Schedule – Summer 2015

05/11 Mon

Introduction to Digital Publishing

Class intro:

  • syllabus overview
  • digital publishing initiative at cmdc
  • dpi research: workflow, reading design, distribution
  • we will publish your research and essay in the dpi journal

Talk:

  • digital publishing crisis/opportunity
  • web, epub, kindle, pod
  • publishing workflows

Digital publishing overview:

————

Research:

  • blogging: 500 words min.
  • Multi-format: markdown, html, epub, kindle
  • Multimedia Remix: multimedia remix
  • Hybrid project: pdf, print/digital relationships, qr codes
  • Final Project: design prototype and 1000-2000 word research essay
  • brainstorm ideas now: genre categories, methods, reading design
  • share skills/ publishing team

Final Project research ideas:

  • marking time: video blogging as art practice
  • nouspace – digital arts journal, mobile writing
  • dpi journal – collected research

Make a blog post: introduce yourself and describe the area of digital publishing that interests you most.

05/13 Wed

Publishing and Networks

read:

blog prompt:
Select two quotes from the readings that stimulate your thinking about the future of digital publishing. Using the two quotes as the start of a blog post (use blockquotes), discuss some of your ideas about digital publishing and what it could become.

————

Gutenberg Project
Terms of Use
Reusing Gutenberg Texts
Public Domain, Creative Commons, Fair Use

Formats
Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”)
select some text (500-1000 words)

working with digital text:

  • Text-edit/notepad
  • Cut-ups / n + 7
  • TextWrangler/Notepad ++
  • Pages/InDesign

working with digital images:

working with digital video/audio:

  • adobe premiere/ imovie
  • audacity
  • html5 audio/video tags
  • miro converter >mp4

Add images (public domain or creative commons license)

Project 1: Translate a plain text public domain story or poem into html, epub and kindle ebook. Include at least three images with the text and a cover image.

05/18 Mon

Markdown/Markup: Structuring Documents

read/view:

blog prompt:

Describe your idea for the first project: to create an ebook from public domain documents. How will you structure and organize your book? How will you use design (typography, spacing, imagery) and/or annotation to make this a unique publication?

(There are limits with image files in ebooks, so don’t be too ambitious!)

————

Building ePub structure:

Pages workflow: good to generate epub files, section and page breaks, <h1> = chapter breaks and toc, clean up html/css

Markdown:
Macdown (mac) | MarkdownPad (pc)
word processor>texteditor>markdown>html>xhtml >epub>kindle

Opening epub documents

Screen Shot 2015-05-17 at 3.33.34 PM

  • pc – change “epub” file extension to “zip” and then unzip it, do the reverse to close.
  • mac: use ePub Zip Unzip
  • download sample
  • META-INFa list of all the root files > container.xml
  • OEBPS:Open eBook Publication Structure is an XML-based specification for the content, structure, and presentation of electronic books.> (html, images, css)
  • mimetype (the type of file – epub)
  • toc.ncx  (xml file that contains the table of contents of the EPUB file)

Creating ebook structure:

  • cover: dimensions, ppi, cover.xhtml
  • chapter: chapter-1.html, chapter-2.html, etc.
  • creating sequence, breaks: toc.html, toc.ncx
  • html anchor links for navigation (notes, etc.)
  • other pages: title page, table of contents, copyright info, notes, footnotes
  • metadata goes in contents.opf
  • images: style images with css (max-width: 100%), 300ppi, 600px x 860px for full page

Parts of a Book:
front matter:

  • Title page
  • Copyright page / ISBN not necessary for ebooks
  • Copyright Acknowledgments (cite sources)
  • Dedication
  • Table of Contents
  • Foreword (someone other than the author)
  • How-To-Use-This-Book
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • About the Author

main body:

  • Parts
  • Sections
  • Chapters

end matter:

other elements:

  • Images
  • Graphs/Tables
  • Visualizations
  • Galleries
  • Audio/Video

ePub Resources:

epub>Kindle:

05/20 Wed

Designing eBooks 

read:

blog prompt:

Do a google search of book covers and choose 1 or 2 that you think would work well to market a book across mobile devices and the web. What qualities about the icons/covers make you want to open it? How can an icon/cover and other book cover matter (title, image, summary, excerpts, blurbs and branding) attract attention and interest differently in a digital and networked context?

Please post the images of the book covers with a citation link.

————

Creating the cover and design elements:
The Shape of Design

Covers:

book-covers-18 book-covers-19 paulrand2 book-covers-54 america the-trail 1240fbcf1649c5d7def2e9704736f352 355741ad53e4bd1fa993890a95b8a807 98c62a45eb1d0be36d4d7c15c88332ba 3d410940aea0887b41ccd0e83a9dd9ce

 

46e1078e415db5e10da2308e0c6028cc Jessica-Martinez-Harry-Potter-and-the-Sorcerers-Stone The-5th-Wave-by-Rick-Yancey-animated-book-cover No-One-Else-Can-Have-You-Kathleen-Hale-animated-book-cover Mr-Mercedes-Stephen-King-animated-book-cover Return-to-Lovecraft-Middle-School-Book-3

Image:

  • Enclose images in a <div> or <p> tag.
  • Make “img” fill the container with “width: 100%;”
  • Set desired width to the container <div>.
  • Prep images at 300ppi and desired dimension
  • 600px x 860px for full page.
  • GIF animations work!

Section breaks:

  • sections automatically create a TOC and a sequential order though distinct xhtml pages
  • in Pages you can insert a section
  • the “Title” style on text will automatically create a section
  • an <h1> in the html will create a new section but its place in the TOC will need to be manually added.
  • an <h2> will generate a chapter heading in the table of contents under the section

Page breaks:

  • to control the flow of content – like images- you can add page breaks in Pages. This will add an html element into your ePub file with the css: break-after: page;
  • you can also add your own CSS:
"break-after: page;" and "page-break-after: always;"
"break-before: page;" and "page-break-before: always;"

Create landing page for publication (from template)

Social media & publishing, branding

 

 

05/25 Mon

Memorial Day

Project 1: Translate a plain text public domain story or poem into an epub and kindle ebook. Include at least three images with the text and a cover image. Present the files and your cover with a description of the book on a landing page. Use this html template to design your landing page.Put everything in a folder and upload this to the server.* Send me the url.

*If you have trouble with this part, I can help you before class on Wednesday

DUE: WED 05/27 

Instructions for uploading your projects to a server using an FTP (file transfer protocol) client:

  1. Download an ftp client. These are free: Cyberduck or Filezilla
  2. “Open Connection”
  3. Enter the following info:
    servername: dtc-wsuv.org
    username: first initial + last name + the year (’15”), all in lowercase, no spaces or symbols (so, “Sam Jones” would be “sjones15″)
    password: last 4 digits of student ID
  4. If successful, you should be in your personal server directory that has the same name as your username. Now you can either drag the folder and files in that directory or use the “action” menu to “upload”
  5. Please upload folders with your project name. Lowercase with no spaces!
  6. Inside the folder, make sure that your default/home page for the project is “index.html.” The server will automatically load files named index.html.
  7. Now check how everything looks live, at the absolute URL that looks something like this: http://dtc-wsuv.org/sjones15/yourproject/
  8. If you cannot see images, make sure that your file names and calls to access those files are all lowercase. Servers are case-sensitive!
  9. Post that URL in a blog post

05/27 Wed

Multimedia Books

read:

blog prompt: Are multimedia, links, interactivity and sharing  essential parts of the way we use texts today? Are they distractions that take us away from the immersive experience that we get from books? Reflecting on the readings, what is “screen reading” to you? How have your reading and writing habits changed with the web and mobile devices? In what ways can design of digital texts create “hyper” and “deep” attention.

—————-

DUE: Project 1 (make a blog post with a link to your project page)

Discuss readings

Design for Attention and Distraction

  • create good distraction
  • capture attention
  • hold attention thru small distractions

multimedia journals:

multimedia essays:

fiction and poetry:

digital collage texts

————

Multimedia authoring tools:

Project 2:
Make a multimedia, collage text about a favorite book, movie, album or art work. Use any combination of image, text, maps, video or sound to express your thoughts and associations about the work. Gather material distractedly with google search. Don’t think too much. Discover what your text will be in the making of it.

06/01 Mon

read:

blog prompt: In The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space, Johanna Drucker suggests that the design of digital books should focus less on copying what a traditional book (the codex) is and more on what it does. The codex is already a “virtual” reading space. As readers we “perform” a cognitive engagement with the material by using the affordances of the codex (page numbers, tables of contents, headers, page breaks and graphic images) to construct meaning. Shirky and Mod also come up with some thoughts of how digital affordances allow us to think in new ways about designing reader interfaces. As a university student asked to read many kinds of texts for classes, discuss your ideas for specific features of digital books that would be most helpful to you in engaging with knowledge and ideas. These features might include social annotation, pagination, navigation, interface design or the use of multimedia.

Multimedia Books 2

View class eBooks:

Discuss readings

Designing for deep reading – pagination, scroll vs. swipe, formless vs. defined content, chunked content, white-space, images, responsive design

Introduction to Scalar and Pathfinders project

Brainstorm final project – idea>team workflow>platforms>launch

Project 2 Workshop (phase 2):
Based on your multimedia collage, write an accompanying short text (1000 word min) that expresses your thoughts about how the art work holds your attention. Does the work encourage “hyper” or “deep” attention? Or both? Format this text inside of the collage in a way that encourages reading in association to the media.

Project 3: Digital/Print Hybrid
Translate the collage and text from Project 2 into 3-5 PDF pages.

Visit Electronic Literature Lab – intro to Pathfinders launch

Final Project: A multi-format publication or white-paper about the main design issues around digital publishing. This will be a collaborative text. Everyone will contribute content and ideas, but the book will collect class contributions as well as outside quotes, examples and resources.

Content Sections/Chapters

  • Introduction to project – Will
  • annotation and social reading – Caleb and Dan
  • pagination – formless/definite, scroll/swipe – Natalie and Cody
  • design – chunking, typography, imagery, graphic elements – Sarah and Danielle
  • digital book covers – Lindsey and Suhaily
  • multimedia – hyper vs. deep attention – Jason, Kyle and Warren
  • documentation – Warren
  • Hybrid Publishing – publication studio

Design and Production

  • Design – images graphic elements, multimedia Sarah, Suhaily, Danielle and Warren
  • Editing – copyediting, organizing text, chunking Lindsey and Natalie
  • Production / development – ebook, ibook author, web and/or pdf  – Caleb, Cody and Dan
  • Social media – everyone

 

06/03 Wed

Hybrid Publishing

assignment:  Work on Project 2

read:

blog prompt:  

Using at least two quotes from the readings, discuss the ideas and/or works of hybrid or “post-digital” publishing. Why are artists “printing the web” and finding ways to embed digital processes into publishing printed books?

————-

Discuss readings…

print-on-demand services:

hybrid / post-digital publishing:

QR codes:

Final project discussion – subject areas/ assignments
collaboration tools: google docs/dropbox

Work Flow
text: word processing (spelling and grammar checked) > plain text
images: photoshop/illustrator > 72ppi and 300ppi
put everything inside a zip folder by Monday June 15th

Scalar – start

Project 2 Workshop

Project 2:
Phase 1- Make a multimedia, collage text about a favorite book, movie, album or art work. Use any combination of image, text, maps, video or sound to express your thoughts and associations about the work. Gather material distractedly with google search. Don’t think too much. Discover what your text will be in the making of it. 

Phase 2 -Based on your multimedia collage, write an accompanying short text (500-1000 word min) that expresses your thoughts about how the art work holds your attention. Does the work encourage “hyper” or “deep” attention? Or both? Format this text inside of or with the collage in a way that encourages reading in association to the media.

06/08 Mon

Hybrid Publishing 2

assignment: prepare your group’s section

read: 

blog:  Post the url of Project 2 along with a brief statement.

————————

DUE – Project 2 

Project 3: Digital Print Hybrid
Translate Project 2 into 3-5 pdf pages.

Changes in project points.

Grading group projects

Getting started:

  • Prep images: 300ppi / approximate in inches for width/height
  • Any text that is not an image make into a .txt file
  • Start InDesign and set Magcloud presets

Useful InDesign tutorials:

Save your .indd project into the shared dropbox folder. I will compile as one document and export to pdf.

DUE – Project 3 (pdf pages) by the end of class

Final Project – groups discussion?

 

06/10 Wed

Publication Studio 

read: explore the Publication Studio website.

blog: write three questions for the field trip to Publication Studio

Visit to Publication Studio
meet at 11:30am – finished by 1:30pm
try to car-pool!

Publication Studio
717 SW Ankeny St
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 360-4702

Google Map

Final Project discussion

 

06/15 Mon

assignment: finish writing and gathering material for sections

blog prompt: Share your thoughts about the visit to Publication Studio. What do you think of their business model? What are your thoughts about the social aspects of publishing, going to art residencies, collaborating with institutions?

(if you were not on the field trip, write a post about how you think the final class project should be marketed)

Final Project

Discuss Publication Studio and book

Design and Build

 

06/17 Wed

Final Project

assignment: gather/work on design elements for your publications

blog prompt: Share your thoughts about the workflow of this collaborative publication in general and about your own experience working with various software/formats. This short reflection will go at the end of the documentation section of the book.

 

Finish and launch

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