Steven Johnson has a new article in the New York Times Book Review that discusses how new desktop search technologies enable (or stimulate) connections across our own writing, notes, published work, etc. I tend to write this way, but finding the paths has been tricky. Faster desktop searching has really been a great help. If something like Google Desktop would just search stickies, notes, and other types of files where it's more convenient to collect stuff, we'd have something.

Dave

Tool for Thought
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Published: January 30, 2005
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html

Kenneth Burke Conference: News Update

Kenneth Burke fans should know that there has been an addition to the already impressive cohort of keynote and featured speakers appearing at the "Kenneth Burke and his Circles" conference at Penn State next summer: Arabella Lyon of SUNY Buffalo, author of Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored.

Go to

http://www.outreach.psu.edu/cnf/kb2005/

to see the full list (click on the "Keynote and Featured Speakers" link located in the menu to your right).

While you're visiting the website, you can learn more about the conference, register, find lodging information, and submit individual paper or session proposals: Don't forget that the deadline to submit individual paper or session proposals for the conference is February 1st!

Computers and Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue.

Multimedia Composition: Pedagogies, Production, Possibilities

Guest-edited by David Blakesley and Karl Stolley

Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2005.

Multimedia composition is the craft of inventing, shaping, producing, and delivering text, audio, video, and images purposefully. As a craft (or art), it is a set of skilled practices for integrating content that may appear in various forms—words, sound, moving and still images, even physical objects—all in the interest of communicating, entertaining, or persuading. Producing multimedia used to be the sole province of high-end specialists with expensive technologies. Now, however, the creators of content—authors, designers, artists, musicians—are closer than ever to the means of delivering rich multimedia content to audiences. New technologies have made it possible for people who aren't technical specialists or professionals to compose multimedia. Yet the technical challenges remain significant. The tangible incentives seem disproportionate to our desire for composing and disseminating multimedia. We have yet to articulate a rich theoretical basis that would rationalize teaching multimedia as a new, if not primary, form of composition.

It's a wave . . .

Charlie and I have discussed CC licensing and I'm pleased to say that (some time ago) TWI decided to offer authors the option of copyrighting their work in this way.

It's pretty likely that TWI will make it standard to publish all work with a creative commons license with the copyright resting with TWI. That leaves the author with rights to the work and perhaps addresses the issue I mention here . . .