{"id":712,"date":"2015-09-16T13:16:24","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T13:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/?p=712"},"modified":"2015-09-16T13:16:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T13:16:24","slug":"creativity-and-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/digital-humanities\/creativity-and-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity and Code"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The third\u00a0class of <a href=\"http:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/2015\/09\/11\/a-new-course-multimedia-storytelling-design\/\">multimedia storytelling design<\/a> is focused on what I call <em>creativity and code<\/em>. Continuing the focus on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/projects\/2012\/snow-fall\/#\/?part=tunnel-creek\">Snow Fall<\/a>, the class reading for today is <a href=\"https:\/\/source.opennews.org\/en-US\/articles\/how-we-made-snow-fall\/\">How We Made Snow Fall<\/a>. That last link is a really good article, worth reading closely.<\/p>\n<p>Creative thoughts from the how Snow Fall is made article:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Making a single story out of the digital assets&#8230;.&#8221;to weave things together so that text, video, photography and graphics could all be consumed in a way that was similar to reading&#8211;a different kind of reading.&#8221; Talk about the origin of the word <a href=\"http:\/\/latin-dictionary.net\/\"><em>text<\/em>&#8230;Latin&#8230;to weave<\/a>\u00a0(see Latin dictonary)<\/li>\n<li>The design process: initial prototyping, collaboration, integration of graphics and video into &#8220;the narrative experience&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;a lot of trial and error and experimenting&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;design revisions and tweaks&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>filmmaking techniques, but reading centric<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;We focused on the pacing, narrative tension, and story arc&#8211;all while ensuring that each element gave the user a different experience of the story.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>moving images&#8230;pauses at &#8220;critical moments in the text&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Having a tight edit that slowly built the tension of the narrative was the overall goal.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Color palettes<\/li>\n<li>Biggest challenge: &#8220;managing the path we wanted the reader to follow&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Much of this class period will be getting students to do HTML hands-on. We&#8217;ve talked a lot about HTML in the first class and looked at a lot of HTML code, but I want to get a sense as to how far the students are coming along with actually doing something with HTML. I suspect not far.<\/p>\n<p>Some thoughts on topics to cover in today&#8217;s class:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Have the students open up the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3schools.com\/\">W3schools<\/a> site. A good reference source for tags. But, also, for those new to HTML: the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.w3schools.com\/html\/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_default\">try it yourself <\/a>\u00a0online editor is an extremely simple way for seeing how tags work.<\/li>\n<li>Tell students about lynda.com. Not required for this class but a great resource for learning on your own. In future versions of this course, I might think about requiring <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lynda.com\/\">lynda.com<\/a> access\u00a0rather than a book.<\/li>\n<li>What is a plain text file? Contrast with binary files using machine code and with WYSIWYG document editors. What&#8217;s a text editor? A code editor? Try opening a binary file in a text editor.<\/li>\n<li>File extensions. Nice to show those extensions in Mac OS X (Finder&gt;Preferences&gt;Advanced&gt;Show all filename extensions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I had a student email me with a problem in getting an HTML document display in the browser as a Web page. Instead, the page simply showed the HTML code. The problem was that the student followed the instructions in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.htmlandcssbook.com\/\">Duckett book<\/a> and used TextEdit on the Mac to create the page. TextEdit, being a rather confusing software program for writing HTML, saved the document as RTF (even though the student had correctly added the .html extension). There&#8217;s a non-intuitive option within TextEdit for saving as plain text.<\/p>\n<p>For this class I&#8217;m recommending the use of <a href=\"https:\/\/atom.io\/\">Atom<\/a>, which is already installed on the iMacs in the journalism lab. But make sure that students know how to install this on their own laptops.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do students understand that a website is a directory (i.e., folder) on a server?<\/li>\n<li>Create a basic web page in HTML. Perhaps by just copying over what they had done in the w3schools try it editor.<\/li>\n<li>Save the page as index.html&#8230;as a way of introducing the importance of index.html as a filename in web site directories. Stress, though, that not any directory can serve web pages. You need a directory that is associated with web server software. In the next class we will look at actually uploading the pages to a server.<\/li>\n<li>Play around with HTML. Go over again the head and body. Title. H# tags.<\/li>\n<li>Introduce lists and links.<\/li>\n<li>Relative and absolute URLs.<\/li>\n<li>Talk about text formatting (non-CSS).<\/li>\n<li>Take questions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The third\u00a0class of multimedia storytelling design is focused on what I call creativity and code. Continuing the focus on Snow Fall, the class reading for today is How We Made Snow Fall. That last link is a really good article, worth reading closely. Creative thoughts from the how Snow Fall is made article: Making a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6,7],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endlesshybrids.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}