Found Photo Fodder

I haven’t commented much on the death of Google Reader, and while this post is marginally about RSS (and, really, about tagging within RSS), I don’t really have much to say about Reader that adds anything meaningful to all of the excellent things that have already been written.

Instead, this post is about found photos, sources for those photos, and the use of such photos in professional presentations.

Over the last few years, I’ve received some minor kudos for developing conference presentations that are visually arresting and compelling. I’ve heard lots of good feedback from folks whose opinions I value about the effectiveness of my presentation style, which is heartening.

During the first couple of years that I worked on developing this ethos, I predominantly used striking images that I found on the web (hence my use of the term “found photos,” which, technically, is different from the actual definition of found photos or vernacular photography, but not unlike that definition either, but that’s for another post…). Indeed, when preparing a presentation, I would often begin with the images, mining Google Reader posts for visuals that evoked or supported ideas I was trying to convey verbally.

After giving a talk, folks would often ask: “Where do you find all those cool images?” In reply, I would usually joke that it was a “trade secret.” But really, it was just simple sifting and winnowing using RSS.

In Reader, I subscribed to several image-intensive feeds, many of which were from Tumblr. These feeds have always made my RSS experience a pleasure, for mixed in with discourse-heavy posts from fellow academics, tech blogs, and news sites were often incongruent and arresting photos. Over the years of using Reader, I probably looked at 100,000 or more photos.[1]

When I stumbled across an image that was striking for whatever reason—and I learned to develop a sense of what would make an interesting and effective slide-ready image—I would simply use Reader’s tagging function to label the post “photos.” That’s it. When it came time to prepare a talk, I’d open my list of posts tagged “photos” in Reader and simply j/k my way through, looking for visuals congruent with the scope of my presentation.

I had thousands of posts tagged “photos” in Reader,[2] which means that I had my own archive of visuals that might evoke the presentation ethos I’d developed over time.

However, over the last two years I’ve moved away from using such found photos in my presentations, preferring instead to use my own images to support my work for two main reasons. First, I’ve been developing approaches to using visual research methods in qualitative studies of writing, and consequently, many of my talks have covered this work. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve been working hard on developing rhetorically engaging visuals of my own, honing a visual phronesis related my academic work alongside the verbal and written craft.

Regardless, when Reader died, so too did thousands of tags. This is but one example; I also used tags to code data in Reader, I used tags to mark items related to research reading, and I used tags for a variety of other things (one of my favorite tags was “holy shit,” reserved for a bevy of truly amazing and awe-inspiring posts).

I moved to Newsblur in mid-June, and I’ve been very happy with the service. No tags, though, and no import for the archive of tagged items from Reader users (there are some other options, I realize, but that’s not the point of this post).

And yet, I still have the desire to single out arresting images. In the old days of Reader, I would sometimes publicly share such images. Since Newsblur doesn’t support tagging but does offer some of the social sharing features that were once part of Reader, I’ve been using the “share” feature to collect interesting found images.

It’s not a workaround, but a totally different way of thinking about the images I find arresting. Since I’m sharing these publicly, I’m thinking more about why I find the images striking, whether others will find them similarly striking, and what my sharing them says about me and my visual ethos.

If you ever wanted to tap into the archive of images I used in presentations a few years ago, or if you simply would like another image-intensive feed in your own RSS reader, feel free to add my Blurblog, a feed of nothing but images that I once would have tagged “photos” in Reader.

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1. Who knows for sure? I’m basing this on the fact that a couple years ago Google released statistics for individual Reader users. When they did, I learned that I had already surpassed 300,000 total read items, the maximum count they’d render for a given user. Again, that was a couple years ago, at least. My feed list has always included a healthy amount of photoblogs, and “reading” posts from such feeds takes just a second, particularly if the image doesn’t immediately hold my attention. Could be I looked at 50,000 images, could be I looked at 300,000. Regardless, I explored (and continue to explore) a crap-ton of images as part of my everyday routine. I’ve thus honed certain visual sensibilities alongside my daily academic reading and writing.  ↩

2. In actuality, I had more posts tagged “photos” than Reader could actually render, should I want to mine them to the earliest such tagged occurrence. Google’s API limits, even in the good old days, stopped me from seeing more than a few thousand.  ↩

Twitter and RSS

Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of talk about how Twitter killed its RSS feeds. What Twitter killed, in actuality, was the button that made subscribing to Twitter feeds (from users or search terms) simple.

As Dave Winer notes: "If you have a Twitter account you have a feed." Where people sometimes run into problems is simply finding those feeds—in particular, it can be difficult to find a user's ID number.

Luckily, Matt Matteson built a handy little tool that queries the Twitter API for the ID of any public user: idfromuser.com. Once you have the ID number for the feed you'd like, simply plug the ID into this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[useridnumber].rss

Then, just grab the URL and drop it in Reader (or your preferred RSS reader). That's it.

Update: well, since I started writing this post a couple days ago, I noticed a problem with the "idfromuser" site—it doesn't seem to be returning IDs for some reason. So, I made a quick screencast showing a workaround in case the "idfromuser" site isn't working for you:



Update #2: Tommy, a former colleague at the Center for Media Design here at Ball State, created an elegant little bookmarklet that does all of the above in a fraction of the time! It quickly retrieves the user ID for any individual Twitter user, then returns the RSS feed for that user. Grab the bookmarklet here! Below is a quick screencast of the bookmarklet in action:



Follow Tommy on Twitter. He's awesome!

Now, If you'd like the feed for a specific hashtag, simply use the following URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23[hashtag (without pound sign)]

Take the new URL and drop into Reader. Piece o' cake.

How is any of this useful?

Well, since I'm a qualitative researcher who studies writing, I often try to document—as much as possible—the places where my research participants write. That sometimes means tracking their tweets.

In previous and current studies, a particular hashtag has been important for exploring collective writing work. Since I'm not dealing with huge numbers of tweets—I'll typically collect anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand for a given study—RSS makes sense for a few different reasons...

First, I drop feeds into my database application, DEVONthink, for archiving. I then mirror those same feeds in Reader as a backup. If I happen to have a list of start codes or a pretty well-defined coding schema, I can use the tagging feature in either DEVONthink or Reader to code data as it comes in. This is tremendously useful during data analysis, but it also allows me to detect trends as I conduct a study, giving me opportunities to shape interview questions or fieldwork while it's happening.

Interstitial Writing Work

Yesterday, I sent off a 4,500 word paper for IPCC 2011—fingers crossed.

In that paper, I discussed findings from the pilot study I conducted in 2009 of the professional conference as information ecology (details here), and the ways in which those findings held or broke down in a longer (8 1/2 month) ethnographic study for which I've recently completed data collection. Basically, my IPCC paper extends some of the things I discussed in my recent ATTW talk.

Round about this time last year, I was also finishing up a manuscript for an edited collection on hybrid spaces—a project led by Loel Kim and Jason Swarts. In that piece, I make an argument about ambient research—about studying the kinds of organizational writing work that takes place in the interstices, in brief, often phatic bursts composed in small-footprint desktop clients and mobile phones.

In the IPCC piece, I talk a bit more about this interstitial writing work, my argument grounded in findings generated by the two studies mentioned above. If my IPCC paper is accepted, it won't be published until October; I wanted to share a small portion of the paper here, because I wonder if others are finding similar things in their own research. Also, I kind of just want to get this idea out there, to a broader public audience beyond the kind and thoughtful reviewers currently vetting my work in various forms.

So, here's a section from the IPCC piece...

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What "Counts" as Writing Work?

For participants in both studies, the organizational use of social software was clearly strategic and intentional. During observations of pre-conference planning meetings conducted by the executive board and local site coordinators for the pilot study, an organizational awareness of the need to better leverage social software was strikingly apparent, so much so that the organizational promotion of live-blogging, a YouTube channel, and Twitter were key to the conference experience. Likewise, in the ethnographic study the primary participants were keenly metacognitive and sanguine about their use of social software to promote their organizational brand and seed organizational knowledge assets (for example, by incrementally teasing findings from their consumer research on Facebook and Twitter).

Yet one of the most interesting findings to emerge from interviews with participants in both studies was the sense that professional writing via social software is overwhelmingly unacknowledged as writing work—especially in contradistinction to more traditional forms of organizational writing work like reports, documentation, proposals, and email. Though participants were aware that one focus of my research was their use of social software, when asked (on multiple occasions for most participants) about the kinds of writing they do in their work, participants never mentioned their writing in social software unless prompted. When prompted, participants would typically respond with surprise and belated acknowledgement that composing Twitter or Facebook updates does indeed constitute writing.

This finding leads to a peculiar understanding of social software within the realm of what subjects consider the traditional norms of organizational discourse. There is a clear sense in which public, organizational writing in a medium such as Twitter is transitional and interstitial for knowledge workers—such activities are significant in the main, in aggregate, but deemed less significant as writing work when considered at the level of composition. This is perhaps indicative of the emerging understanding of the role of social software within organizations—knowledge workers know such work is important, but don't yet consider such work as part of the writing they do professionally. In many ways, then, writing for social software environments is interstitial—it circulates in the in-between spaces of organizational writing work and carries meaning in non-traditional ways. For example, the phatic nature of many Twitter posts in both studies reveals an informal, socially significant tenor, interactions that may carry more personal meaning for participants than some sense of organizational significance. But despite participants' reluctance to acknowledge things like Twitter updates as organizational writing work, there can be no doubt that such updates, in aggregate and alone, “count” as writing work—often significantly so.

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As always, I welcome comments—here, on the Twitter, or by email.

ATTW and CCCC 2011

I recently gave two talks—one about some ongoing research in professional communication at ATTW 2011 (by far my favorite conference) and another about research methodologies in rhetoric and writing at CCCC 2011.

I've created screencasts of both talks, and I'm happy to discuss them further or to share my scripts.

Sinews and Connective Tissue

"The bundle of concepts tied to the word media is unraveling. We need a new conception for the word, one that dispenses with the connotations of 'something produced by professionals for consumption by amateurs.'

Here's mine: media is the connective tissue of society."

Shirky (2010)

"We view the internet as a set of environmental conditions that span traditional geographic or social boundaries. The internet can serve as connective tissue between and within local information ecologies."

Nardi and O'Day (1999)

Media on the internet (and this is the media with which Shirky is most concerned), whether manifested as video, audio, images, or some combination thereof, needs writing to do its work. This is writing in a different light than we have traditionally assumed—writing as markup, for example. Often, indeed, the media we experience is wholly constituted and represented as writing work (this post, for example), with writing work likewise dictating the visual elements we see and unsee (#000000, #FFFFFF, padding, divs, et al.).

If media, or the internet writ large (as in Nardi and O'Day's formulation), constitutes the connective tissue of contemporary societal interaction, then writing must be the sinew of our contemporary social graphs—the very thing that holds us together, mediates, and articulates sociotechnical existence.

Epistemological Movement and [ Web-Scale ] Ambient Research

I've recently been invited to an NSF-funded workshop at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on Examining Web-Scale Research Collaboration. Not only am I very much looking forward to working with and learning from an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars, I'm excited by the recent convergence of events and opportunities around my development of the notion of ambient research.

In addition to the workshop, my thinking through the particulars of ambient research and the movement of knowledge is reflected in my recent presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a manuscript that's being considered for what I think will be an important edited collection in technical and professional communication. These events are buttressed by my ongoing collaborations with Christa Teston in Rhetoric and Writing Studies research methodologies and practices and Paul Gestwicki in computer supported collaborative work and information visualization. Interestingly, this work also coincides with my forthcoming Computers and Writing panel, where I'll present on digital collaboration and mentorship with Derek Mueller, Steve Krause, and Ryan Trauman.

In short, I'm moving toward exciting in situ and empirical research and practice of the kinds of things I've been discussing for the last 18 months or so.

Participants at the NSF workshop were asked to circulate abstracts detailing their work ahead of the event, and I've provided mine here. This abstract reflects some of the ideas I discuss in the manuscript I mentioned above, so if some constructs seem to receive short shrift it's because I didn't have the space to expound on them the way I would have liked in a one-page abstract.

As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!

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Much of my work is motivated by the desire to better understand distributed, collaborative knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Swarts and Kim (2007) define hybrid spaces as the "meshed and material places" where "information is not only a commodity; it is a frame on the world around us" (p. 212). My research, then, considers the following lines of inquiry: what do hybrid spaces look like in everyday organizational practice? How are they comprised, and what holds them together? How does knowledge move within these spaces as we move within them, and as they in turn move and shift around us? What practices enable meaningful “thinking and doing” (Haas, 1996, p.19) for knowledge workers in such spaces?

I draw on theories of knowledge work developed primarily in Professional and Technical Communication. Both Johnson-Eilola (2005) and Swarts (2007) explicitly link concepts in distributed knowledge work to Reich's (1992) figurations of the symbolic-analytic, where professionals work "within information, filtering, rearranging, transforming, and making connections to address specific, specialized problems" (Johnson-Eilola, 2005, p. 19). Johnson-Eilola (2005) argues that "symbolic analysts are people we might think of as technical rhetoricians working in the datacloud" (p. 19). Spinuzzi (2006) suggests that knowledge work “tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies” (p. 1). A key component of knowledge work then is its distributed quality; Spinuzzi (2007) argues that "distributed work is the coordinative work that enables sociotechnical networks to hold together and form dense interconnections among and across work activities" (p. 268). He notes that this kind of work is "deeply interpenetrated, with multiple, multidirectional information flows" (2007, p. 268).

Following Grabill and Hart-Davidson (2010), my research is interested in "what writing does, not in what it means" (p. 1) in knowledge work environments. In other words, surfacing and tracing the literate activity of knowledge work can help us determine writing's formidable role in enabling "sociotechnical networks to hold together" (Spinuzzi, 2007, p. 268). For Grabill and Hart-Davidson, writing practices and activities are "epistemologically productive" (2010, p. 1), an assertion that foregrounds writing as heuristic, actionable, and explicitly social in the organizational and networked ecologies (Nardi and O'Day, 1999; Spinuzzi, 2003) of knowledge work. Attention to the practices of rhetoric and writing—what writing does—is paramount to our understanding of the ways knowledge moves at web-scale.

Movement, then, is a key characteristic of knowledge work in hybrid spaces. Though we have come to accept a burgeoning "ambient awareness" (Thompson, 2008; Spinuzzi, 2009) as a function of always on, always connected devices and networks in hybrid spaces, I argue for more intentional practices of situating knowledge work within heuristic frameworks of ambient informatics for the purposes of research and production. What does writing do at web-scale, how does it draw and hold people together, and how might it be leveraged?

I argue that our understanding of knowledge work in hybrid spaces is productively yoked to our ability to accept and manage continual movement, which I explore as a function of distributed and collaborative knowledge flows. Epistemological movement—manifested most often in and through writing work—not only articulates and holds together the material and ephemeral components of hybrid spaces, many of its strongest connections are often found in the interstices, and thus remain invisible for knowledge workers not attendant to the continual movement characteristic of hybrid spaces. Drawing on ambient informatics, my work suggests ways that the knowledge worker can practice ambient research, taking advantage of knowledge flows at the interstices of hybrid spaces.

6,000

Whoa. 6,000 tweets. That's a lot of writing. At around 12 words a tweet, that's ~72,000 words. Hmmm...

[ Persistent Backchannels and Social Graphs ]

This a screencast of my brief roundtable talk for the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Louisville, Kentucky. I was thrilled to be a part of a panel called "(Almost) Live at the Cs: Re-visioning Conference Networks."

This screencast details my opening position statement; I argue that interstitial writing work is the sinew of persistent social graphs--the stuff that holds together and articulates (in the sense of "joining and mediating," following Hall, 1980 and Johnson-Eilola, 2005) complex sociotechnical networks. As always, I welcome feedback and conversation!

Twitter and Commonplace Books

Since 2006, I have been thinking through various iterations of a digital commonplace book. First, a little background on the traditional practice of commonplacing...

As early as the 14th Century in the west, literate populations began to cobble together bits of information--quotes, measures, thoughts, arguments, summaries, responses--on paper, an increasingly ubiquitous resource. These "note books" eventually came to be known as commonplace books, and they were a predicated upon tenets of classical rhetoric. George Eliot kept a commonplace book; so did Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, and E.M Forster, among many, many others.

The Digital Commonplace

While people continue to keep journals--both offline and on--the online sourcing and collection of information and contemporary digital reading practices have provided different affordances for the same kinds of work accomplished in the traditional commonplace book. Delicious, Digg, Reader, FriendFeed--all of these tools enable knowledge curation practices which remediate the work of commonplacing to a certain extent. And the affordances are strikingly different: greater access to massive amounts of information, far flung, and harder to filter. If these affordances can be managed effectively, new communications tools can revive commonplacing in a significant way (in fact, if you're reading this, you are very likely already engaged in the kinds of digital commonplacing I am suggesting...).

As I mention above, I have been trying to develop the idea of digital commonplacing in concert with research on recursion in writing studies (and more recently, ambient research). For example, in 2006 my first-year writing students used a modified version of the WebCT discussions area to produce a (quasi) stream of short reading responses and thought pieces that eventually built from and played off of one another. Today, platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter afford commonplacing activities in ways that are persistent, searchable, copyable, and easily shareable.

A key, of course, is positioning the platform so that it can be effective for this kind of work.

I'm still thinking through these ideas, and I'll be discussing Twitter as digital commonplace book at the upcoming International Digital Media and Arts Association annual conference (iDMAa), held this year on my home campus of Ball State University. The abstract for that talk elaborates a bit on these ideas, and is embedded below. As always, I welcome feedback!

A Look at Yahoo! Meme

Yahoo's recent struggles to remain relevant have been well documented, from upheaval in executive management to the significant search deal with Microsoft's Bing. As a long-time Flickr user, I've never been particularly happy with Yahoo. Under Yahoo! ownership, Flickr has arguably regressed as social networks have burgeoned all around them.

Earlier this year, Yahoo! rolled out a new service called Meme in a Portuguese-only version, a move described at the time as akin to a Twitter 'Clone'. I recently received an invite for the service's English-language rollout. Early impressions? It's very cool--lighter than Tumblr, more functional than Twitter. I've created a screencast with some initial thoughts, comparisons, and a brief demo...

Tweet Research: Computers and Writing 2009

I'll be presenting at the 2009 Computers and Writing Conference at UC Davis this week, and I've included the slides for my presentation below. If you would like a transcript of the talk, please let me know--I'm happy to provide it.

One of the most rewarding aspects of preparing this presentation was my interaction with Peter West, a management consultant and principle of Continuous Innovation in London, Ontario. Peter is one of my most important Twitter contacts, and he was gracious enough to grant me an interview which detailed how he uses Twitter within a broader suite of knowledge management tools and ecologies. My work with Peter is so interesting that I hope to work with him on a more substantial project in the very near future, as much of the information that he provided must necessarily be truncated for a short conference presentation.

Regardless, I wanted to provide a preview of Peter's workflow now, in anticipation of a more detailed discussion on Friday:

Peter has developed what he calls an “environmental scanning system” predicated upon a complex ecology of information sources ranging from RSS feeds of peer-reviewed journals to tools such as Twitter. He also relies heavily on both Google and Windows Desktops. He says that “each day, I manually scan the new citation releases from over 10,000 journals. Experience has proven that this is the most effective way to get a general sense of the literature that is being produced and to comprehensively capture relevant material.”

To get a better sense of what this type of knowledge work entails, Peter graciously tracked his activity during the month of May, yielding some tremendous insights into how he scans and disseminates research:

He processed 23,970 total citations, and spent 89.1 total hours doing so.

The highest number of citations processed in one day was 1,630 and the longest one-day processing time was 6.42 hours. Alternatively, the lowest number of citations processed in one day was 108, and the shortest single-day processing time was 1.1 hours.

He averaged 773 citations per day for an average processing time of 2.87 hours.

The Total number of journals included in these statistics was 4,298, however, he scanned another 5,834 journals during the period whose articles were not posted in Twitter, primarily because they do not provide open access.

Peter began sharing citations publicly via a blog called “SynapShots” back in 2002. One of his objectives was to foster reciprocity and conversation, an ethos achieved more readily through Twitter.

Regardless of your perspective on Twitter, it's clear that Peter is a very unique user and participant in this evolving social space. For my own work, his diligence is invaluable. I'm very much looking forward to talking more about Twitter at #CW09!

The University of Texas at El Paso approval for this study is filed under IRB protocol ID #117301-1--"Tweet Research: Aggregating and Disseminating Organizational Knowledge Work through Twitter"

Practices of Ambient Research

I wanted to post a follow-up to my previous discussions of ambient research with some comments on how the collection and sharing of information played out in practice yesterday, for a very specific purpose.

First, a little context. In studying postmodern rhetorics during my doctoral coursework, I was introduced to postmodern and experimental geography by my eventual dissertation director, Helen Foster. We looked at theorists like Soja and Harvey from a decidedly rhetorical perspective, and I became very interested in the relationship between an ontological view of rhetoric and the production of space--so much so that I felt my dissertation work was trending in this direction. In addition to reading seminal work in both fields, I began using Delicious to bookmark links, articles, and especially blogs like City of Sound, BLDBLOG, and Critical Spatial Practice. In fact, the latter blog was tremendously useful, as Nicholas Senn's Delicious page fostered further research in this area.

But for a variety of reasons, my studies took me in different directions, despite some productive work on rhetorics of space (see, for example, the forthcoming Responsibilities of Rhetoric). Nonetheless, I have remained interested in geography and mapping on a more personal level, and in the move away from Delicious to Twitter and RSS (another post, perhaps), I have continued to collect work in this area, especially via feeds from some 15 space/place related blogs or sites. My admittedly inexpert knowledge on the topic has accumulated to the point that I have been able to at least suggest resources for others, or offer feedback on scholars like Sibley, Low, Auge, and Lefebvre.

What I'm getting at is this: through blog visits, then Delicious, and now feeds and Twitter, I have enabled ambient contact with some of the seminal and emerging topics in postmodern geography, and I've been able to contextualize that work within my own discipline by way of consistent wading in the flow of information. Even though I'm not explicitly researching in this area, the work that I come into contact with is still useful and interesting, often for others.

In recent weeks, several people have contacted me about sources on space/place for work in rhetoric and writing studies, and I've been able to pass along research both print-based and digital. Just yesterday, my own ambient infrastructure brought me a blog post on Mapping Play from Alex Reid (via RSS and Twitter), a post and conference presentation on urbanization and everyware (RSS), and an excellent post on experimental geography (RSS). In turn, I shared links to these articles via Twitter, for anyone interested, but especially for those who'd recently asked for sources. The sharing of these links on Twitter also prompted Collin Brooke to post an excellent list of sources in experimental geography.

Anyone following along with even a passive interest in space and place had several intriguing threads to follow, promoting a kind of shared or collective ambience. This is ambient research in practice, enabled by social platforms of distributed connectivity. This is good good stuff. This must be the kind of thing that Peter West experiences almost daily.

One last thought: if you use Google Reader to manage feeds (or if you're going to start), please feel free to contact me about sharing feeds!

Ambient Research, Recursion, and RWS

(This is a follow-up and continuation of a previous post, Infrastructures of Ambient Research)

"Untitled," by gadl on Flickr.

I'm going to begin this post by drawing on some research in cognitive science, and then I'll make a few statements about the nature of cognitive recursion, and its importance to writing, rhetoric, meaning-making, and ontology. Much more of the research supporting these statements will necessarily remain separate from this blog post, but if you're curious about the work I'm drawing from, please see the slidedeck from my presentation at the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the review of that presentation.

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"Every moment in your waking life, each region of your neocortex is comparing a set of expected columns driven from above with the set of observed columns driven from below. Where the two sets intersect is what we perceive. . . .Longtime cortical modeler Stephen Grossberg calls this 'folded feedback.' I prefer 'imagining.'"

"If you study a particular set of objects over and over, your cortex re-forms memory representations for those objects down the cortical hierarchy. This frees up the top for learning more subtle, more complex relationships. According to the theory, this is what makes an expert."

"Creativity is mixing and matching patterns of everything you've ever experienced or come to know in your lifetime. It's saying 'this is kinda like that.'"

"Your understanding of the world and your responses to it are based on predictions coming from your internal model." (Hawkins, 2004; p. 156, 167, 187, 202)

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"We humans are beings whose fate it is to be able to perceive abstractions, and to be driven to do so. We are beings that spend their lives sorting the world into an ever-growing hierarchy of patterns, all represented by symbols in our brains. We constantly come up with new symbols by putting together previous symbols in new kinds of structures, nearly ad infinitum."

"Consciousness . . . is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Godel's strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you've got self, you've got consciousness."

"In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference." (Hofstadter, 2007; p. 295-96, 325, 363)

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Recursion is a pretty simple concept; at its most basic level, it simply denotes things that are repeated in a self-similar way. When we start to explore some of these recursive things, however, complications can mount exponentially, resulting in an ever-increasing complexity; think of the graph of "e," for example:

At some level then, recursion is easy to grasp--the way a mobius strip elegantly bends back upon itself, for example. But when we begin to consider complex constructs like language, meaning-making, human ontology, and consciousness, these recursive things can become increasingly, almost infinitely complex.

Folks in English Studies may think of Bakhtin's heteroglot notion of language, perhaps, as a tremendously complex form of linguistic recursion and evolution. And anyone with even passing knowledge of the disciplinary discourse of Rhetoric and Writing Studies will be familiar with the idea that "writing is recursive."

Recursion and Writing Studies

Janet Emig appropriated the notion of recursion from applied mathematics to describe the ways in which an individual might negotiate the various components of textual production, bouncing back and forth among seemingly discrete actions such as composition, revision, outlining, etc. As an early hallmark of the process theory movement, the notion that "writing is recursive" quickly became incorporated into lore, such that few would dispute the fundamentally recursive nature of writing production.

And in this I wholeheartedly agree; writing is recursive. In fact, writing is recursive in profoundly complex ways. One of the key arguments of my dissertation research, however, is that the disciplinary discourse of Rhetoric and Composition has commonplaced recursion in the study of writing, and as such, has woefully undertheorized its role in writing production and the complex cognitive demands that accompany writing. So, much of my research has explored the ways in which writing actually is recursive, beyond the simple formulations of early process theory.

As Douglas Hofstadter argues in I Am a Strange Loop, recursion is fundamental to epistemology, ontology, and consciousness. Recursion, in other words, is no small matter. It's essential to meaning-making, to subject formation, and to postmodern notions of rhetoric--where rhetoric is epistemic in an ontological sense. And as Hawkins argues, "creativity is mixing and matching patterns of everything you've ever experienced or come to know in your lifetime. It's saying 'this is kinda like that.'"

We learn--and communicate what we know--by continuously looping back to old, established knowledge within the context of new inputs. These complex (often tacit) processes, which are intimately and infinitely different for each person, foment meaning-making. In short, and within the disciplinary context of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, recursion is the fuel of rhetorical invention.

Ambient Research and Writing

Steven Johnson, author of Ghost Map and The Invention of Air, among other works, recently guest-blogged on BoingBoing. In a particularly intriguing post, he said that he "thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books." Johnson says that

"the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory." (emphasis added)

"The first stage, which is crucial," he says, "is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting." If you've read my previous post, and you're tracking with my arguments about recursion and writing, then this should all be sounding very familiar. Johnson says

"I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text--and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online. . .) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink."

As he moves from aggregation to organization, and from organization to the writing of actual chapters, he reads through all of these seemingly disorganized snippets of research. "In reading through them all," he says, "I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of just hints or hunches."

While Johnson doesn't explicitly address recursion, I want to reflect for a moment on the kinds of cognitive acts that accompany the research process that Johnson has articulated for us here. Obviously, the work of pulling strands into Devonthink, and then contextualizing those multiple, disparate strands within the context of writing production is fundamentally recursive work.

But I'm quite certain that Johnson's cognitive recursion doesn't begin and end with the act of pulling, contextualizing, and rethinking strands within the Devonthink database. Certain important connections are no doubt made along the way. And these kinds of connections will recur, over and over again, ostensibly away from the project (yet anyone who has ever completed a writing project with any kind of complexity--from a student research paper to the books that Johnson writes--will understand that one is never completely away from the project). For example, he might make an important connection between two bits of research while running on the treadmill; he might reformulate the organization of a given chapter while listening to a fellow traveler. This is the stuff of cognitive recursion, and this stuff is at the core of writing production.

Devonthink is the primary infrastructure that is foregrounded in Johnson's example, but there are clear analogues to the infrastructures of ambient research I discussed in the last post. In fact, I can think of no better framework than leveraging push, pull, and streams as one is researching and thinking through a given project, and then contextualizing that research through a tool like Devonthink.

What I'm arguing here is that a framework of ambient research fosters cognitive recursion. Conversation streams from Twitter periodically delivered via SMS to mobile phones can foster such recursion for developing and expert writers alike. In curricular and pedagogical terms, this can carry complex thinking within a given content area beyond the classroom, and beyond the computer and course management software.

Wading into ambient research can allow researchers (and I see undergraduate and even advanced placement secondary students as researchers) to continually interact with and consider new cognitive inputs within the context of what they already know, pushing them to consider how "'this is kinda like that,'" how we can put "together previous symbols in new kinds of structures."

So What?

With a more robust theory of recursion within writing studies, the scope of what constitutes "writing" and "writing processes" must necessarily expand. To use myself as an example, the great bulk of the writing I do--probably 95%--is cognitive. That is, when I am focused on a writing project, I spend most of my time thinking through the potential permutations, interconnections, and implications of my argument, and I write it all down (in what we traditionally think of as the "act of writing" or "composition") in short bursts. I can write 30 or more pages in a 24 hour period, so long as I have developed the appropriate cognitive framework to do so. It is this framework that has been made largely invisible in writing studies (though there have been several noteworthy exceptions over the years, such as that of Prior and Shipka, for example). It is this framework that can be strengthened through ambient research.

In The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain argues that "recursively generative applications are capable of producing not only new works, but also new generative applications that can then be used to create new works." This brings us back to platforms, and the role that they play in fostering recursion, innovation, and rhetorical invention in writing. Well -developed infrastructures of ambient research are productively generative, as they explicitly (and continuously--it's a stream, remember?) foster recursion.

Infrastructures of Ambient Research

As I've noted elsewhere, I use Twitter and other SNSs primarily for research and conversation about research. This post details a core approach to the kind of research one might pursue in leveraging the potential of ambient communication.

Defining Terms

Ambient research is precisely what one might expect it to be: a framework and approach to research that is enveloping, atmospheric, ubiquitous, and unflinchingly mutable. What I want to do in this post is briefly sketch the parameters of ambient research as I currently understand them, discussing the infrastructures that enable legitimate and productive research activity that is streaming, aggregable, searchable, and conversational. In a follow up post, I'll also consider the potential of ambient research for generative productivity and cognitive recursion in my own field and beyond.

Mobies

My oldest daughter's 11th birthday is this Saturday, and we're very excited to give her a new computer. Of course, she already has an older Windows XP desktop in her room, and she has frequent access to both Ubuntu and OS X laptops. But this is a computer that she can hold in the palm of her hand, that's wifi ready, and that she can use to text her friends via IM. This isn't a "computer" as we've come to understand the term, but instead a mobile computing device that can do more (better) than the laptops of just a few years ago. She's getting an iPod Touch.

Ambient research is predicated upon the growth and development of such devices, as ambient communication requires ubiquity and mobility. How, for example, can communication be ambient if there's no means for consistent contact--contact that occurs beyond the traditional screen? But even more to the point, ambient research at its most basic level is predicated upon the infrastructure of not just wifi or data enabled devices like my daughter's iPod Touch, but by the SMS capability found in standard mobile phones.

"Smart" phones are fine, but relatively new (and growing) communication platforms that leverage SMS technologies have significantly lowered the barriers to ambient communication, and therefore, research. The combination of mobie + SMS + always-on communication platform (such as Twitter, which I discuss below) represents the fundamental infrastructure of ambient communication.

While this infrastructure is enough to support ambient communication, enabling a framework of ambient research requires an initial strategic outlay of intellectual capital in the deployment of three critical forms of information flow (Push, Pull, and Streams), and the eventual engagement of such frameworks in the form of conversation. Additionally, the initial parameters will need continual adjustment, depending, of course, on the nature of the research area and the ongoing effectiveness of incoming data. Like a growing tree, the forms of information flow will need consistent watering and pruning.

Push

Let's say that you're interested in researching "serendiptious search." One of the first and easiest means of systematically acquiring information on your topic is a Google Alert. Periodically (each day, for example), Google will index sites that contain the phrase "serendipitous +search" and deliver that information to you via email. This is basic "push" information retrieval.

When Apple recently announced the release of iPhone OS 3.0, much of the buzz centered on the platform's "push notification model." As my friend and former colleague Shawn Miller notes, "push gathers info from other servers and pushes out notifications to apps in iPhones." And as Paul Golding recently argued, "a push notification service is a MINIMUM level of platform support to achieve the level of ambient communication that [applications like] Twitter brings."

In short, push notifications for data enabled phones raise the bar for real-time data streams in applications like Facebook, Twitter, Google Calender, et al. Instead of running the Tweetie app in the old iPhone OS, as Golding notes, push notifications bring the data to you--immediately. But what about SMS? This is where Twitter serves as a fascinating example. Tweets received in real-time via SMS aren't technically "push notifications," as they aren't reliant on relationships to individual apps (other than Twitter itself, of course). SMS tweets are more akin to the streaming information I'll discuss below.

Pull

RSS feeds are certainly not new, nor are they even necessary to develop a "pull" framework of information delivery based on one's interests. In fact, many have simply abandoned RSS in favor of the information streams of platforms like Twitter and FriendFeed. But the widespread adoption of RSS through tools like Google Reader have validated the importance of pull--of establishing and maintaining an aggregable and searchable "feed" of information specifically tailored to one's interests.

Whether one uses Reader, Pipes, or a similar aggregator, feeds--and the sharing of feeds--are an essential component of ambient research. In fact, both push and pull have explicit communicative components, as these aggregators are social, and work best when shared and discussed. For example, the work of Peter West in creating "living bibliographies," and subsequently sharing such work with others through platforms like Twitter, embodies the both/and proposition of ambient research. It is the combination of push, pull, streams, and conversations that make such a framework viable--not the reliance on any one form in isolation.

Streams

If you've ever used Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or MySpace, then you've dipped your feet into the flowing currents of real-time conversation streams (or perhaps you're already an avid swimmer). Much has been made of the recent Facebook redesign in the image of Twitter, and influential technologists like Robert Scoble have espoused the flexibility and potential of FriendFeed. For the present discussion of ambient research, these platforms all share certain essential characteristics.

First of all, they are platforms. This seems rather obvious, I know, but this is a tremendously important distinction. Certainly all four simultaneously enable and constrain, and like any communication environment, there are agency/structure dynamics that must be critically considered. But the reality is that a platform is mainly flexible (within reason)--one can use it to catch up with friends (as in the case of Facebook and MySpace), share interesting finds and photos (FriendFeed), or share peer-reviewed journal articles in knowledge management (as in the example of Peter West on Twitter, mentioned above). It should be noted that Peter's work is particularly expansive in scope, with timely links to recently announced books, conference proceedings, and articles in a variety of scholarly and professional areas. The platform enables the widespread dissemination of such work.

Secondly, these platforms only work when multiple connections are made. Having two contacts on any of these sites will not enable a stream of conversation and connection. Having 500 Facebook friends or following 200 people on Twitter changes the game. These contacts--and the frequent conversations they engender--are the key to ambient communication and research.

Finally, like "pull" information flows, these platforms are aggregable (to varying extents). Twitter is not only aggregable, it is impressively searchable, both through Twitter's proprietary search algorithm and through Google (which, as John Battelle has noted, seems to love indexing tweets). Moreover, Twitter's "favorites" function, much like "starring" posts in Reader, allows selective and strategic aggregation.

Twitter is the platform I know best, and it is the form of ambient communication I have most readily in mind when I envision currents of information streams. David Weinberger's recent post "4.5 Things Twitter teaches us" is worth referencing at length here to emphasize the power of Twitter as a platform and as a stream of information.

He notes that Twitter's web UI "assumes we're ok with not keeping up with abundance. Tweets are going to scroll by when you're not looking, and you're never going to see them." This is the nature of streams--you're going to catch some things, while others float on by--and that's just fine, because the communication event is fundamentally ambient. You can never take it all in.

"At Twitter, the people you follow are not necessarily the people who are following you." This is an important difference between Twitter and Facebook as platforms, and it's one of the core reasons that I believe Twitter is growing exponentially. The reality here is that people like Tim O'Reilly and Kevin Marks and Clay Shirky do not follow me, and I'm okay with that because Twitter is a public forum, and they still provide me with tremendous information, sometimes even engaging in conversation. Twitter would be drastically less effective if follow ratios were exactly one-to-one. (See James Governor's post on Asymmetric Follow for an insightful approach to @ replies and social scaling within Twitter)

"Twitter is an app that scales as a platform." Weinberg is right to note that Twitter is an application, but this simply reinforces the point I've been making all along, that as a platform, Twitter enables robust connections, conversations, and information sharing in ways that few other platforms can.

Adding SMS functionality to your tweet stream only enhances scalability. SMS is the key feature of Twitter for ambient research; it means that anyone with an SMS enabled phone and at least occasional access to a computer can combine push and pull (via more traditional means) and streams (via real-time tweets) to enact ambient research. (As I'll discuss in the follow-up post, this has tremendous implications for curriculum and pedagogy in a variety of content areas). Someone with a high-end mobie (like an iPhone or Pre) can engage ambient research collectively (push + pull + streams).

Wading at the Confluence of Push, Pull, and Streams

As an activity, ambient research is subjective in more ways than I have time or space to consider. We're all researching different things, and we all engage the information we encounter in different ways. That said, I'd like to share a few principles that have helped me effectively wade and grasp at the flows of information that comprise much of my online research.

First of all, I'm a wannabe polymath. I'm profoundly interested in the disciplinary discourse of my field, but I'm also doubly lucky to study what is essentially a metadiscipline, as virtually every human pursuit involves communication, and a great many involve writing. In this sense, I'm always interested in the environments where writing and rhetoric occur, which leads me to follow others on Twitter with diverse backgrounds, and subscribe to feeds and notifications that are sometimes flagrantly extradisciplinary. In this sense, effective streams are necessarily cross-disciplinary and often cognitively dissonant. This is a good thing.

On Twitter, I follow others in my discipline, and I'm continuously learning from them. But I also follow as many (or more) outside of my discipline, because I'm interested in what the software developers, information architects, sociologists, and business professionals are doing, and how they are communicating about their fields. I'm interested in the research they share with each other. And I'm engaging much of this information ambiently.

The benefit of this approach to ambient research is found in collision, bricolage, and aggregation; cross-disciplinary dialogue and information sharing accretes and collides in the streams of ambient research, and it is in this collision (and resultant bricolage) that new knowledge is born. These collisions leave traces, and over time a kind of reverse hypertie emerges, connecting researchers in digital environments and beyond.

In a follow up post, I'll tie the notion of ambient research to work on recursion theory and rhetorical invention/innovation. I will also explore some of the implications of ambient research for issues in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.

(The tweets above that mention "PolyContextual" refer to my previous Twitter name, which I recently changed to @bmcnely.)