These Beauteous Forms: Liberty, Grief, and Memory
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy …
Roger Ebert and the Social Value of Criticism
On Friday, April 5, 2013, I saw something I would never expect to see: the passing of a critic reported as front page news in the New York Times. The critic in question was, of course, Roger Ebert, the celebrity film critic who passed away presumably (the obituaries aren’t clear on this) due to complications…
Study of Film and HCI
Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here. I mentioned during class today that HCI luminary Elizabeth Churchill had an interesting…
HCI and the Essay
Sorry I haven’t been as active on this blog of late; I’m going up for tenure soon, and blogging doesn’t seem to count for much. (Even though I have to wonder how blogs stack up to conference presentations in terms of scholarly impact.) Anyway, I recently composed a position paper that started as a rant…
Discourse Analysis vs. Close Reading
Introduction Textual analysis is fundamental to many kinds of research, from psychology to literature, philosophy to information science. Not surprisingly, different strategies have emerged from within the various disciplines that do textual analysis, and naturally these strategies reflect the epistemologies of the disciplines from which they emerge. And as long as one stays insular to…
Getting Under My Second Skin
This morning I finally got around to watching the much vaunted Second Skin trailer about MMORPGs. I feel that the framing of the whole thing is wrong. Though virtual worlds have objective dimensions (the code, the UI, the subscribers, the paratext–by which I mean forums, blogs, guild sites, etc.), “virtual world” is also an intellectual…
Species of Interaction Criticism
One problem that is likely impeding the development of critical approaches in HCI is equivocation. Equivocation occurs when different meanings or uses of the same word are used interchangeably. “Criticism” appears to be just such a word, and the origin of this post was to offer some fundamental distinctions among different uses of “criticism” in…
Criticism = Design = Criticism
Here are some juicy quotes by French New Wave filmmaker and critic Godard on the relationship between criticism and filmmaking. As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today [1962, after he started directing films] I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before.…
Godard’s “Breathless”: Design with Attitude
A recent trip to California left me inside of airplanes long enough to watch Godard‘s 1960 film Breathless. This film was enormously influential for its in-your-face style, which flaunted the “rules” of editing and made Godard an overnight sensation. One often hears of film editing as an invisible art, that is, when done well, you…
The Fall of the Professional Critic, Continued
A post by Salon’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek today passes along the chief finding from a study by Martha M. Lauzen at San Diego State University, which finds that 70% of newspaper film critics are men. Zacharek redirects the focus from male-versus-female to the broader phenomenon that professional film critics appear to be a dying…
Interaction Culture 