and very frustrated by them. I am trying to find software that will not only help me to prepare research for publication but will make me feel good about it along the way. Here's the adoption timeline, to bring you up-to-date:

6 months ago
My first ever Mac, an iBookG4. Infatuation quickly leads to love. It is an OS of beauty and refinement.

3 months ago
NovaMind and Keynote. Both very good. I've no previous experience of PowerPoint, but the room in which I lecture has been kitted out with a great new AV projector and I'm getting on board. I'm setting myself the challenge of using this equipment instead of the whiteboard whenever appropriate, which is nearly all of the time.

1 month ago
Tinderbox. An information management programme of great simplicity (it makes almost instant sense) and rich complexity (I am quite possibly using about 8% of its features).

3 weeks ago
I'm on a roll. Boswell as text archive. Don't file, search.

2 weeks ago
Ulysses for writing? CopyWrite for writing? Ditch the layout 'pretties' (does that subheading look better in 12 point or 11?) and concentrate on elegant prose.

1 week ago
ARRGHHHHH! I need to spend months to learn these programmes in order to find out if they do what I want them to!

Today
You can blog in Tinderbox. That would be a good way to learn the programme in more depth, would it not? No. Or rather, maybe, but not in the timeframe I have in mind. Signed up to Blogger. Hello.

Nov 06
I want to have a paper ready to submit to a new Norwegian journal provisionally entitled "Music Practice as Research". My article is to survey research methods and reporting practices that specifically address the non-artefact nature of dance and music performance.

Dec 06
I'm giving a short seminar on this same topic to colleagues in a small and very friendly European research group, many of whom also happen to be senior figures in this field. I'm not concentrating on the last bit.