Digital Culture Studies

While it has been around a while in a sort of cool kids beta, it looks like Vox is finally open to the public. The good: a pretty good user interface, easy theme skinning (a great feature in wordpress, but not everyone is able to install a wordpress blog), great integration with Amazon to add book, music, and DVD collections. I have a Vox account - I wasn’t cool enough to be offered one during the long beta, but I know cool people, and wrangled an invite, friend of a friend-like.

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I am beyond excited about this:

“The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.” Take a look at the list of grants and initiatives!  And the knowledge network!

If this had existed 6 months ago, my thesis would have been so much easier!

I originally started this site as a way to disseminate my research results. The topic (and thesis) is a simple one: why do college students participate in digital culture?

700 participants later, the results are astonishing, but they have also made me realize that I want to look at a wider range of participants, and then possibly break the data down into more specific chunks, maybe by gender, or class standing, and that I need to add some interview questions, so right now, I am filing a new IRB and am going to restart the project using what I have learned since finishing my thesis to make the project better.

Watch this space! It will relaunch from here.

This is the first time that I have ever set up a WordPress blog, and so far, there have only been a few surprises.  I have never used MySQL before, or PHP, and every site that I have ever administered was built using notepad and a lot of  ‘< ' and '>‘. One dropped bracket and the site stops working. Ah, the good old days, wading through nested tables to find the dropped bracket! I miss 1996!

Naturally, when I decided to put this site together, I opened up Photoshop, designed a site, redesigned it, cleaned it up, sliced it in ImageReady, coded a site around it, and put  up the result as my index page, assuming (erroneously) that I would just drop WordPress code into the areas on the page that I wanted to be dynamic. I assumed that it would work like Blogger, which drops Blogger code into one’s own design.

[ed note: interesting....I hit 'Save and Continue Editing', but WordPress lost the next two paragraphs in the save. And I just had a sick flashback to the moment that the computer on which I had just finished my GRE essays crashed, thinking of which, to this day, makes me sick and a little anxious!]

It doesn’t though, and my pretty design is for naught, unless (or, lets face it until) I teach myself some PHP - enough to design my own theme. The theme aspect is nice though, and I have wasted  spent the better part of the last week looking at all the theme options. They are all different, and yet look eerily similar to one another. It is the death of personal design, but at the same time, the level of design in most publically distributed themes is astonishingly high, so perhaps the true measure of the death of design is that such good work is being given away, free.

Since I started this entry, I have switched themes twice, because neither of the first two had all the sidebar info that I wanted. I can easily see themes becoming my new digital habit, in the way that font collecting was for me in the nineties.

Ah, Chank, the font foundry of my fondest youthful days.