Author: Courtney Minden

https://dtc-wsuv.org/cminden22/fear-of-coding/

Here is the final version of the fear of coding

https://dtc-wsuv.org/cminden22/fear%20of%20coding/c1.html

Here is the link to our website for fear of coding

A podcast I like to listen to is The Brian Buffini Show by Brian Buffini that my dad introduced me to a while back. The majority of the podcast themes are about how to handle money while working and communicating with others. I felt like the podcast are helpful to me because they give good advice about communicating and interacting with other people. I do not listen to it often, but every now and then I will come back and I will listen to it.

I think that digital publishing through audio is a good way because  of how it allows the listeners to just listen and not have to look at any screen or a speaker. Sometimes someone would like to listen to something and does not want to have keep looking at a different direction. I know for me that there are times that I just want to listen to a story while I clean or do homework without getting distracted because of video aspect. Audio publishing work so well because they are designed for people to just listening and not watching. They can add sound effects and music while the listeners can use their imagination to fill in the visual aspect. Because they are designed for just listening, people can play them and can be doing a different task all together while listening into the podcast or audiobook. Overall, I cannot think of any thing that would make audio publishing bad.

The quote I chose to use is the second sentence in The Language section of the reading:

“The starting point of the transmission of mental images is always an intention: we speak to transmit a particular image“.

This quote can be use to describe different languages interact with one another. Each language wants to create their own image of what they see in their own context for others to understand. Coding html is similar to language with the difference being it is a typing format. Learning a new language is always scary at first due to not knowing what the language it is saying just like html. Once someone starts to learn the language they start to get better and better until they can speak it fluently.

For the group project I would like our group to approach the project in this matter: coding in html is scary at first and can be crazy once you see the whole code. However, once someone starts to learn all the coding rules, then it starts to get easier and you get better and better as you keep keep practicing and learning new things. The story would start with someone scared and freaking out because they do not understand how to code in html. As the story progresses, the character will start to get more confident and at the end of the story the character will be full of confidence and ready to start coding in html for real. It is easier to take a language you know and compare to another language to help learn which is what html does with some of its “commands” to make a webpage come to life. This actually made it a lot easier for me to understand how coding works and how to write it myself. I may accidentally forget something here or there about what I need to write, but I just end up figuring it out again.

https://dtc-wsuv.org/cminden22/dtc338-epub-assignmen-cminden/

Here is the link to my Epub assignment.

In my case, screen reading has multimedia aspects and hyperlinks with if there is like a word that I do not understand, I can easily look it up and learn more about it. For the many readings that I have to do for school, some have ways for me to end up going a little off topic and accidentally read something different from the main topic rather that a book where I just keep moving forward in the book.

For reading habits they have somewhat stayed the same with me reading with a few skims around where I read. If I enjoy the content of the story then I would take more time reading it and dive deeply into it. It does not usually matter if it is online or book form if I want to read it, but if I cannot enjoy the story then I do more skimming than usual. For online reading it is more on the skimming than reading so that would be the biggest difference of the story. While for school reading my habits just like what Hayles said about schools in her paper, “Educational institutions have specialized in these environments, combining such resources as quiet with an assigned task that demands deep attention to complete successfully.” Schools taught me how to find certain information and giving me good resources to find things for research. I do also like images in my readings because they usually help me understand what I am reading and puts the words into a visual perspective.

My first story is “The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold and it is about two men with one named John Morgan and an unnamed character. Both of them are on a radio show that talks about unfortunate events that happen all around the world. One late night, a story about a town called Xebico being taken in a humungous fog and Morgan starts to tell about it while getting more uneasy the more he read about it. However, it wasn’t broadcasting and when the unnamed character tries to tell Morgan, he was dead. The unnamed character decided to stop doing this and Morgan’s death remained a mystery.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68555/68555-h/68555-h.htm

My second story is “There is a Reaper” by Charles V. De Vet and it is about a man who is told that he has a limited time left until he dies. The man then wonders what it is like to dye, so he picks a homeless man to tell him. He put poison in a drink and gave it to him and starts asking him what it feel like dying with the homeless man telling how it feels. Before the homeless man dies the man then asks what he is waiting for with him answering that the homeless man is waiting for him.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29954/29954-h/29954-h.htm

When looking at any library around the world, there are only a handful of books for a wide audience. There is usually a section for children, young adults, adults, and many more within the library. Finding the books that one enjoys to read can take a while to find, or might not even be there due to either being checked out by some other reader or transferred to another library. Now that there is an emergence of digital libraries that exist where one could find their favorite books online with a few requiring a fee to read certain books. However, the reader now loses that connection of reading a physical copy of the book by flipping through the pages, or wandering through a library to look for their books. Readers also lose connection to other people who they would read books with and would not know what other readers think about a certain book. They could through online comments, but not at areas where they saw that within the book. But what if there was a way to be able to wander through a library, not a real one, but a virtual library. With the emergence of virtual and augmented reality, creating a space where a virtual library can be seen is possible.

Imagine being in a normal room: put on a pair of VR goggles or put a portable device in front of one’s eyes, and instead of a normal room there is a library with shelves of books to the ceiling. One can change the genre of books around in this “virtual library” for which book they would want to read and are capable of “pulling” the book out of the bookshelf and looking through it. This is the beginning of the virtual library, one where readers could explore all of their favorite works, take a book off a shelf, and start reading it just as if they are in a library. According to Borsuk, the Internet Archive has more than twenty scanning areas where they scan  books to preserve them in modern times by treating them with the utmost respect (The Book, pg. 218-219). Within the virtual library, the reader would be able to access these books . They would only be able to read a certain amount of the book by either “flipping” the pages or through an e-textbook format before the virtual library would want the reader to “check out” and “return” within a timeframe. If the reader wants to keep the book that they enjoy reading over and over again, then the digital library would help the reader to find the version of their book, either physical or digital, to buy and keep. If the reader wants to explore this virtual library with others, then for VR they could all connect to a shared library or they could hang out together within one room to explore in AR. According to Carrion, the “definition of the book as a ‘sequence of spaces’” (The Book, pg 149), meaning that books are meant to take up space within the area a book is produced. So even within a digital library, a book can still exist due to the fact that a book is the space within an area of space. Other readers can be welcomed into such spaces to comment on their favorite books and allow other readers to know which parts got them interested and why. With the whole room transformed into a digital library where one can change between different age groups or genres to find the perfect books for them to read, the world of reading will keep expanding.

Each author has their own way of telling their stories: some like to allow the reader’s imagination run wild while others would show the reader their world through images, drawings, fictional or historical maps, or any form of visual looking. The virtual library can still allow readers to just use their imagination and would help amplify that. The virtual library would turn the reader’s surroundings into where the reader would feel most comfortable reading in by a menu of option themes. If the reader would enjoy the visuals of the book, then they can keep it and the virtual library would then transform into a world of the books. According to Borsuk about the book, “Because they are unbound, each leaf of the slot-books can be oriented four ways as well as flipped” (The Book, pg 178). Each author has their own way of telling their stories: some like to allow the reader’s imagination run wild while others would show the reader their world through images, drawings, fictional or historical maps, or any form of visual looking. The virtual library can still allow readers to just use their imagination and would help amplify that. The virtual library would turn the reader’s surroundings into where the reader would feel most comfortable reading in by a menu of option themes. If the reader would enjoy the visuals of the book, then they can keep it and the virtual library would then transform into a world of the books. Each author has their own way of telling their stories: some like to allow the reader’s imagination run wild while others would show the reader their world through images, drawings, fictional or historical maps, or any form of visual looking. The virtual library can still allow readers to just use their imagination and would help amplify that. The virtual library would turn the reader’s surroundings into where the reader would feel most comfortable reading in by a menu of option themes. If the reader wants music to play in the background, then the virtual library can do that to allow the reader to be more immersed into the story. If the reader would enjoy the visuals of the book, then they can keep it and the virtual library would then transform into a world of the books. Now the readers can read the book in their own ways with either traditional methods such as flipping the pages or in a digital space where their surroundings are the story and the way it is told is still within their own control. This would allow readers and authors to connect more due to allowing the reader to read the story in whatever way they want to with the author still being able to allow their story to be told in the way they wanted the story to be told.

Borsuk has mentioned the potential of digital devices to help create a place for books within the digital realm though the computers and other electronic devices (The Book, pg. 200). If virtual reality and augmented reality are going to be the primary access to the virtual library, then they will be the primary publishing areas for new versions of texts. Virtual reality and augmented reality would need to learn how to allow readers to “flip” through the pages and transform the room into the digital library. Authors could introduce a first person view of reading the story by putting the reader in one of the characters places and allowing the reader to switch between which character they want to look through their eyes. If the author would like to make their story like a video game for their readers to come to different endings such as some video games have. Virtual reality can allow the reader to get immersed into the stories through a more personal way by allowing the reader to feel like they are inside the story. Some authors might allow the reader to put their input into the story and allow some characters to change that way. Augmented reality can allow the reader to explore the world by just transforming a certain area into the world and allowing the reader to read what that object is within that fictional world and what it can do. An author can make augmented reality a game where the more a reader explores the world, the more the reader can learn about the world and what the story is all about.

Virtual and augmented reality have the potential to allow readers to enter a virtual library where they can either read stories in any format they ever dreamed of reading in. Allowing others to visit the virtual library where one keeps all of their books and what comments they put on it and how different readers interact with the contents of the book. It could be just flipping through a virtual page of a virtual book in any setting the reader would ever dream of being in, or being able to walk within the pages of the world to explore the author’s view of the story. Authors can find new ways of immersing their readers into their world through video game settings or a puzzle format. Physical books will not go away, but virtual books can become something that readers can cling on to and allow them to get more immersed into the world of that story even more than before. The virtual library can expand how books are kept and how they are read in any way and format that the reader would enjoy the most.

Craig Mod reveals that the post-artifact system is a system that turns books from a secluded vessel for holding the work inside to something that can be looked into through other peoples. That, is Mod’s words, it is “A system of unlocking. A system concerned with engagement. Sharing. Marginalia. Ownership. Community. And, of course, reading.” For books people enjoy reading, they can highlight parts that they enjoy reading or something that catches their eye during the reading and can discuss with other people. Not only for books, but for other works as well, such as magazines and blog posts.

For me when it comes to the web as a main source for information only, it was always easy to get to and hear other people’s responses to how to find an answer to a question that I was having trouble for. If I just wanted to go for entertainment, Youtube has a lot of content created by other people where they can get feedback by those who watch their content and try to figure out how to improve it in the future to make it better. Also, some different YouTubers are in certain communities where they would do collaborations with one another and connect their followers. Another thing if I wanted to connect to other people, there are many social media platforms that I can connect with others and share things with others such as ides that I have or funny things that have happened during that week. The web helps everyone connect to one another and allows everyone to share ideas and new connections with new people.

“A book, in its purest form, is a phenomenon of space and time and dimensionality that is unique unto itself. When we turn the page, the previous page passes into our past and we are confronted by a new world” – Dick Higgins, “A Book”

Each “book” is unique in its own way with how it is made for every story that is told. That “book” could be through a certain format with how they should be told, how they can be move forward, and how they should be viewed. There are many forms that a “book” can be told through with examples being movies, physical books, digital books, video games, VR and AR. As we move forward within the “books” through their own story structure, we explore that “book’s” space/time area within that specific “book”. The “book” becomes a part of our experience as we move forward within that story: it’s past becomes our past as we explore its world the more we dive deeper within that story. The more “books” that are within the digital databases, the higher the chances that those “books” will be able to keep those worlds and their space/time within the culture and be able to mixed with the next generation’s future. Not only that, more “books” will be able to become part of that space/time area and it will keep expanding as those “books” are created and put into the digital database. So as long as we keep putting these “books” within the digital database, the more that we are able to explore the new worlds those “books” bring along with them.

For the book that I enjoy the most, it would be “I’m Not Leaving” by Carl Wilkens which was published in 2011. It is based on the author’s experience of what happened as an American in 1994 during the Rwanda genocide as he stayed there in order to keep those who could not leave Rwanda safe from the Genocide. The book explains Wilken’s experience of deciding to stay while his family left for safety then to what he did to help the people of both sides of the Genocide with it ending with him being back with his family.

Carl Wilkens and his wife Teresa Wilkens

This book touched me a lot when I first read it because I felt like I was there experiencing it with Wilkens. Even if some parts of the story were hard to read due to how it occurs during a genocide, it helped me see that one person’s decisions can make a difference no matter how big or small it might be. It also tells how that even though the two groups of Rwandans could have been neighbors for years, they could feel resentment with one another that could lead to bloodshed. The last thing is that this was not a made up story, it actually happened and it impacted me because sometimes historians try to make the past seem all fun even with wars and genocides. This book shows all the bad that happens and how it hurt so many people including Wilkens.