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John Pray
designer.
developer.
writer.
cartoonist.
technician.
idealist.
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Info
- IT & Office Manager at the Federation of American ScientistsInformation Technology and Services | Washington D.C. Metro Area, USSummary
Developer, explainer, techie, concerned citizen. Does a little bit of everything, and a lot of some things.
Currently managing IT and administrative stuff at a small DC non-profit. Learning front- and back-end web development in my own time.
Specialties: communication, programming, writing, visual design, technical support
Experience- Jun 2011 - PresentIT & Office Manager and Web Projects Developer / Federation of American Scientists
• Web development: Develop and maintain public-facing web projects, including the Science Game Center at http://sciencegamecenter.org/ (built with Ruby on Rails). Maintain and make technical and aesthetic improvements to FAS.org's modern and legacy web pages and its various WordPress blogs.
• Internal systems development: Adopt and maintain Open Source projects to improve FAS's membership database and communication systems and reduce administrative costs. Projects include the FAS MemberCenter and donation system (built on open-source projects CiviCRM and Drupal).
• IT support: Maintain the computers, network, and Google Apps accounts for an office staff of 10-20. Work with staff to troubleshoot hardware and software issues, provide education, and assess future needs.
• Office administration support: (starting in July 2012) Manage human resources and general office needs for ~10 full-time staff plus part-time fellows and interns. Serve as liaison with outside accounting firm. - May 2008 - Jun 2011Academic Computing Technician / St. John Fisher College
• Worked with supervisor and colleagues to maintain and upgrade ~540 computers for daily use by ~3,700 students and ~635 faculty/staff members in campus computer labs and classrooms.
• Customer service: Worked with faculty, staff, and students to troubleshoot hardware and software issues, provide education, and assess future needs.
• Built, deployed, and maintained a Mac OS X Snow Leopard system image for daily student and faculty use on 25 campus lab iMacs and Mac Pros. Built, deployed, and iterated on a prototype Windows 7 64-bit lab image to replace Windows XP on the aforementioned campus PCs. - Sept 2007 - Apr 2011Editorial Cartoonist and Comic Strip Artist / Cardinal Courier Media
• Wrote and illustrated 42 editorial cartoons, 42 four-panel comic strips, and various miscellaneous illustrations for the Cardinal Courier, the award-winning student-run newspaper at St. John Fisher College, and its sister publication C Magazine
- Oct 2007 - Dec 2010Media Services Student Technician / St. John Fisher College
• Worked with supervisors and colleagues to maintain and upgrade classroom technology (projectors, instructor podium PCs, AV racks, and sound systems) in more than 90 classrooms, conf. rooms, and auditoriums.
• Customer service: Worked with faculty, staff, and students to troubleshoot equipment issues.
• Set up and took down equipment (microphones, PA systems, projector carts) for day-to-day campus events.
• Trained three newly-hired Media Student Technicians.
Education-
2007 - 2011Saint John Fisher CollegeBachelor of the Arts in Major in English (Writing), Minor in Computer Science, Minor in the Visual and Performing Arts
Activities: Cardinal Courier, Honors Program -
2009 - 2009Richmond, The American International University in LondonStudy Abroad in England
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Honors:• Magna Cum Laude, St. John Fisher College • Trustee Scholarship, St. John Fisher College • Honors Scholarship, St. John Fisher College • Dean’s List for eight consecutive semesters • AIFS Study Abroad Scholarship, American Institute for Foreign Study
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Repositories
- A Secret Santa web app on Rails to meet my family's specific needs1 watcher / Pushed May 12, 13
- Roundarch Isobar Interface Development's front-end coding standards. Memorize them BY HEART./ Pushed May 03, 13
- A Secret Santa app for Android to meet my family's specific needs (abandoned)/ Pushed Oct 24, 12
- An app to fulfill the needs of St. John Fisher College's Android-toting community members.1 watcher / Pushed Jun 09, 11
- A simple Android app for keeping track of whether a certain license plate has been spotted today (and eventually by whom, with points). For US road trips: US states and Canadian provinces./ Pushed Mar 01, 11
- A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.1258 forks / 6344 watchers / Pushed May 17, 13
- Manage (re)watching your favorite TV shows on your Android devices.90 forks / 282 watchers / Pushed May 17, 13
- Forms made easy for Rails! It's tied to a simple DSL, with no opinion on markup.471 forks / 3288 watchers / Pushed May 16, 13
- A tagging plugin for Rails applications that allows for custom tagging along dynamic contexts.476 forks / 2231 watchers / Pushed May 15, 13
- FriendlyId is the “Swiss Army bulldozer” of slugging and permalink plugins for ActiveRecord. It allows you to create pretty URL’s and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for ActiveRecord models.246 forks / 2023 watchers / Pushed May 15, 13
- Ruby integration with Autoprefixer to parse CSS and add only actual prefixed by Can I Use database1 fork / 19 watchers / Pushed May 15, 13
- A Secret Santa web app on Rails to meet my family's specific needs1 watcher / Pushed May 12, 13
- A modern, HTML5-ready alternative to CSS resets (as used by Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate, TweetDeck, Soundcloud, and many others).1298 forks / 8493 watchers / Pushed May 11, 13
- Library for implementing the action bar design pattern using the native action bar on Android 4.0+ and a custom implementation on pre-4.0 through a single API and theme.1571 forks / 3731 watchers / Pushed May 07, 13
- Markdown + oEmbed + Sanitize + CodeRay = the ultimate user input rendering pipeline!7 forks / 227 watchers / Pushed May 07, 13
- Classier solution for file uploads for Rails, Sinatra and other Ruby web frameworks604 forks / 3999 watchers / Pushed May 02, 13
- SelectList is a jQuery plugin that replaces the standard HTML multiple select element with a nicer and more user-friendly interface. The user selects a number of items from a drop-down list, and the selected items are displayed below.5 forks / 25 watchers / Pushed Feb 27, 13
- A polyfill for implementing the HTML5 <input type="date"> element in browsers that do not currently support it.6 watchers / Pushed Sep 09, 12
- 5 forks / 4 watchers / Pushed Aug 20, 12
- A Jekyll plugin for generating redirect pages for posts.15 forks / 44 watchers / Pushed Jul 24, 12
- 12 forks / 118 watchers / Pushed Mar 08, 12
- This Drupal module allows you to skip the confirmation page in the donation process in CiviCRM while still processing the transaction.3 forks / 6 watchers / Pushed Oct 28, 11
- An Android package for doing useful things easily...38 forks / 153 watchers / Pushed Oct 24, 11
- Dynamically inject classes from future Android versions into old API levels.9 watchers / Pushed Oct 22, 11
- 7 forks / 17 watchers / Pushed Sep 19, 11
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Tweets
- @scottmccloud Google Maps will show the boundaries if you search for the city specifically.
- Join me in supporting Lauren O'Connell @Patreon http://t.co/2XHAtb3c4s
- RT @SciGame: Like video games? Are you a teacher, scientist, game developer, player? Your reviews are needed at http://t.co/N0NKZf9RRY
- RT @kwiens: Why isn't Gatsby in the public domain? https://t.co/vGQSAJBTfT
- RT @HilMarieRz: To the man who thought 7:50 am on a Saturday was the best time to mow the lawn....everyone hates you.
- RT @TarSandsAction: #BP's coverup worse than we ever knew; caused major health issues like memory loss, wrecked ecosystems http://t.co/ZJZf…
- @_WillieClark Safe as can be, as long as you follow only the tutorial I linked to. No way to transfer individual things that I know of.
- @_WillieClark Very easy nowadays. Just follow this up to the BootMii part and you'll be golden. http://t.co/41HuzBHawj
- @_WillieClark Doubt it. I just backed up my hacked Wii's NAND memory then restored it after the transfer. Best of both Wii's!
- @_WillieClark I suppose Mewtwo can probably learn Blizzard, but that's still a really big snowflake.
- @Staples Any plans to fix your website? This is the second day in a row it's been down.Apr 16, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @LoveRockCreek: It's not too late to volunteer for the Rock Creek Extreme Cleanup #cleanrockcreek Saturday at 9:00am http://t.co/8nIG ...Apr 05, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @Steven_Haber Not today.
- RT @romainguy: Dear game developers, stop releasing so many good games. I don’t have enough time. Thanks.
- @_WillieClark I shall check on the morrow! Every day they're out there making DuckTales (after all).
- The view of Boston from our #PAXEast hotel room is okay, I guess. @ Boston Marriot Copley Place http://t.co/8ToxSUGeim
- @Official_PAX Guidebook says 10:30a keynote goes until 11:30 PM. Something tells me that's a typo. :)
- Doing my civic duty by attending a happy hour for charity. That counts as a good deed, right? #PlayItForwardDC
- @_WillieClark Metronome all the way.
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Posts
- Photofo: The Making of an Infographic
Herein you will learn of Photofo, the “simple” computer program I wrote to help me to collect the data that went into the infographic “a picture about pictures”. My goal was to look at all of the photos I took while studying abroad in London last fall (of which there were over 2,000) and use the information I could glean (1) by looking at the photos and (2) by remembering what was going on at the time the photo was taken in order to learn a bit more about the places I visited—and about myself.
In order to make the task of collecting that data realistic, I decided to harness the Visual Basic programming skills I was just learning at the time to create what I eventually dubbed “Photofo” (“photo” + “info”). Here’s a snippet of the code in Visual Basic Studio 2008:
And here’s the finished product:
It’s not much to look at, I’ll admit. But when combined with some basic spreadsheets with EXIF data (data encoded in the pictures by my camera) pre-extracted thanks to Exifer, it became a full-blown photofo-ing tool. It worked like this:
- I’d click Open Data and choose the correct barebones spreadsheet for the folder of photo I wanted to examine.
- I’d click Choose Photo and pick a photo, either the first one in that folder or where I’d left off.
- I’d get the following view, with the greyed-out values on the left being the ones pre-extracted by Exifer and added manually to the barebones data files by me:(That was our tour bus during my first trip to Scotland, with Haggis Adventures. I highly recommend them, clever bus text or not.)
- I’d then fill in all the info on the right, based on what I saw in the photo and (in the case of properties like “Spontaneous” and “Tourism”) what I remembered.
- I’d click Next Photo, the next image in the folder would load, and the process would repeat. I did this for every single one of my 2,143 photos in 18 folders. It took a reeeaaaally long time.
- When I was done with that folder, I’d click Save Data to File and then move on to the next one.
- Eventually I came out with a fully-filled-out spreadsheet for each of the folders full of photos I has. When I was done with them all, I combined them all into one big spreadsheet, which you can see a snippet of here:
- In that spreadsheet, I used some Excel wizardry (thank you Google search) to quantify the data, as you can see in the rightmost columns. Then I used Excel to make charts and graphs out of the data, some of which went directly into the infographic. The rest I used as reference as I made the infographic.
And that was that (it looks like a lot less work in a blog post than it really was). It was a fun project, except for the part where I didn’t leave myself quite enough time to work through the photos at a reasonable pace (let’s just say it was my most hectic finals week ever).
The question is, where does Photofo go from here? Was it just a fun little personal project, or should I expand on and polish it for others to use? Good question. What do you think? Would you use it?
The history, design, social rhetoric, and future of the old Erie Canal aqueduct and current Broad Street road bridge in Rochester, NY. Presented at St. John Fisher College in December 2010.
A Pecha Kucha is a presentation that requires the presenter to limit himself to 20 slides at 20 seconds each. It was invented by Japanese architects but has been used by many people the world over to talk about about a wide variety of topics since.Learn more about the aqueduct’s future at BroadStreetCorridor.com.
Photo credits:
Modern-day pictures
- taken by John Pray (me) and my good friend Joe Caruso (used with permission).
- Cover slide photo borrowed from Wikipedia.
Historical pictures borrowed from
- “The End of the Line: Rochester’s Subway”, a documentary by Animatus Studios,
- the Monroe Country Library System,
- ErieCanal.org,
- and MichiganRailroads.com (the train).
Future plan pictures
- found on BroadStreetCorridor.com.
- Net Neutrality: What It Is and Why You Should Care (or "Saving the Internet: Why and How")
One of the most important debates going on in our world today is the one over whether to preserve Net Neutrality. Sadly but unsurprisingly, you probably don’t even know what Net Neutrality is or what the debate’s results will affect. This is because those who have the most to gain by letting this issue pass by without debate are the same people and companies who control the flow of information to you, through TV, newspapers, radio, and popular web sites. It’s a trivial matter for them to keep their TV and radio stations from broadcasting any information that they don’t want broadcasted. Now they want to have such restrictive control over the Internet, too. This is what the Net Neutrality debate is about.
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Net neutrality is the idea that all online content should be treated indiscriminately. A neutral or open Internet is the only type we’ve had so far, where all websites—commercial or non-commercial, corporate or ad-free, established or up-and-coming—load at the same (relative) speed, and each user, after paying their ISP a flat fee, receives an all-access pass to digital content. An open Internet ensures a level playing field for online entrepreneurs and users alike.
The above concise definition is quoted from this article by Melissa Bollman of The Humanist. She goes on to discuss the current threat to Net Neutrality, as posed by big corporations who have much to gain monetarily by introducing discrimination to the ‘net. This threat is a serious one, and one that we must all be aware of for the sake of the future of our Internet.
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The people who started the “Save the Internet” campaign recognized the dangers of ignoring this threat despite the service providers’ efforts to hide it from view. They have worked for years now to attempt to alert the public—that is, you and me—of these companies’ intentions to bastardize the Internet for their own short-term profit. In a nutshell, Internet service providers like Time Warner and Verizon want to charge content-creators extra money to be distributed to users at the normal speed; otherwise, those creators’ content will load more slowly or not at all. That practice will apply to everything from Google and Facebook to your mother’s blog or your friend’s small business website. It will be (and in some cases, already is) a restrictive and discriminatory practice, but it’s currently legal. Here’s Save the Internet’s 2007 video summing up the situation:
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Brothers Hank and John Green (an eco-technology blogger and award-winning young adult author, respectively) in 2007 decided to use the Internet to reboot their own suffering brotherly relationship. Living hundreds of miles apart (in Montana and New York City, respectively), they felt they did not talk to each other enough. Their solution: to ban themselves from communicating with each other by text for an entire year, instead talking only by voice (over the phone) and (more significantly) by video blog. The “Vlogbrothers” started a channel on YouTube, each brother taking a turn every other weekday in 2007 making a video of himself talking to his sibling about a topic of his choosing.
Though the “Brotherhood 2.0” project started just between the two of them, the two brothers left the YouTube channel open for public view and quickly gained a loyal fan following. The message they ended up conveying, just through their conversations to one another, was that it is okay to be a “nerd”—that is, it’s okay to be enthusiastic, to be an expert, to care, and to be ready and willing to share your knowledge. This accidental movement (eventually dubbed “Nerdfighters”, “nerds who fight for awesome”) went against a dominant culture of “coolness”, of not caring, of leaving the thinking to others. It provided an outlet and a community to turn to for similarly-minded viewers worldwide. This community continues to thrive and grow today, and I’m proud to count myself among its members.
John and Hank have continued making videos since that first year, now just two or three a week (rather than every weekday). You’re about to watch a video from May 2010 in which Hank (after discussing the brothers’ Dad’s recent birthday) gives his own explanation of Net Neutrality—a principle that without which Brotherhood 2.0 wouldn’t have been possible and the Nerdfighter community would never have come to exist (and would probably cease to exist, if the principle were to be quashed):
Next is a video from John the previous month, in which we see a glimpse of some Nerdfighters and get a nerdy-but-informative explanation of a then-current issue typical of the older brother:
This video also demonstrates another important aspect of an open Internet: the ability of any citizen to make his or her voice heard on political issues, whether he has a lot of money or power or not (something that is not possible on our sadly non-open newspapers, magazines, radio, and television). Instead of having to trust the government or the advertiser-controlled news networks to give us the full story, we have other options to turn to if we choose. And that is what freedom of press is really supposed to be all about.
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Let’s say you have a great idea for the next big website. Let’s say you’re like Mark Zuckerberg, who took his ideas for an online social network and harnessed the power of the open Internet to turn those ideas into a real, useful, valuable creations. All he needed was some programming knowledge and an extra computer to serve as a web server (which a friend lent him the money for). (Even less is needed today to start a full-fledged website.) He didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission. He didn’t need to pay his Internet service provider extra to distribute his content at a reasonable speed. He just needed an idea, some knowhow, and the open Internet. Services like Facebook and Wikipedia are used by millions of us every day, and yet they were started not by engineers at big companies but by individuals with nothing but their personal computers and Internet access. This is the power of the open Internet, of Net Neutrality.
Wikipedia, as you know, is a huge online encyclopedia of every kind of information imaginable, with every page editable by readers (in other words, the site’s audience are also its creators—something that was very rare before our open Internet came along). Wikipedia’s role in today’s information-driven societies is large; its influence is so large, in fact, that teachers and professors often need to specifically ban their students from using the site as an academic source (since the students, so used to going to Wikipedia for their information, find it unusual to imagine getting info from anywhere else).
Wikipedia’s history is interesting, and another example of a project that would not be possible without a net-neutral Internet. Click the logo below and read Wikipedia’s article on itself. Besides giving a thorough description of the site and its history, it serves as an example of what services like Wikipedia have to offer to their users:
Now imagine a world without Wikipedia.
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The World Wide Web itself, the open platform which uses the Internet to provide a place for anyone who desires to post pages full of content and to view the content posted by others, was similarly started by an individual sitting at his computer and thinking about what he could do with the global network forming around him. Tim Berners-Lee saw the incredible value of such a universal, open Internet back in 1990 when he created the first website and web browser, and fears a day when that network is no longer open nor universal. In an article published just this past month, he gives his own wise thoughts on the Net Neutrality debate, and reminds us all of how and why the Web began:
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As a technology geek and aspiring programmer, I pay close attention to the many useful bits of new hardware and software made available to us every day. I find it particularly amazing how many excellent, useful apps—both for our computers and for our smartphones—are being released on a daily basis, many for free! And those that aren’t free are usually only a few dollars, far less than those big corporations would want to charge you for the same product, to be sure. Dropbox, for example, is an incredibly useful syncing service that lets anyone keep a folder full of files totally up to date on every computer or Internet-connected device they use. The difference Dropbox has made in the lives of so many people who make their living creating content on computers (myself included) is unquantifiably large, and yet the service isn’t provided by any big, established company. And Dropbox is free unless you want to choose to pay for more than 2GB of storage space—an option that wouldn’t be possible if Dropbox’s developers had to pay Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner each to get the “premium” content delivery speed for their users nationwide (let alone worldwide). But this is exactly what those providers want to do, and not because they can’t afford to keep things going the way they are now. It’s simply, and sadly, a ploy to increase their already large profit. For some perspective, read the following Reuters article (click the Comcast logo), which describes Comcast’s ridiculously large profit in just the last quarter of 2009 (hint: it was almost a billion dollars—and that’s just for three months of the year! There’s no hurting going on in Comcast’s bank accounts, or those of its executives.)
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We all know what YouTube is and use it regularly, despite the fact that it has existed for less than four years. Yes, YouTube is another example of the open Internet fostering innovation and improvement to our lives. But more importantly, YouTube, like the World Wide Web as a whole, provides a platform for users of the Internet everywhere to make their voices—and, in some cases, their instruments—heard.
Independent musicians for years have been restricted from sharing their music with potential fans thanks to the restrictive, discriminatory nature of record companies’ usual practices (not unlike their fellow media giants—many of whom now actually own the record companies). Internet-based tools like YouTube allow musicians to bypass this old, restrictive system altogether, distributing their music easily, freely, and independently. Hank Green is one such musician (besides showering clothed on video, he also writes and sings nerdy songs). Another is Lauren O’Connell, a Fairport, NY native. This 21-year-old has no big record deals, no recording studio, no friends in high places. And yet she has three albums out on iTunes and elsewhere, a popular YouTube channel, and thousands of fans all over the world. She grew up with my girlfriend in Fairport, but I think I would have encountered her music anyway thanks to her popularity on YouTube (her videos have been featured on the front page multiple times). She’s an inspiration for aspiring independent musicians (or artists, or writers, or programmers, or interpretive dancers) everywhere.
Here Lauren is singing a song she also wrote. I don’t know what your taste in music is like, but by my judgement, it’s excellent stuff. Note that she’s in her living room, not some fancy company-owned studio. And yet this one video has over 625,000 full views:
If Net Neutrality is extinguished, our next Lauren O’Connells, Hank Greens, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Tim Burners-Lees will be extinguished, too, before they even have a chance to ignite. The next Facebook or Dropbox or YouTube will try to start but will be choked out by the service providers like Comcast so that they can promote their own products, and the products of those who can afford their high fees, instead.
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So, how do we, as individuals, help to ensure our futures by keeping Net Neutrality around? It’s simple: we just have to make noise. Our still-mostly-functional democratic system will take care of the rest, as long as the volume of the noise we make is great enough. A few weeks ago, a hearing on Net Neutrality was held in New Mexico. More than 400 people turned up, and many of them shared their thoughts on Net Neutrality in the form of personal stories and poetry.
Also attending was Michael Copps, one of the five commissioners of the FCC (which, if you don’t know, is the governmental agency in charge of regulating and preserving open telecommunications in the US). Copps listened to his fellow citizens, and spoke himself, affirming his personal commitment to Net Neutrality (click the image for a description of his speech):
The event in New Mexico is only one of many events and rallies being organized all over the world by ordinary people like you and me who care about the future of our Internet. You don’t have to write poems and go to rallies to show your support, though. The open Internet itself makes it possible for us to make our voices heard, right now, about this issue and any other one we care about.
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The decision-makers are listening, and Comcast’s well-paid lobbyists won’t quit whispering in their ears anytime soon. If enough of us speak, loudly and often enough, we will be heard by those whose job is to make decisions based on what we, the people, say.
The above Internet celebrities earned that title from their fans and not from media companies who served to profit from them (I’m looking at you, Justin Bieber). If, like those in the video, you care about the future of our Internet, take advantage of tools setup by your fellow citizens to contact the government officials who will soon be making these decisions (as soon as December, the rumors say):
Our society has improved so much since the introduction of the Internet. The future of that same Internet depends on you. Make your noise.
Just after I finished this piece, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a proposed plan supposedly supporting Net Neutrality. Free Press calls this effort “fake”, and I tend to agree. The plan makes no real strides toward protecting any of the most important principles of the open Internet. Fortunately, only if three of the five commissioners of the FCC vote for the plan will it be put into action. Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, the latter of whom appears above, have in the past shown their commitment to the rights of the people, so hope is not lost. Take a look at what I have to say below about the importance of the open Internet, and decide for yourself whether you think it’s important to let the FCC and Congress know your own thoughts on this crucial issue.
I originally wrote the above as an “anthology” for an English class assignment, but all along I had in mind the intention to crosspost it here. Everything in it represents my honest opinions, and I don’t exaggerate the importance of the issue of Net Neutrality. Every day I am finding more examples of what the Open Internet makes possible that I wish I had included here. But then I remember: As long as the Internet remains open, people will continue to make awesome things every day for all of us to immediately enjoy. I’d sure hate to lose that.
I just realized that the excellent graphic novel my girlfriend gave me to read over Thanksgiving is by the same graphic novelist my class is going to see tomorrow at RIT. Best. Coincidence. Ever! (It’s Alison Bechdel, by the way.) I knew those two pages looked familiar!: http://www.cwgp.org/alison_bechdel.php
Work-in-progress screenshot of my Self Photo Info Gathering Tool (Photofo). There will be a separate window that shows the photo being categorized at the moment. Clicking “Next” or “Previous” will save my choices and the info gathered from the photo file itself (like filename, date taken, and whether flash was used, which my camera saved in the picture itself) in a simple database, and then will move on to the next (or previous) photo to be ‘fo’d.
(It only looks like a Mac OS X program because I happened to be in my school’s Mac Lab when taking the screenshot. When I’m using it on my own PC, it will have the Windows 7 Aero look.)
Using Java in Eclipse with WindowBuilder Pro.
- Photofographic: Abroad Edition Mockup
Ideally, the infographic depicting the categorization of my semester abroad photos will be interactive. The “home” screen, as I imagine it right now, will be a map. Mousing over the different parts of the map (country or city) will pop up some quick info on that group of photos; clicking it will bring you to a much more detailed view. At this detailed view you’ll be able to look specifically at the information you want, and (hopefully) also be able to look at a gallery of the photos that fit into the specifications you chose.
This is all to come, however. Right now I’m still working on the data collection part of the project. I’m working steadily toward having a working program coded that will let me easily tag my photos one by one with all of the info I want to gather. I;m going to call it Photofo (as in Photo Info); who knows: maybe its usefulness will go beyond this project.
- Exploring the History of Rochester's Abandoned Subway
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
I’ve lived near Rochester my entire life (about 40 minutes away by car), and yet I know so little about its history. What I do know about the city’s history can be summed up in a small bulleted list:
- Back in good ol’ colonial times, Palmyra (my small, quiet hometown) was a bigger, more bustling city than Rochester was at the time
- Kodak and Xerox made Rochester a boomtown and brought many, many businesses and people to the city and the surrounding region
- When Kodak and Xerox made a turn for the worse, so did Rochester. None of them have recovered.
- … That’s it.
I have a feeling that dearth of knowledge is about to change. In the small amount of research about the abandoned tunnel that I’ve already done, here’s what I’ve learned:
- The Erie Canal used to run through this tunnel. Eventually it was diverted to go around the city instead of through it.
- In the 1920s, the former city canalway was adapted to serve as a new subway tunnel. This rail system ran until the late 1950s.
- The tunnel has been abandoned since. The specific part that I’m looking at, over the Genesee River and under the library, has been considered to be turned into a tourist attraction, a footbridge with a Rochester Transportation Museum (according to Wikipedia).
- However, the city doesn’t really think it has the money for this kind of thing. Instead it wants to fill it in with dirt because, as it is now, it supposedly takes over $1 million per year to keep the tunnel maintained (that is, from caving in).
- Now this is key: When the city announced this plan, there was a loud public outcry. The subway tunnel is an important part of Rochester’s history and identity, the protesters argued. Despite the current “uselessness” of the tunnel, no one really wants it gone (besides the city government’s book-balancers).
That is to say, the abandoned tunnel is an important part of Rochesterians’ cultural identity, and they seek to preserve it so as to preserve that identity.
I hope to better understand this identity as I get deeper into this project. I’ve got a DVD documentary about the Rochester subway coming through interlibrary loan. (This documentary was apparently made by Rochester’s own Animatus Studios, where I took animation classes when I was very young—but that’s a story for another time.) And I’ve found more material to read about the tunnel and the canal, so that’ll be good. And, of course, I’ll be visiting the tunnel again. Maybe we’ll run into some homeless Rochesterians this time.
Photo from here.
- Rochester: A City of Rhetoric
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Work on my abroad photo stats infographic is well underway (or at least work on the program I’m writing to collect that data — more on that soon!). In the meantime, we’ve got another assignment.
Entitled “The City of Rhetoric”, this assignment asks to analyze some place in or around our city of Rochester, NY in terms of the rhetoric that went into and that results from its design.
This analysis will culminate in a Pecha Kucha, which is a type of presentation of Japanese origin that requires the speaker to only use exactly 20 slides shown for exactly 20 seconds
along with whatever audio counterpart the speaker deems appropriate, be it the speaker’s voice, music, miscellaneous sounds, or (most likely) some combination of the three. I think the Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) a very cool idea. One thing I really enjoy is working within limits—often a limit in choice in some aspects really brings out the creativity in others.
The most immediate question for me is, what place do I choose? My instinctual choice would be the St. John Fisher College campus, perhaps specifically its little-known nooks and crannies, which I know well after attending and working at the school for nearly three-and-a-half straight years.
(Bonus: Lavery Library’s old front facade, which we’ll never see again.)
It’d be very interesting to me (and I think to everyone in the class, as members of the Fisher community) to gain some better insight into the kind of rhetorical effects that the design of the different bits of our campus has on us. But our professor was very specific about our chosen spot being off-campus. Perhaps I can still convince him otherwise.
I probably won’t bother, though, thanks to my other idea (which just came to me, to be honest). Rochester contains a space that I only discovered very recently, thanks to my friends.
This abandoned aqueduct/subway tunnel in the middle of downtown, spanning the Genesee River and extending under the city’s public library, is infinitely interesting to me. This theoretically-off-limits place is in fact my favorite landmark in the city proper (which admittedly I’m only cursorily familiar with), and it’s thrilling to me that such an accidental, unofficial spot is so important to the city’s identity (at least from my perspective).
My one friend is doing a photography independent study focused on Rochester. As his flickr photostream reveals, he’s visited a lot of landmarks in and around the city, from Mount Hope Cemetery to Seabreeze amusement park. He also visited the abandoned aqueduct, and later took a bunch of us there when, feeling bored and spontaneous, we found ourselves dumped downtown by an RTS bus (thanks to the rarely-taken-advantage-of free bus passes provided by Fisher).
Climbing down inside
(which is not an activity for the physically-unfit), we found this:
a world of graffiti,
pitch darkness, and
mounds of rubble and dirt.
It may not seem like much, but I assure you that it was very exciting to me. Adventurous and rebellious individuals and groups venture down here relatively often, and so it is a place where rhetoric has a role. I’m excited to explore what that role is.
All pictures in this post after the first two were taken by me. The skyline photo comes from Wikipedia, while the Pecha Kucha slide comes from this blog.
- VR 10/21: Likely Types of Conceptual Representation in my Abroad Photo Infographic
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
So I’m planning to meticulously analyze the approximately 2,039 photos and videos I took during my semester abroad, looking at everything from where the picture was taken to who/what is in it, whether it is a “repeat” picture (one I took again, usually in case the first wasn’t quite how I wanted it to be), and whether it is a close-up or far-away shot. (The actual list of attributes to be examined is far from final.)
The question is, once I have all of this information, how am I going to visualize it? That is, how am I going to put it into picture form, in some form that allows a viewer to easily comprehend the information in context with and relation to all of the other information represented? Good question.
Our textbook for our Visual Rhetoric class, Reading Images, spends a chapter discussing the different types of “conceptual representation” (as opposed to narrative representation) used in visualizations. I specifically found relevant the “symbolic process”, which is basically defined as representing what a subject “means or is”. The book uses an old painting of a man sitting in his study surrounded by objects that clearly represent some part of that man’s identity. A similar example pulled from my own Facebook profile pictures album can be found below this paragraph. The point of the objects in the image is not to illustrate the objects themselves, but for them to represent something else—in this case some part of my own self/identity.
The PS3 controller represents my affinity for video games, for example, while the moisturizer is meant to convey that my hands tend to get very dry in the winter (though I see now that there are other possible interpretations. Anyway…).
Alright, so I understand symbolic processes. How does this concept apply to my project? Well, let’s specifically take one aspect I plan on analyzing in my photos: what the subject of the photo is: person, animal, building, interior, or landscape, and so on (deciding on these final lists will definitely take some thought and revising). I’m hoping that this project will help me to better understand some aspect of myself; specifically, in this example, the kinds of things I tend to focus on, that I tend to think significant enough to devote photographs to while not bothering to snap pics of others.
So let’s say I represent these subjects as silhouettes: a person standing, a bird, a famous building/landmark (Big Ben, perhaps), a mountain (for landscapes). I’ll then resize each of these objects in relation to each other depending on what proportion of my photos actually had those objects as its subjects. Ideally, this series of silhouettes, which on their own are essentially pointless pictures, will serve as symbols of my observational tendencies—an abstract concept that is really impossible to represent except by some technique like symbolism.
Did a quick (half hour or so) spreadsheet quantifying how many pictures I took in various places while studying abroad in London last fall. (All photos and videos I took during that time and haven’t since deleted are included.)
Still not sure if I’m going to pursue this for my infographic, but it is certainly a possibility. It’s interesting to see just how many pictures I took—more than 2000 total, with 347 in Paris alone despite only spending a weekend there! (I actually took two separate trips to Scotland; unsure how that will factor into my final visualization, but it probably will in some way. I’m also probably going to break down large groups like London and Paris into smaller categories, such as specific neighborhoods.)
Update: I’ve decided I’d also like to examine things like what the subject of the photos are (person? landmark? landscape? animal? object?), whether the photo is portrait or landscape, what the weather was at the time (indoors, sunny, rainy, snowy?), in what context the picture was taken (tourism? daily life? in transit?), time of day, and other details that aren’t so easy to measure at a glance.
This means I’ll have to go through each photo pretty much one-by-one and record all of the criteria I want to measure, but I think it’ll be worth it. I think I’ll learn a lot about what my experience was really like, what my photo-taking habits are like, and through that what kinds of things I tend to focus on when observing.
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
- A Self-Quantification Brainstorm
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
We are currently working on a project that involves collecting data about ourselves (any kind of data we want) and then creating an infovis or infographic to effectively illustrate that data.
Here are a few potential data types that I might collect and illustrate about myself, and how:
- Photographs, how many taken, where, when, how - measured through photo organization software Picasa - could be particularly interesting thanks to my semester abroad last year
- Cartoons/comics - subject matter, techniques used (physical), techniques used (visual rhetoric) - manually analyze the comics I’ve drawn in the last few years, or maybe just specifically Skip & Cal or editorial cartoons
- Computers I’ve Fixed - how many, for whom, whether I got paid and how much - this is not realistic for a short term project, since I haven’t kept track of any of this info up to now. Interesting potential though.
- Video games I own or that I’ve played - how many, for how long each, which ones, for which systems - Wii and Steam (PC) keep track of your playing time. Also maybe analysis of stats within a particular game, such as the multiplayer Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which keeps meticulous records of everything that happens in the game, down to individual players (as long as names have been picked when playing)
- How much time / how many messages I spend in communication with others, as well as when and maybe even about what (personal vs work, etc) - start recording cell phone records, consider Facebook? IM records?
- VR 10/5: Examples of Types of Narrative Visual Structure
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Action: Non-Transactional:
Circumstances:
Reactional:
Our mission in creating these images was, as the assignment asked us to do, to create mash-ups of found images that can serve as examples of some of the different types of narrative visual structures.
Starting out with absolutely no ideas as to subject matter, we made use of StumbleUpon to provide us with some inspiration by randomly sending us around the Internet. Each of the above pictures started from some image we found through StumbleUpon, mashed up with further elements extracted from specific Google Image searches. For example, StumbleUpon presented us with a page full of artwork of comic book hero Wolverine; we took one such piece of artwork, and set it against the very-opposite environment of Teletubby Land (with its infamous sun-baby), which we specifically searched for.
Britney and I worked together in Stumbling and determining which of our discoveries would and wouldn’t fit our needs. We also worked together in determining what additional images to mash together into the ones we had found. Due to my higher level of Photoshop (well, really GIMP) experience, I did the editing; Britney gave valuable input throughout the editing process.
We paired Wolverine and Ghost Rider with Teletubby Land because, honestly, we thought the juxtaposition of opposites would be humorous. We really liked the picture of the man and the cliff, and added the sailboats to make the picture more of an example of circumstances, with multiple actors that are present but not interacting. We came across the picture of the cookies and thought it was really entertaining, and so we found a kitchen counter and cookie sheet to place them on.
We actually finished this project pretty quickly, which I think is a great example of the power of the technology at our disposal, especially the Internet. Without StumbleUpon, inspiration would have been much harder to come across. Without Google, finding specific pictures would have been nearly-impossible, necessitating us to make such pictures from scratch ourselves. I’d go on, but you get the idea.
This project was fun. I’d do one like it again.
- VR 9/28: Image Analysis
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Your eye is first drawn to the “BOOM” and then to the giant lightning bolt, which you then follow down to the bottom-left corner.
The main “actor” in this image, by Kress and van Leeuwen’s definition, is the lightning bolt. Its vector leads toward the edge of the picture, away from the actual characters present. This helps to emphasize the main idea of the image (that an individual human being is—apparently, anyway—statistically unlikely to be hit by lightning).
One of the small human figures has what could be called a hiking stick. The other does not. The one with the stick, then, automatically carries the connotation of adventure, which supports and is supported by his dialogue, reckless in comparison to the nervous tones of his companion.
An aspect of many webcomics that I’ve always found interesting when comparing to their print counterparts is the inclusion of “hover text” or “mouseover text” — that is, the “tool tip” that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over the image. This “secret” message sometimes contains some throwaway additional joke pertaining to the comic.
Sometimes it can completely change one’s interpretation of the image in question.
So my question is, how does a previously nonexistent element like this affect our interpretation and analysis of an online image? Can we really classify pictures as being separate from their context? Is it even appropriate for me to have reposted the xkcd comic above without the frame of its original page (as can be reached by clicking on it)? Doesn’t removing it from its visual (and technical? HTMLical? How do we classify mouseover text?) environment change its meaning?
It seems my rambling has deviated. Better end it. Enjoy those comics.
- VR 9/23: Word and Image Relationships
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
As illustratively demonstrated by Scott McCloud, the types of word-image combinations found in comics and other forms of visual rhetoric can, for purposes of better understanding, be broken down into distinct categories. The following are examples of the seven categories named by McCloud pulled from my own body of work (all of which, besides the frog, can be found in full elsewhere on this blog). For McCloud’s description of each category (as quoted from the book excerpt linked above), simply hover your cursor over the exemplary image. (Click an image to see the original comic/cartoon, if there is one.)
Interestingly (to me, anyway), before being introduced to this way of analyzing word-image relationships, I’d never consciously thought about it. I’d certainly never given it conscious thought while planning out and drawing any of my cartoons or comics. And yet, in going back through them to see if I could find any to serve as examples, I was surprised to find good examples of all but one of the categories (parallel) in my existing body of drawn work.
My typical comic-making process goes as such: get an idea (usually thanks to a friend or assigned by an editor), plan (write potential lines, plan within the frame limit, make a quick sketch), pencil the lines (lightly, with a hard-leaded drawing pencil), ink the lines (with drawing pens of a couple of different tip widths), scan, and edit (usually with GIMP), which may also involve adding text depending on whether I liked how I “drew-wrote” it on paper. I don’t usually draw the full frames on paper; instead, I draw the “pieces” of the picture (characters, parts of the background, word bubbles), and then put them together post-scan.
Sometimes I’ve varied from this process: my early comics involved no ink at all, being shaded with variously-leaded pencils, while more recent comics were done entirely digitally with a Wacom Bamboo Pen drawing tablet. (Not being satisfied with the quality of my digital-only work, I’ve since returned to the method described above, using the tablet only during the editing process. It’s great—though perhaps a bit expensive—for using the lasso select tool.)
Anyway, I think what we’re most concerned about here is the planning step of my process. It’s when I’m writing the first draft of the dialogue and making the first sketches that (unconscious) decisions start to be made about the word-image relationship. Because it’s an unconscious process, I naturally can’t have much to say about it. But I suppose that submerged part of my mental iceberg must remember how words and images have worked well and have not worked well in the many, many instances of visual rhetoric I have encountered in my life, from road signs to video games, and then applies that experience in informing the rest of my mind how it should go about things.
How that process actually goes, I may never know. But it doesn’t matter, because it appears that I can trust my unconscious to appreciate the importance of word-image relations when it comes effective visual rhetoric even when it’s the last thing on my conscious mind. Pretty convenient, I’d say, and a skill that I’m sure has played a large part in the development of human civilizations into what it is today and to what it will be.
- VR 9/21: OIT Student Worker, Designer
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Working for OIT (The Office of Information Technology; that is, the people who take care of all the technology, from computers to projectors to microphones, unfortunately for me, flipcharts, at our school) usually has me running around maintaining, fixing, replacing, settings up, or taking down those things mentioned in the parenthetical. I’m usually interested in what I’m doing (especially when working with computer software and, to a lesser extent, hardware), and they pay me well, so I can’t complain.
There are some times that doing my job takes me out of what you—or I—would expect my job to entail. Occasionally I have been tasked to, for example, design, produce, and distribute some piece of visual rhetoric on OIT’s behalf. For example, two summers ago my boss in Media Services asked me to make step-by-step instructions for replacing a projector lamp, a relatively simple but sometimes confusing process, for the benefit of fellow and future student workers. I took the photos, wrote the text, assembled the page (positioning the pictures, choosing typefaces and sizes) and then sent the results to my boss. Since I was so proud of my work, I also printed a copy of the instructions on the black-and-white LaserJet in the Media Services office and hung it on the wall near the student worker desk.
There it remains to this day, informing any student worker who cares to read it everything they need to know about replacing the lamp for an Epson 6110i projector. I served, in some capacity, every role in the creation process of this visual rhetoric; that is, there was virtually no specialization involved. I designed, composed, produced, and distributed the work of rhetoric all on my own, with minimal input from others. This was made possible by the technology available to me: digital cameras, computers with image-manipulation and publication-producing software (not to mention the Internet), and fast, cheap laser printing. This is a far cry from the days of specialization in design — days, I think, that are being quickly brought to a close by the proliferation of personal computers and, in particular, the Internet.
Why hire someone to take your pictures and design your page (or blog post, as the case may be) when you can do it all yourself with minimal additional skills or knowledge needed? Why contract some company that has no grasp of your group’s culture or ideals to create your website when you can do it yourself, being sure that you are represented accurately in every step of the process? Why ask your friend to explain some aspect of British history to you when you can find a better explanation with a quick web search?
It’s been said many times, but it’s still more true than any of us can really grasp: recent technology is changing the world, changing human civilization, in ways we can only try to understand and more quickly than we can hope to keep up with. It’s pretty cool, technology. I hope it sticks around for awhile, even if that global nuclear holocaust does come to be. At least then well be able to rebuild civilization faster, right? And without even a need for specialization in visual design.
- VR 9/15: Helvetica
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
In the documentary film Helvetica about the famous font of the same name, designer Wis Crouwel tells us that a typeface “should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface. And that’s why we loved Helvetica very much.”
Helvetica is unremarkable. Like a simple picture frame, its purpose is not to bring attention to itself but to bring attention to its content, to enhance that content but not to distract from it.
Seen as oversized or over-the-margins black text on a white background, Helvetica makes me think of modern art galleries. Bold Helvetica superimposed on an enlarged photograph of a person makes me think of stylish clothing. Seen as a headline, Helvetica makes me think of technology blog Engadget.
None of these associations have anything to do with the inherent qualities of Helvetica. They have everything to do with context, with content, with association. It’s like Crouwel says: Helvetica’s lack of remarkability is what makes it so useful.
If the designer knows the content can stand on its own, they will choose the plain, black, 1-inch thick frame. When the content itself isn’t as strong, or perhaps not as important in and of itself, a more ornate, colorful, thicker frame would be used. You wouldn’t (or shouldn’t, anyway) put an inches-thick, excessively orante frame around an artistically-framed photograph (pun unintended), just as you wouldn’t use Lucida Calligraphy when printing a textbook or even a novel.This is not to say that Lucida Calligraphy doesn’t have its place: in wedding invitations, for instance, where the dryness of the content (“You are cordially invited. Month Day, Year.”) is enhanced and is able to communicate more effectively (of regality, of celebration) with a more expressive typeface.
That being said, the plain frame of Helvetica is exactly the lack of feature that strong content wants. And so, ideally, it’s what strong content gets.
(And if I’m optimistic, that means someday I’ll hopefully be looking into getting Helvetica into the style sheets for this blog.) - VR 9/9: "What is visual rhetoric?"
This post is one in a series done for a class I took as a senior in college on the interesting topic of visual rhetoric.
Just defined off the top of my head, rhetoric encompasses the methods we use to communicate effectively. By effectively, I mean efficiently and in a way that is specially tailored to each audience and each subject matter (as opposed to a “form letter” way of communicating, using the same language and methods no matter the audience and subject, which will take longer and sometimes not even work at all).
So visual rhetoric, then, encompasses more specifically the methods for effective communication that involve any kind of visual element, from the shape of a letter to the animation in a video. Text itself is included in this definition due to its inherently visual nature. The italics I’ve used twice in this post are a widely-used element of visual rhetoric. But so are photographs, diagrams, drawings, videos shot with a cinema-quality camera, videos shot with a cell phone camera, and even body language.
The above image dug up from my pictures folder (I edited it for a sticker for my girlfriend’s years-back internship) makes use of visual rhetoric. The colors immediately communicate that the subject in question is “green” — that is, relating to and/or supporting environmentalism. The small leaf, symbolic of nature and of life, reinforces that.
There are so many possible examples of visual rhetoric that I almost feel it’s irresponsible to try to describe and exemplify it so briefly. But I suppose future blog posts and projects for this course will provide plenty of opportunity to be more thorough. Until then, I’ll keep my eyes peeled.
Cardinal Courier Classics: “One Low Price!”
Original published in September of 2008When my school’s new dining services first started, its prices at “Late Nite”, as we call it, were a bit astronomical. They got the hint pretty quickly, but not before I drew this little number.
(It seems the cartoons I’m most proud of have to deal with the food at my school. Well, I guess it is a pretty important thing in our lives.)
Skip and Cal Classics: “You’d Think They Would Ask First”
Originally published in the Cardinal Courier during April of 2008This cartoon was drawn in response to my school’s decision to change the company providing dining services — that is, the source of all resident students’ meals — with little-to-no input from the students who would actually be eating and paying for the food. It turned out to be a good decision in the end (as evidenced by my weekly-or-more strawberry milkshakes), but is still just one of many examples of the questionable administrative system in place at what is supposed to be a non-profit educational institution.
But that’s a rant for another time.
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