Neil Gaiman: blogging, tweeting, possible projects and his writing process

Ok, so I'm on a bit of a Neil Gaiman kick right now.  I'm enjoying his writing and love how involved he can get online with fans.  The other day he did an interview as part of a tour celebrating and promoting the 10th anniversary of American Gods. This interview is great because he talks about how he uses the internet to promote and connect with fans and how it influences his writing.

Watch live streaming video from neilgaiman at livestream.com

Learning Outcomes

How fast time has gone by. I almost can't believe that the semester is over, but let me tell you that I am ready for a break.  Next semester is my last semester of classes at BYU and in the winter I'll be doing my student teaching.  I think that this class has been a great preparation for using tech when I'm teaching, and I've learned a lot about writing and research.  So, as the semester ends, it's time to look at the learning objectives and see how I did.  Our learning objectives were centered around three important aspects of writing in the digital age.
1. Consume.  2. Create.   3. Connect. 

Consume:  I've learned how to use the internet in conjuction with traditional libraries and databases to find what others are saying about the work I am studying.  During the semester I've searched for information with Google, Twitter, Goodreads forums, fansites, and Diigo bookmarks just to name a few sources.  The value to this is that we can filter our information by finding people who are invested in our research and have already done some of the work on their own. They can be great sources for finding information about a topic of research.  This enhances the research we can do in the library with its databases of scholarly journals.

Create:  I've learned that creating can be part of the process of discovery, but it also gives our research a valid outlet.  Authentic projects have been the name of the game, and that is what we have done with our eBook. I've created content with my blogging and with my Diigo account that has helped me and could also be of use to other people who are trying to learn more about Douglas Adams or making eBooks or even using digital tools and media.  By creating we add our part to a massive conversation and exchange of knowledge that is the nature of both the internet and scholarly writing.  I didn't only consume information about my book either.  I spent hours consuming information and learning about InDesign in preparation for the eBook we would be making.  Blogs and youtube videos and social bookmarks were a great help with finding and consuming that information.

Connect:  I've connected with many people this semester.  First, I've never worked more closely nor been more involved with my classmates work as I have this semester.  It has been great to see their blogs and learn about Borges or Comics or pig farming as the semester has gone by.  Also, the level of collaboration that has taken place has had me emailing, chatting and pestering almost every one of my fellow students in the course as we tried to get this eBook done. It has been a great experience and I have learned a lot.  Connecting with others?  Well, as a class we have been connecting with others to share our work with them.  I had several friends on facebook tell me they were interested in the book we've written and I also sent out a recommendation to some of my friends on Goodreads. Hopefully they will read it and love it and share it with others who are interested.  This is the point of connecting.  This is the way that all of our research and writing and hard work pays off in the end.  Someone will find it useful and share it with others who will also find value in it. It's so exciting.

I think that I've done pretty well this semester.  I've worked hard at getting my writing done and writing often.  I did a lot of research and learned more than just writing skills.  I think that the things I've taken from this class with be assets in my future career.

Our eBook has arrived

Writing about Literature in the Digital Age is now online and available for download.  I wont lie, it has been a pretty stressful and at times frustrating experience, but it has been one that I will always remember with a smile.  My assignment for our eBook was to write a chapter (like everybody else) and to work on the Design Team with Ben Wagner and Annie Ostler to get our book put together in an organized eBook, preferably in the ePUB, MOBI and PDF formats.  These formats, it was decided, would make our eBook available to the most people without requiring us to make too many different versions. Sounds exciting right?  It was, but oh was it hard to do.

We decided to use Adobe's InDesign CS5 to compile and format our eBook into the ePUB and PDF formats.  From the ePUB we converted to a MOBI format for Kindle and I have to say all three formats came out quite nice.  Several different versions of our free eBook can be downloaded here.  Also, if you are on Goodreads, you can download the book here. If you like it, please remember to give us a good rating.

So, what goes in to making  an eBook with InDesign?  It's not as simple as you think.  I'll talk a little about our process.

Works Cited page

I decided to get a jump on the work cited page, although we still haven't finished all of the regular chapters.  I put this together based on what sources where in your final drafts.  We are still waiting on a few chapters to be approved and sent back to the editing team.  Other than that, the work cited on one or two chapters didn't have enough information to cite the pic used.  If this is the case I sent you an email asking for more.  I appreciate comments and collaborations.  The work cited isn't set it stone, and if you can give it an edit, Nyssa, and help make it more uniform I would appreciate it.. 
Take a look at the work cited list for our eBook here.

URGENT: read and respond ASAP

The design team will be working hard this weekend to try to have the eBook ready to launch on Monday by class time.  Right now we are working and designing each individual chapter for the eBook.  I believe that we have gotten past the few minor problems we were having and everything is looking good.

Now, the reason for the post is to show you all the Table of Contents I am making.  This is the annotated Table of Contents that will be at the beginning of the eBook.  It will look like this barring any changes, but the section and chapter names will have internal links to its proper place in the book.  I had to take liberties with a few thesis statements, especially if you didn't provide the "tweethis," so look this over and find your annotation.  If you don't like it or want to change it I need to know.  Just make a comment on this post and include the changes or new thesis you would like me to put in the final version.  Any other input is also appreciated.  Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

Download the PDF here

going off matt's idea

New chapter image

After talking with Annie Ostler and Ashley Nelson, we decided that my image probably wasn't going to work because of some small text the image contained.  So, I decided to get a new image.  I wanted something similar, but with less words or small text in it.  I couldn't find anything I loved, so I took an image I liked and changed it a little for my purposes.  I still have to figure out the right way to credit the original creator and acknolwedge that I changed it.  Anyway, I thought I would put the image out here to see what everyone thinks about it. 

The original was done by Imooty and can be found on her flickr account here. It has a creative commons license and only requires attribution.  So unless I get negative feedback this will be the picture.

Final Draft?

Alright, I think that I have my final draft ready to send to the editing team. Hopefully I didn't create too much work for them, but I sometimes forget to put in commas simply because they are there in my head and I don't realize that they aren't there.  Anyone who would like to see my chapter can read it here, although I'm sure that you are all as busy as I am trying to finish everything and make it look nice.  Good luck everyone! I'll send a Word version to the editing team in case that makes it easier for them.

As always, any pointers or other advice would be appreciated. It's not set in stone yet.

Good thing I finished. I just finished my Dr Pepper.

Draft progress.

Ok, I think I've finished writing my rough draft now.  I just need to trim the fat, tweak a few things and add the bio.  I'm just going to post the link to the google docs and you can see how it looks on that.  Tell me what you think of my picture I used and anything else you can think of.

Breaking Conventions: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Scholarly Research in a Digital Environment

Not-so-raw Rought-draft

Ok, I started adding things as I was getting close to finishing and ended up with some things to do still.  I need my picture, my bio, the last section and a closer and I need to do my references.  I'll get this done today and repost the link to the Google doc.

Breaking Conventions: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Scholarly Research in a Digital Environment

 

Introduction

On May 25, 2011, NPR did a story about PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his controversial plan to pay twenty-four teenagers one hundred thousand dollar fellowships to drop out of college for two years and start their own companies. Thiel feels that the modern education system is too slow in reacting to change and actually stifles new, innovative thinking (Peralta). This is a sentiment that seems to be growing in regards to the American system of education. In his speech “Changing Education Paradigms,” Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, a renowned education expert, also worries about the idea of free thinking and innovation in an education system based upon old techniques and paradigms. The question that remains to be fully answered is, how do you teach students to be creative and think in new ways, but do so in a way that provides them with a legitimate education? Here at Brigham Young University, our Writing about Literature in the Digital Age class has been exploring this same question in terms of scholarly writing.

On the first day of class, many of us were shocked to learn the parameters of our new writing class. There would be no traditional papers, no secluded, private writing that only Dr. Gideon would read, instead, we would blog. Our research and our ideas were going to be cast into the web where our classmates and anybody else can read them. Our tools for this class would be the Internet itself. As a class, our focus has been on how we consume, connect, and create. Social discovery and human filters were to combine with traditional libraries to help us research our book of choice and write meaningful criticism on our blog posts. Oh yes, and we were required to document our actual research process during the semester on our blogs. Yikes! We would be breaking scholarly conventions that had been drilled into us during our time at college. This stuff wasn’t peer-reviewed. Can it be worth anything if it hasn’t been in a scholarly journal? Worst of all, my writing was going to be available for anyone to read? Needless to say, this was new grounds for all of us.

Nonconventional Examples

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is an expert at breaking conventions. When the book that defined his career was published in 1979, it was an instant success, and its popularity spread to all parts of the world. The key to Douglas’ success is the way he was able to break the conventions of the genre he was writing in while showing an understanding and appreciation for the same unspoken rules he was breaking. The result was an unforgettable galactic comedy. Professor Shlomo Maital, a senior research fellow at the Technion Institute of Managment and author of TIMnovate a blog for innovators, praises Adam’s for his ability to break conventions and as inspiration for other innovators (par 4). Adams’ success can be measured in the fact that these stories have been adapted for radio, book, audiobook, TV, movies and even a play. Douglas skill at the craft shines through in all formats, and his fans all over the Internet agree that no one can successfully imitate the way he writes.

There are certain unspoken rules in any genre that all readers pick up on implicitly which, without conscious thought, they use to compare a work with others and therefore determine its value. So, when Adam’s takes an unexpected turn right before satisfying the unspoken conventions his readers are waiting to find, we find it funny because we are pleasantly surprised. Douglas tips his hat to the same convention he laughs at, and we are in on the joke.

One character that meets conventions while breaking them is Marvin the Paranoid Android. Reading blogs and fansites online, I’ve seen that he is a favorite of many Adams fans. A chronically depressed robot who can’t stand humans or other robots, and is constantly complaining, “Life, don’t talk to me about life” (Adams 63). Who wouldn’t laugh? We find value in Marvin as a comical character because he meets one important convention of the Science Fiction genre. Most science fiction include androids in some way in their stories. Quite often these androids are super intelligent and are dealing in some sense with the ability to act and feel emotionally like a human. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is one popular example of this. Classic examples in literature are Asmiov’s Robot series, beginning with I Robot and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? All of these address the issue of combining robot intelligence with human characteristics such as emotion. We love Marvin because he fits this category. Marvin has the largest “brain” in the galaxy and calculates complicated problems lightning-fast--when he feels up to it. Douglas breaks conventions by parodying this idea and showing what the most pathetic of human emotions would look like in a robot. We, the readers, like this because we see ourselves and recognize the irony of a super-intelligent yet emotionally unstable robot in Science Fiction. Carl R. Kropf says that Adams’ reversal of conventions comments “on the bankruptcy of the genre’s paradigms and rais[es] questions about the nature and the function of the genre” (62). Our writing class, by breaking conventions of scholarly writing, is also raising questions about the nature and function of the genre and how it should evolve in the digital age.

The Big Question

Breaking conventions can be a risky business if someone wants their work to be taken seriously, especially when dealing with long-standing traditions like the Science Fiction genre or even scholarly research and writing. It is, if I may be permitted to mix metaphors, like walking a tightrope standing over thin ice. One misstep and you fall through. If writers move too far away from the conventions of their genre, they run the risk of not being taken seriously or appearing to be careless in their craft. On the other hand, those who play it too safe compromise their initial purpose to create something fresh and new. To successfully break conventions, it is necessary to show a mastery of those same rules you are breaking. Douglas did this perfectly in his writing. There is no doubt his jokes are carefully crafted to address convention and turn it on its head. By meeting the requirements his readers expected he was able to break them with greater impunity. Nevertheless, Adam’s books are not often seen as literature worth studying and writing about in schools or scholarly works. The question remains, How do you break conventions while creating something that can be taken seriously in scholarly research and writing?

The Process

Consume:

Douglas Adams broke the conventions of the consumption of information when he wrote Hitchhiker in 1978. The idea of an electronic book that stored millions of book’s worth of information in a small, hand-held device was something new. “The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic compenent is. . . [it] would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in” (20). With monumental amounts of information literary at Arthur Dent’s fingertips, the Guide was a prophetic vision of e-books and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

Writing and reading in the digital age involves new methods of consumption as well. This involves both the consumption of books and the consumption of information as we research. In our class we were encouraged to experience at least one of our readings in a format other than the printed book, just to see what the benefits and drawbacks of each medium is. Matt Harrison has been looking at comic book version of Ender’s Game, considering the role of comic books as literature. Carlie Wallentine and I have been experiencing our books in many formats including text, audio, movie and others. This has been beneficial to me as I have been looking at Adams’ humor and experiencing it in different ways led me to consider how humor works in different mediums and how Adams has created humor by the way he breaks the conventions of his genre.

Our consumption of research information has also changed with this class. In her research on Where the Red Fern Grows, Amy Whitaker has used art to explore people’s interpretations and how art can enhance the study of literature, as has Rachael Schiel while studying Borges. Ben Wagner has used twitter to research and find what people are saying about The Great Gatsby. Scholarly Journals are not the only places where people are writing about literature. The digital world offers many ways to consume literature and information. It can be surprising to see how many people care and write meaningful things about the books we have chosen to study.

Connect:
Adams also knew the value of breaking conventions in order to connect poor Arthur Dent with other characters and the information he needed. Imagine how much more lost he would have been without his Babel Fish. The Babel Fish is essentially a plot device that allowed Arthur to understand any alien language that was being spoken to him. The fact that translation was done by a small, telepathic parasitic fish breaks the convention of Science Fiction by downplaying the role of science in this aspect and giving an important role to nature. We, as a class, did not have access to any Babel Fish, but we were able to find tools online that allowed us to connect to people and information otherwise impossible to find in a traditional library.

In general, connecting as a class in the digital world as well as the physical, has enriched our research. Social bookmarking (diigo, in our case) has been one tool that we have been using to share our discoveries with our classmates. As we come across resources or ideas that deal with our topics of study, we have been able to easily share these with our classmates. This has worked for our general topic of study as well as to share information about each other’s specific texts. Also, social networks have served as a great tool for connecting with people who care about our novels. Goodreads, for example, has allowed several of us to post questions and topics of conversation to forums about the books we are studying. The benefit of this is we are getting opinions and ideas of people who are invested in our book of choice and have spent time reading and thinking about it. It isn’t always a golden nugget of information, but has often proved enlightening.

While studying our primary texts, we have been encouraged to use social networking and other tools online to connect with people who have emotional stock in the books we are studying. This has led to meaningful communication with people who have insightful things to contribute. Annie Ostler has talked in class about the value she has found in fan sites or forums where blacks have talked about their responses and perspective on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. This has been an invaluable resource to her as it offers a perspective that she could otherwise never experience, a perspective extremely valuable while studying a Toni Morrison novel.

Create:
   

I wasn't procrastinating . . . I just ran out of soda

photo by brent_nashville

I don't know about you guys, but when I am sitting down to write a paper, or anything that will be longer than a page, I really love to have a soda or something else to drink.  It isn't even the caffeine, although Dr Pepper is my drink of choice.  Right now I'm taking a break from writing, but I have an open Shasta Black Cherry soda can on my desk.  It's almost to the point that after so many minutes of writing I have to get up and get a soda or stop.  Maybe I just do it to break the monotony.

How about you guys? Do you have any strange writing habits?

E-book: images, links, and InDesign

I did some research about images over the weekend and found some pointers and guidelines for using images in e-books.  This site is a good one that gives recommendations for image size for the cover art and also images inside the book.  I think we should follow the recommendations for the kindle, as that is the device that has the most limited display of graphics. The recommended size for the cover art is 600 pixels wide and 800 pixels high, so that is something to keep in mind when designing the cover.  Interior images should be no bigger than 450 pixels wide by 550 pixels high.  Also, with the kindle it says that the maximum size of the image should be no bigger than 63 kb.  Lastly, it recommends using .jpg or .png images as they convert easiest to e-book.

Links in InDesign is not too difficult as long as we don't use a lot of them.  We can create interior links as well with a little extra work.  I found some really good tutorial videos that I bookmarked for our diigo group that gives good instructions for images, links, and other aspects of creating an e-book with InDesign.

Last of all, in my searches I came across this page from Amazon, that provides several different programs to help facilitate publishing for the Kindle.  Two on this page caught my attention.  The first is a Kindle previewer that allows you to see what your e-book would look like on an actual kindle.  We can use this to test our e-book when it is made to make sure everything flows well.  The other available download is probably the best of the two.  It is an plug-in for Adobe InDesign that will allow us to publish our e-book directly to the Kindle format instead of needing the extra step with Calibre.  That is nice because we can create our e-Pub and Kindle book with the same program.

The three C's

Consume

• I consumed H2G2 in many formats: Audiobook, radio, book, tv
• Carlie discusses different ways of consuming and what makes a primary text
• Matt consumes literature in comic book format, is it legitimate?

Connect

• Amy has had success connecting with teachers and asking them about her novel
• Annie has connected with forums that focus on the personal relevance Toni Morrison's books have had for them

Create

• Ashley and fanfiction
• my blog post on dead-end research

New Title

I think the title for my chapter is going to be Breaking Conventions: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Scholarly Research in a Social Environment

What do you think?

My Raw Rough-Draft

Breaking Conventions: Scholarly Research in a Social Environment

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is an expert at breaking conventions.  When the book that defined his career was published in 1979, it was an instant success, and its popularity spread to all parts of the world.  The key to Douglas’ success is the way he was able to break the conventions of the genre he was writing in while showing an understanding and appreciation for the same unspoken rules he was breaking.  The result was an unforgettable galactic comedy.  His success at this can be measured in the fact that these stories have been adapted for radio, book, audiobook, TV, movies and even a play.  Douglas skill at the craft shines through in all formats, and his fans all over the Internet agree that no one can successfully imitate the way he writes.

There are certain unspoken rules in any genre that all readers pick up on implicitly which, without conscious thought, they use to compare a work with others and therefore determine its value. So, when Adam’s takes an unexpected turn right before satisfying the unspoken conventions his readers are waiting to find, we find it funny because we are pleasantly surprised. Douglas tips his hat to the same convention he laughs at, and we are in on the joke.  

One character that meets conventions while breaking them is Marvin the Paranoid Android.  Reading blogs and fansites online, I’ve seen that he is a favorite of many Adams fans.  A chronically depressed robot who can’t stand humans or other robots, and is constantly complaining, “Life, don’t talk to me about life.”  Who wouldn’t laugh?  We find value in Marvin as a comical character because he meets one important convention of the Science Fiction genre.  Most science fiction include androids in some way in their stories.  Quite often these androids are super intelligent and are dealing in some sense with the ability to act and feel emotionally like a human.  Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is one popular example of this.  Classic examples in literature are Asmiov’s Robot series, beginning with I Robot and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  All of these address the issue of combining robot intelligence with human characteristics such as emotion.  We love Marvin because he fits this category.  Marvin has the largest “brain” in the galaxy and calculates complicated problems lightning-fast--when he feels up to it.  Douglas breaks conventions by parodying this idea and showing what the most pathetic of human emotions would look like in a robot.  We, the readers, like this because we see ourselves and don’t have to worry about intelligent and emotionally stable robots.

Breaking conventions can be a risky business if someone wants their work to be taken seriously, especially when dealing with long-standing traditions like the Science Fiction genre or even scholarly research and writing.  It is, if I may be permitted to mix metaphors, like walking a tightrope that is over thin ice.  One misstep and you fall through.  If writers move too far away from the conventions of their genre, they run the risk of not being taken seriously or appearing to be careless in their craft.  On the other hand, those who play it too safe compromise their initial purpose to create something fresh and new. To successfully break conventions, it is necessary to show a mastery of those same rules you are breaking.  Douglas did this perfectly in his writing.  There is no doubt his jokes are carefully crafted to address convention and turn it on its head.  By meeting the requirements his readers expected he was able to break them with greater impunity.  Nevertheless, Adam’s books are not often seen as literature worth studying and writing about in schools or scholarly works.  The question remains, How do you break conventions while creating something that can be taken seriously in scholarly reasearch and writing?

Consume

Connect

Create

Can we make our e-book with InDesign?

Ok, I decided to make a screencast video to show what I did with InDesign and how I think it will work with our project.  Unfortunately, Jing's free screencasts are in the swf format and I couldn't post it to the blog or know how to convert it.  So, to see the video, follow this link.  It is kind of big, but everything I did was in the middle of the screen.

I then used calibre to convert the ePub format into mobi and I think the results looked pretty good

Here are some pictures of what these books looked like on the kindle:

Terry White's book

And the one I made with our googledoc and a random picture

 

E-book Conversions.

Ok, so I must confess that I got a little lazy over the weekend and didn't write anything, but I did look into e-book conversion programs.  Unfortunately, because I didn't bother blogging until today I got beat to the punch.  I guess I won't ever make a good reporter. That's ok though. I found two possible programs that we might be able to use to create our e-book. 

The best program I found was Calibre, which Bri has already talked about.  If you use e-books at all I would recommend this program.  I played with it over the weekend and gave it to my dad to use on his with his Kindle.  He loves it.  This is a managing program for your e-books that let's you buy from different sites online and transfer them directly to your e-reader of choice.  It has a built in reader too and is a great tool to manage you stuff.  Check out the link and watch the video. This program will convert to any type of e-book. The downside is that it can't convert a .doc or .docx file.  It has to be in either PDF or HTML or another e-book format.  That is no big deal really, Word can save documents as PDFs.  The downside to this is that, converting it to an e-book, we need to have the chapter headings and Table of Contents linked by ourselves.  After reading Nyssa's post, however this doesn't look to be that difficult.  Like I said, the advantage of Calibre is that we can make this book in several formats and post them ourselves in places like Goodreads and anywhere else without getting stuck with just Amazon.  Also, its a free program.

Next, is a program that isn't bad but I don't find quite as versatile as Calibre but it isn't bad, and its free too.  This is Mobipocket Creator. This program will convert you .doc and .docx files plus the usual PDF's and HTML's to the .mobi format used in the Kindle. It does a good job but I find it more limited than Calibre. If we just want that one format, then we could just submit the e-book to Amazon and let them do the work of formatting it.  Mobipocket does have their own e-book market that we might be able to publish on but after looking at it, I don't think that such a small market would be worth the effort. 

I like the idea of publishing in several places.  The Goodreads idea was a great one.  We can share the book with all of our friends on that site.  Amazon of course would be good too.  I looked into the iBook part of iTunes and I don't think that we will be able to distribute the book there.  From what I read, we have to charge at least $.99 for anything offered through iTunes.  Lulu might be another possibility but I'm not sure if they let you distribute it for free. I'll have to check into it.