23 February 2010... this seems as interesting and fraught with possibilities 5 1/2 years later, and I wouldn't change all that much (though Bloglines has been superceded by Google Reader) if I was thinking it through today. I note that I'm not a whole lot closer to figuring out how to organize gaggles of mp3s, though I have vastly more of them to wrestle with.
23 October 2004
My daily routines turn out to be vitally important. If the DSL isn't working when I sit down at my desk, it's difficult to know just how to start, especially when there's already a train of thought running. This morning it was stuff on music, all sorts of pre-coffee fragments about mp3s and how I might approach the ethnomusicology course and what I want students to do amongst the forest of possibilities. These found a direction as I started to read "Wireless music's new social sound" (David Pescovitz) as I made the first coffee... and I needed, needed to follow up with some searches and some writing and some link-making. And no connection. It's not that I don't have plenty of other things to do, read, think about, consider...
There's this choice amongst media, and between various apps that one might use at a given moment... and the desire to be able to capture the moment --the fleeting thought, the well-turned phrase, the passing reference, the conjunction of Web stimulus and inner reaction-- so that its fruits will be available for later use, and amenable to search. Thus, when I'm fishing in the waters of the del.icio.us stream, or reading my own Bloglines harvest, the choice may be (1) to add to my own del.icio.us/oook so that Bryan and Ron will see the site/object I've found, (2) to cache in Bloglines' own clipblog for some indefinite reconsideration, (3) to link in some page I'm already constructing, (4) to put into oookblog or some other piece of the blogworld, (5) to download and cache for some later purpose (that happens with mov and mp3 files, though it's pretty haphazard...) or some combination of those. So much flows by in an hour or a day of my interactions with the world of cyberspace, but most isn't curated or even metadatable. And there's thus whole new explosion of language, vividly seen in folksonomies on del.icio.us, and in the writings of bloggers, and so much of it fits nowhere in the perspectives of conventional academic disciplines or librarianship, but it's just so much FUN...
Taming the babbling brook or the raging torrent is a vain hope, and really one must settle for dipping the cup.
It occurred to me that UNIV203 is really an exploration of information, in ways that the procedures of libraries don't stretch to fit. The chickens of what I've been saying about the uses our students (well, people in general) are making of information are coming home to roost as I think about how to distribute sound examples (mp3 surely, but as CDs? as files in some access-limited form via the network? via some sort of Udellian sampling, or Webjay listings for material that's already available via the Web? maybe all of the above?). And what facilities are available to them to create their own distributables? I'm using Sound Forge about as competently as I use Photoshop: at the newbie ground-level of basic function... so I'm not exactly in a position to teach how to do mashups and remixes. And of course we're skating close to the edges of the legal, and trying to deal with the unstable sands of what's possible, what's ethical, what's pragmatically doable. In many of the areas we'll be working with, there aren't any clear answers or procedures, and certainly none from academic disciplines or mainline librarianship. How do you organize a gaggle of mp3 files? Do you even try --why not just put 'em on an iPod and put it into random-play mode and groove?
It really looks like Audacity will work as a means for people to play, edit, produce mp3s...