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From Textcamp
Online talks, collaborations and tutorials leading up to an unconference on the 21st August, 2010 in London, UK (Date TBC)
Contents |
So, What is Textcamp all about?
A day spent learning and playing with texts, manuscript images, letters of correspondence, memoirs, and paper goods.
- When: DECEMBER!, 2010 NB Pushed back due to bad collisions with other things in my life... sorry!
- Where: London, UK
Event blog - http://blog.textcamp.org
(I have a venue potentially lined up and waiting for confirmation.)
Tag - #textcamp - For example, search for it on Twitter or Flickr
(Some suggestions - it's an open meetup: any, all or none of the below might happen)
Create and play with text
- "What can a narrative look like on the web?"
- Find new, interesting and - maybe, just maybe - useful ways to interact with manuscripts and texts
- Read text from images, webcams and videos for fun and profit
- Gain different perspectives on content by moving it through different media
- Borrow and play on Oulipean ideas and constraints
Discuss, argue or simply contemplate
- Rich media in books - will video be another tool in an author's arsenal?
- 1 page bad, 2 pages good - are we the last generation to read books where we see the left and right pages simultaneously?
- Self-publishing, short runs and personalised content
- Comments, annotations and individual's critical editions: will we ever read solo again?
- "Writing ability is overrated; popular authors need only hype and controversy to write a best-seller" - is this true? Will it remain so? How can we explain Dan Brown? How might the next Dan Brown be stopped?
Analyse text to find new and unlikely trends in writing
- plotting out the social networks of yesteryear based on records of correspondence
- Was Charles Dicken's writing about industry influenced by the correspondence he had with Babbage or Ada Lovelace? Did he 'borrow' any of their phrases?
- Can we detect plagiarism between the language used by allegedly corrupt MPs and the businesses that are said to employ them?
- Are there audible trends in the words chosen by writers - are gritty depictions of real life made with more harsh and gutturally words? Are comedic or emotional texts full of open vowel sounds in comparison? Which writer is the most poetic in their use of sound - Pullman or Pratchett?
Who Textcamp is aimed at
The curious who want to learn
- You want to ask for help on all manner of things, such as slicing'n'dicing through text, word + network analysis and reformatting - you might even want to learn a little code! (Imagine knowing enough code to be able to plot out the use of a phrase through a set of letters between notable figures?)
- You want to play with the ideas of text and how we can best use the digital resources we have using open technology.
- Want to convert an online text into a book of your very own but want to add a personal touch.
The mutually stumped who want some peer-support
- You've tried to experiment with some ideas but you felt like you hit a roadblock you can't see the solution to? Come along and talk about it - you may find not only a solution to your problem, but that something you talked about inspired, illuminated and solved problems for many of those you talked to. Even the things you might think were trivial. Especially the trivial things.
- You want to try something quite different and want to bounce some ideas off other people who share your interests.
The excited who want to share
- You've been experimenting with academic blogging and have written something that can turn a Wordpress blog post into a LaTeX article, ready for submitting to a journal publisher.
- You've used OCR software like ocropus on videos of people doing presentations and can show how to automatically create readable notes for a video.
- You are carrying on in the footsteps of Brendan McKay making a mockery of the Bible code and others and have found secret prophesies in Wikipedia that you want to share!
- And anything else you feel excited about!
And most importantly, Textcamp is for those who want to not just discuss ideas but get something done at the end of it
