This blog is migrating to my own website, annakjonsson.com. Please follow the link, and don’t forget to update your feed!

Over and out at Serial Anna,

Serial Anna

Does it look like the guy from Where the Wild Things Are?

Thanks to @pipsan for the venue/tools!

My teammates and I decided to focus on the problem of “bad” links– links you want to purge from history. During this process, I began thinking about the metaphor of clothing storage. To some extent, I hypothesized, link storage is like storing clothes in a closet– some you use every day, some you never pull out, some you want to get rid of, or never wanted in the first place.

This falls in line with the research that says frequency of visitation falls into 3 categories (described in This Presentation by U-M SOCHI, Slide 9):

• Fast (short term, high volume, sites like shopping)
• Medium (regular hourly checking, Gmail, Facebook)
• Slow (rare but regular visits, personal interest sites)

I did some sketching to see how useful the clothing storage metaphor might be use for browser history interactions. Here’s what I came up with:

Clothing storage sketch

Ultimately, I’d like to work with my group a little more to see if the metaphor is useful. We want to find a meaningful way to get “bad” or unwanted links out of the browsing history.

A major problem of this design is a lack of parameters around “Fast,” “Medium” and “Slow” interactions.

After an initial obligatory self-searching, I noted that part of what makes the installation so intriguing is the flow of crawled text as it builds into a final representation. The installation displays partial stories before pushing the information derived into a category.

Here’s Nelson Mandela:

Nelson Mandela Persona

And here’s Nelson Mandela being built by Personas (to get a good look, you might want to watch the video full-screen):

Okay, so we have one interesting public figure who became the President of post-Apartheid South Africa and who arguably was a positive force for change in the world. So what about the baddest of the bad?

Charles Manson:

Charles Manson Persona

It’s reassuring to see that “Illegal” is the largest category for Manson, but “social” is among the second largest category, and prominent categories like Sports and Management are downright confusing. Furthermore, it is strange to see the name Manson afforded categories like “art” and “professional” at all.

Okay, we’ve done good man and bad man now. I decided to try out my current favorite comic (and person to follow on Twitter), Russell Brand. Here he is:

Russell Brand Persona

Here his largest categories make sense; online, movies and social. But Sports and Military make less sense.

And finally, I didn’t have any girls. Jezebel did a nice piece a little while back about prominent women in the Media (What Do People’s Online Personas Say About Them?), which offers more visualizations if you don’t want to DIY. But I decided to try out Gwen Stefani, general rad chick and lead singer of No Doubt since as long as I can remember.

Here’s Gwen:

Gwen Stefani Persona

Conclusions

After watching the growth of these fine (well, 3/4ths of them) folks, as well as observing the construction of my own persona, I recognized that the project might show just as much, if not more, about the body of data from which the personas are derived. For example, all of these personas, none of whom are athletes, include substantial sports sections. Maybe this has to do with the way that language is constructed to organize information about sports. For example, many sites have sports pages or sections, and there are many opportunities for vocabulary that falls within the umbrella of sports.

I’m actually not trying to go into deep analysis mode, so I guess I’ll leave it at that. It’s hard not to draw some conclusions. But if you found this post in the least bit interesting, you’ll want to read up on Personas. The explanation of the installation notes that the project was “not supposed to be utilitarian. Instead, it was meant to expose a process that often happens behind the scenes.”

I spent some time today on a mini-project called The Long Say.

Ironically (because I have designs toward making this a quick post), the blog focuses on collecting long essays from folks. I just did the whole deploy to my social network thing, and I am now officially excited about it.

Check it out: thelongsay.org.

(As soon as you check it out, you will probably noticed that it needs contributions. See how to become a contributor here.)

But for the attentive (ahem, anal) among you, you may have noticed that Hijinx is not a word. It’s phonetically the rough equivalent of high jinks, yet it’s spelled differently enough so when I one day went looking for the/a proper spelling of this strange and seldom used word, I couldn’t find anything.

And besides, though I always found myself among the attentive (ahem, anal) crowd when it came to things like intentional misspellings (“Krazy Glue” used to make my blood boil, even as a 10-year-old), I kind of liked the way the word Hijinx looked. I mean, that x really backloads all the fun and adventures that I was hoping to convey. It implies a saving of the good things for last.

Flash forward to now. It took about five years for me to randomly stumble across the word. And just like that, I became aware that my bio needed fixing. So enjoy the new web site, free of hijinx. But there will be many more high jinks to come.

www.annakjonsson.com

Hop on over there and enjoy.

Having acquired an iPhone not two days before I headed up north last week, I was able to catch the beautiful thunderstorm that passed over us on US23-I75 North near Flint with the phone’s video camera.

One of the things I always loved about taking film production classes as an undergrad was scoring the films. I felt like you could give me anything, and adding the music would allow the footage to zing off the screen. I never played the role of a DP, but I managed to win Best Soundtrack (or maybe it was Best Score– I don’t know; it was a few years back now) for a digital animation I made my senior year in our department’s student festival (I used the sounds of Mogwai). However, it bothered me at the time and still bothers me today that while using the music of known or semi-known bands for student projects is usually some degree of acceptable (one might plead “Fair Use”), using music from the CD you bought/ripped/acquired magically from the man in the moon isn’t fair play.

So almost as soon as the thunderstorm was over I decided to conduct an experiment. I would cut out the car chatter I recorded and replace it with Creative Commons-licensed music.

In case you want a little refresher on the Creative Commons, it’s “a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright (About – Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/about/, retrieved August 18, 2009).” You can use the Creative Commons website to define your own creative work, and the CC folks make it really easy to embed the license you choose in your own work.

I figured there must be a whole galaxy of musicians out there who publish using a Creative Commons license that allows me to understand exactly the kind of permission I have as a random creative type, wanting to rip, scratch and work other people’s work on a whim.

First I stumbled across Magnatune, a music distribution site with the tagline “we are not evil” that more or less allows users to set the price of the music. I came across the artist C. Layne, whose album Shark Week I liked a lot, possibly for my movie. According to Magnatune’s website, they have a liberal policy toward non-commercial uses of the music. However, my budget for this teeny-tiny project is a staggering $0, so I decided to keep looking.

Next, I found my way to Jamendo. Jamendo lets you download music for free and all music is available under a Creative Commons license of some kind. There was plenty of music to explore here, and finally I settled on a nice little folk harmonica tune by a Japanese band called Secret Ocean.

I learned that there are other similar services to Jamendo. I could have kept looking for days, but one of my goals was to keep it simple. There’s the Free Music Archive (which a really nice looking logo, design friends), ccMixter, BeatPick, and Sutros.

The license associated with the music I chose is Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. In other words, I have permission to share and remix the work as long as I attribute and share alike– in other words, as long as I let you share and remix too. So here you go, if you want to.

As you may have heard, Michigan has kind of an image problem. Anthony Bourdain described Detroit as a city that’s “fucked up.” I’m sure if you’ve seen a photo essay about the city in the past six months, you’d agree with him.

Yet Michigan is as vibrant and dynamic as it’s ever been in the 26 years of my life. Admittedly, I’ve never been alive to see Detroit’s, or even Michigan’s heyday, and admittedly, I live 40 solid miles from the city of Detroit, but to me, Michigan is a playground for creative thinkers and raw talent. Rent is cheap, friendships are solid as oak, and M-75 calls you to Northern Michigan on all the weekends where you can scrounge together gas money and a carful of friends.

I live by a motto that describes this place well: we make our own fun. We make horror movies in the woods. We dance twice monthly at the Elks Club Lodge. We write incessantly, and some of us write exceptionally well (uh, hello Jeffrey Eugenides and Ernest Hemingway!). We rock and roll. Detroit is the only city that could have raised a guy like Jack White of The White Stripes, from a Polish family with nine (or so) siblings. It is also the city of Eminem, of course, and Sufjan Stevens.

Michigan is the setting for scores of recent and upcoming films; take Whip It for example. The rural roads and pathways you see in the movie’s trailer might look like anywhere else, but they are only 5 miles away from Ann Arbor, home of Google AdSense, Border’s Headquarters and one of the top public schools in the country. You can walk everywhere in Ann Arbor, but we have plenty of culture to walk to. Ann Arbor is also home to 826 Michigan, a non-profit writing center for kids.

When Silvia came, I made sure that she had a Bell’s Oberon. So did everyone else. My friend Erin attempted to describe the feeling of tasting your first Oberon of the summer. After my friend’s rehearsal dinner in Glen Arbor, we all headed over to Art’s Tavern. We drank pitchers of Oberon, all 20 or so of us.

While I hesitate to use a local (well, regional) beer as a metaphor, let’s visit the comparison: an Oberon is a wheat beer, easily drinkable, tasting of orange. Non-beer drinkers have been said to be content with this beer, but I also know die-hard beer fans who swear by an Oberon on an August evening just shy of dusk. So yeah, we’re beer drinkers here in Michigan. But we are mild and welcoming. We make our own fun. We are a vibrant community.

Over the past few years, I’ve stumbled across a lot of people who are committed to sticking with Michigan and its offerings. It would be easy to spend my whole life here and still miss something. Whether or not I stay, Michigan has really served me well. Yet I’ve mostly only lived here, and I dream of finding new homes on further shores. I feel the tug to leave and explore, but I do feel that it’s so I can one day come back.

Finally, I must say that the people of Michigan are built of solid character. We can be serious and funny, all in one sentence (think sad clown– wait, don’t). We make great lifelong friends. We also make great lovers. If you stumble across a Michigander you think is cute, I would recommend  you take him/her out on a date. As a people, we are a catch, and how could we not be with all the freshwater fish surrounding us on three sides?  …Right???