a thaumaturgical compendium

Below is the ad that our department is putting into a bunch of the standard outlets. The faculty wanted “Now looking for smart people working on cool projects,” but that lost out to the standard form. If you are working on social software, and you can combine a background in social science with some knowledge of this, we’d love to see you here in Buffalo. We are hiring into a Department of Communication, but are part of one of the first (if not the first) Schools of Informatics in the United States. Our school mission is to look specifically at the social aspect of informatics, and so work ranging from KDD and HCI to broader issues of the impact of networking on society and organizations would be of interest.

We’ve just hired two new professors (Pauline Cheong, from USC, and Arun Vishwanath, who returns to Buffalo after teaching for a while at Indiana University), and plan to continue to grow slowly over the next several years. Buffalo is a good place to live: we actually get less snow than much of upstate New York, despite what makes national news, and Amherst (where UB is actually located) is the fastest growing city in New York, with an influx of high tech businesses. If you have questions, I’m happy to answer them privately. I’m not on the search committee this time around, but if I know you and you are applying, please do drop me a note so that I can make sure your application gets the attention it deserves.

Here’s the official listing:

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

The Department of Communication in the School of Informatics at the State University of New York at Buffalo invites applications for one tenure track position in communication/information technologies beginning Fall 2005. Emphasis in communication/information technology preferred with an additional focus on information science, small group, organizational, mass communication, media economics, or health communication. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in Communication, Information Science, or related disciplines and an active research agenda. Ability to seek research funding is desirable. Rank is open. A curriculum vitae, a cover letter describing research and teaching interests, and the names of three references should be sent by December 1, 2004 to Thomas Feeley (thfeeley@buffalo.edu), Search Committee Chair, Department of Communication, 359 Baldy Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1060.

Composed of the Department of Communication and the Department of Library and Information Studies, The School of Informatics was formed in 1999, in recognition of the changing role of information technology in human communication. The School offers a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication, a M.L.S. in Library and Information Sciences and a M.A. in Informatics. The University at Buffalo (SUNY) is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. The Department of Communication is interested in identifying prospective minority and women candidates and professionals with disabilities. Qualified individuals with a disability may request needed, reasonable accommodation to participate in the application process. No person, in whatever relationship with the University at Buffalo, will be subject to discrimination on the basis of age, creed, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, or marital or veteran status.

I wasn’t going to do this quiz, but since all the cool kids are, I have succumbed to peer pressure. (Or, for the benefit of the Mad Historian, scummed to pear pressure.):

You are 74% geek. You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you’ll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you’re a technical geek, you’ll be able to afford it, too. If you’re not a technical geek, you’re geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don’t date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You’ll constantly try to out-geek the other.

74%?! Are they not aware of my genius?!

With this quiz, I finally am admitting that I take web quizzes, and have created a category for them on the blog.

So, I am sitting in the relatively empty Informatics lab during our first day of “virtual” class. I’ve been checking up on each group’s blog, reading some of the postings in detail, and others only superficially. Right now, I would say that some of the blogs are off to a very promising start, while others need think about how they are going to start becoming really good. I’ll be sending out the first set of grades on the blogs not this weekend, but next. My main focus will be on the content of the blogs: are the postings interesting, original, provocative? Are you developing a “voice” or tone for your blog?

I would suggest that you reach consensus within your group that you are OK with one another editing your posts. There are spelling and grammar errors out there, and that really affects the ethos of your blog.

The next week will be a bit strange. I do want to look a bit more at the practical aspects of blogging, including how to make your blog look unique and interesting. I also want to work a bit with the idea of presenting a public face, and how “personal branding” might be tied to blogs and other online technologies. On the other hand, it will also be a bit of a “field trip” week. Not necessarily for you, but for me. I am doing a couple of presentations in the UK this week. I’ll blog the outlines of my lectures, as well as some observations based on what I hear.

Finally, this is the last entry in which I’m going to put [MITIA] in the title. You can still know which ones are class-specific, because they will be in the MITIA category (look up to the right of this entry).

If you are a UB student interested in going into journalism, hopefully you already know that you will need an internship if you want a good chance of landing a job later on. Now is the time to be looking for internships for next summer. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association publishes an internship guide that will help you find positions to apply for.

One of the students in my graduate class has posted an experience she had at the local mall, in which a salesperson (male) physically grabbed her and pulled her somewhere. In my reading, this could easily be seen as assault: no one touches someone’s face uninvited.

She wonders why she was not more active in resisting this. I’ve talked to many people — not just women, but mostly — who have been in similar situations, and unprepared, are just too stunned to speak out. I’m reminded a bit of a recent NYT article on Milgram’s attempts at crossing social lines in a subway. The “victims” of this experiment generally complied, in part, I suspect, because they didn’t have a schema to resist it. It was simply a very unexpected event.

I guess part of it is that it’s really important for people to be prepared — as much as possible — for such breaches of civility. I think women are generally more aware today about rape, even if they have not had someone attempt to rape them, and have in mind some of the ways they can respond. But there are a range of physical attacks that they may not be prepared to react to. I suspect this might also have something to do with socialization: boys are often taught that it is both acceptable and even admirable to respond physically to a physical intrusion, whereas many girls do not have the opportunity to learn how they can or should behave when their physical privacy is intruded upon.

Of course, the terrible part of this is that reporting this incident (which I think is vital), may have little or no effect on what happens in the future. Many organizations have people within them that have been repeatedly accused of, for example, harassment, but there is nothing done until the complaints are deafening. And for every complaint, there are ten people who silently abide by the behavior.

In her shoes, I would contact not mall management, but Kaufman’s customer service. When they know that another shop in the mall is assaulting their customers on the way out, I suspect they will have more of an impact than a single customer will have on the mall management.

This semester, I joined 11 million other people and began IMing at work. Now, I’m not exactly new to the IM thing. Heck, I remember spending hours text-chatting two decades ago, and my ICQ number has an enviable number of digits. (Now if I could just remember the password.) But most people didn’t have my account number and I liked it that way.

This was the first semester I put an AIM address on my web site and my syllabi. Note that AIM is the preferred IM system on campus; it is distributed on the freshman CD-ROM, and the reference librarians are available on it. And so while students always *could* reach me on IM, now it’s much easier.

As a result, I get the pop-up window at all hours of the day. But I really don’t mind. Sometimes they get the answer they are looking for, and if I just don’t have the time, it’s much more flexible. I haven’t had an undergrad come in to office hours yet this year, but I’ve chatted on IM with several.

Lots of people talk about how new communication systems lead to more frantic lives. It seems to me that this is a perfect example of how that is not always the case. Frankly, students seem to drop by my office at the worst of times. As soon as I begin working to a deadline, I get students (and faculty) dropping by my office to chat. I always feel rude saying that I have to get to work on something, but IM does not require the same level of, well, politeness.

For me, at least so far, it has been a completely positive experience. Another faculty member prefers to chat with students on the phone. I don’t like to do this, but I may very well publish my Skype address next semester, just to see if I get any takers.

What is HTML

Lao Tzu suggests that the best way to start a long journey is from the very beginning. Last week we made a few first steps into HTML and CSS that would allow us to provide a bit of structure to our blog entries. You’ll recall that I suggested your brain might have been mushed by much of that. It’s not uncommon. So, I’ll recapitulate some of that discussion here.

We are used to thinking of altering text in WYSIWYG applications like Microsoft Word. In Word, if you want something to be italicized, you might highlight the text and click on a button that says “italicize.” The word on your screen then gets a bit squashed and slanted. Behind the scenes, a bit more is going on, but on the screen you only see the effect. In fact, it’s really hard (especially as a human) to read the “behind the scenes” files in the case of Word, but in the case of the Web, it’s at least a little bit easier.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a set of codes for “marking up” text, a term that comes from the days of typewritten (or handwritten) manuscripts that would later go to a printer. You might, for example, circle a bunch of text and say “make this bold or something.” Today, the browser is the printer, and by annotating your text, you can tell the browser how you would like something displayed (or, what kind of information some piece of text is).

Tagging the text

To mark up a piece of text, you put a tag at the beginning of a piece of text, and another tag at its end. For example, if you wanted to emphasize a word, you might write:

Now, <em>that</em> is an interesting question.

In this case, the tag we are using is em, used to emphasize something. A tag is made up of a pair of angle brackets <em>. The end tag is made up of a slash before the tag </em>. The same is true of all tags. For example, the <strong> tag is a way of saying you want some word, or group of words, or even a whole page to be expressed “strongly.” (Normally, the way this is interpreted as a request for “bolding” some section.) You would begin a section with <strong> and end with </strong>.

These tags can be “nested” — that is to say, you might want some text to both be emphasized and strong. For example:

Now, <em><strong>that</strong></em> is an interesting question.

In fact, on most web pages there are nests inside of nests inside of nests. But for blogging, you usually only will use a few tags and don’t have to worry about the more complicated structures.

Once you understand how the tags work, it’s easy to add tags to your vocabulary. Let’s look at some of the others:

<blockquote>: By placing blockquote tags around a piece of text, it is usually set off by larger left and right margins. More importantly, this lets people know about the content: it’s not yours, it’s a quotation.

<p>: This tag marks off a paragraph. Again, it can be rendered (displayed) in various ways, but usually this puts a line before and after the section of text.

Tag attributes

Tags can also have options related to them that further explain what to do with text. Take, for example, the <a> tag makes a piece of text into a hyperlink. But unless you tell it where to link, how can it know? In fact, in some browsers, if you write

Try searching on <a>Google</a>.

The browser won’t do anything at all to the text within the tag. The attribute you need to include is a reference to a hypertext page, or an “href.”

Try searching on <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>.

There are two things important to note here. First, the href= part only appears in the first, opening, tag. The closing tag does not have to then repeat this. Second, note that the URL is a fully validated URL, including the http:// part that you might normally skip. In fact, this is the most common mistake that people learning HTML make. If you leave the http:// part off, the link won’t work correctly.

There are some tags, including <div> and <span> that are designed mostly just to hold attributes! They don’t really do much by themselves.

Just a little CSS

One of the attributes you can add to an HTML tag is the “style” tag, which you can use to gain a bit more control over how text is displayed. The style tag allows you to describe how to display something using Cascading Style Sheets. There is no reason to go into depth regarding CSS here, but we should touch on the idea of separating content and display.

Style sheets are designed as a way for telling the computer how to display chunks of text identified by HTML (and other markup language). For example, you might want to say that a section of text is blockquote, but want to ask the browser to do more than the standard margin adjustment. Maybe you want the text to be smaller when a blockquote is used. Later, we’ll get to the idea of how CSS can be largely separated from HTML, but for now, let’s see what they can do together.

Consider this section of text, surrounded by the <p> tag:

<p style="font-size: 6pt;">This is a section of text that explains a very small idea.</p>

This paragraph tag includes an attribute that defines a style for the paragraph, a set of more specific requests for the display of the information. Inside the quotation marks for the font-size attribute there can be one or more style requests, each followed by a semicolon. In this case, we have requested that the font be very, very small: six points. There are other measurements you can use. For example, you could request that the paragraph be written in six-inch letters:

<p style="font-size: 6in;">This is a section of text that explains a very small idea.</p>

If you try this, you will find that it isn’t a very effective size to use on the web. There are many other measurements — including ems, centimeters, and pixels — that you can use.

We can add another style request to the paragraph:

<p style="font-size: 6pt; color: red;">This is a section of text that explains a very small idea.</p>

It should be pretty obvious what this does to the output. Like HTML tags, there are a dozens of other style attributes you can use to affect the way your text is displayed. Later, we will talk about how to use CSS to affect the way your page is displayed, and where pieces of text are placed on the page.

Self-closing tags

There are a handful of HTML tags that don’t enclose anything. It doesn’t make sense for these to have a closing tag. Consider the line-break tag, BR. We could have an open and close break tag, like this: <br> </br>. But for a line-break, there is nothing that seems to make sense that would come between the open and close tag. So, we can collapse it into a single tag, but typing <br />. This tag can be used by itself, as a single, self-closing tag. So,

First line<br />next line.

will be displayed on two separate lines.

Another important tag that is self-closing is the <img /> tag, which displays an image on the page. The image tag, of course, needs some attributes for it to work. The one most vital attribute is the “src” attribute, telling the browser where to find the image to display. If you include the following code, for example, an image of me will be displayed:

<img src="http://alex.halavais.net/photos/photos/alexpics/unhuried.jpg" />

Moving forward

You now know almost enough to code HTML “by hand.” There are some important pieces missing, but these are fairly trivial. Once you understand the very basic elements of HTML, you can easily add new tags to your vocabulary, and learn some of the tricks of the trade.

A good place to start might be the cheat sheets found at Web Monkey for <a href=”http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/html_cheatsheet/”>HTML, or the CSS tutorial. But there are a lot of other good online resources for learning more. I encourage readers to add their favorites in the comments.