Moby Dick as a Lens for Digital Culture

Combining a classic novel like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and digital culture may seem like an odd idea, but even something written as many years ago as Moby Dick can still provide insight into the digital age. Many of the characters in Moby Dick can act as representations of aspects of the digital world, in particular Ishmael and Ahab.

Ishmael is an example of curation. Throughout the novel he is “collecting” data about pretty much everything he encounters. He goes into great detail about whales (almost creating his own Whale Wikipedia), explains customs for when one ship meets another, describes the ship, explains the background of some of the crew, like Queequeg for example. In many ways, Moby Dick becomes Ishmael’s very own Pinterest board, Diigo account, or Wiki.

Ahab can be seen as a representation of social proof and understanding the web. For him the white whale is Moby Dick, for the internet the white whale is whatever new thing is coming up. This white whale can never really be captured, because as soon as you grasp one thing in digital culture something else new will emerge. It starts to feel like an endless goal to keep current on things and no matter how many harpoons that you throw at digital culture, you will never be able to fully capture it, because then another white whale will just appear.

Digital connections like these can be made througout the text of Moby Dick that enhance both the text and an understanding of the digital world. Finding connections like these and exploring new ideas is what literary studies and digital culture are entirely about, and using these two hand in hand is of great benefit to students.

Curating with Diigo

When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to use for this curation project, I decided that I wanted to use a tool that I had never tried out or heard of before, so I chose diigo. I started out by making a profile and wandering around the website a little to try and get a feel for what I was jumping into, but there isn't really that much on the actual diigo.com webpage. So, I next decided to watch the video tutorials. I figure that it would probably be way easier to use this site to its full benefit if I knew what I was doing rather then spending hours trying to figure it out on my own. 

As I've been searching around trying to find articles and websites that talk about my subject (which is still a little all over right now ranging from media, to editing, to web identity), diigo has been really interesting to work with. My favorite feature is being able to highlight and annotate articles and to archive articles. I read tons of stuff online everday and I feel like I am always telling someone, "I read this awesome article today, but I don't remember what it told me only the basic subject, and I don't remember where I found it." Useless, huh? With diigo, I can save articles to my online archive so that I can go back to them later, and with the highlighting feature, I don't even have to read the whole article again to remember what it was all about. Instead, I have some notes and some highlights that I can use to get the gist real fast (cause I already did the work to read it once, it's great that I don't have to read it again!). I really appreciate that all of this carries over to my iPad too since I mostly use my laptop at home and my iPad on campus, so I am swaping between the two a lot throughout the day. 

The next step that I need to take in using diigo is to start finding other people that are using this site that are interested in the same thing as me so that I can start piggybacking off of their research. It would be really useful to see what others are archiving and see how was others have already found can help me figure out what I need to be looking for an how to make my research more refined. 

Curation: SoundCloud

I am currently working on curating a playlist on my SoundCloud composed entirely of Provo bands. So far I have the bigger names on there, but I want to get a bigger sampling of what Provo is producing. Going forward I will expand this list.

But what is SoundCloud?

SoundCloud is a site where anyone can go and listen to the music (or even interviews, etc.) posted there. You can explore music under many different genres, such as rock, electronic, Hip-hop, and Jazz. You can also listen to things under the categories of Story Telling, Technology, Sports, and News. If you want to comment on songs, or like them (done by pushing on a little heart symbol below the song, for the purpose of being able to browse through your "likes" at a later time period for repeat listens) you need to create an account. This is free. Also, bands are not payed to put there music up on SoundCloud, so this is one of those abundance economies. The artist has an option to allow the song to be downloaded for free, to make it unavailable for download, or to make it available for download but for a price. In this way it is more progressive than itunes, in that you can listen to the entire song before deciding whether or not to buy it. In SoundCloud you can create playlists on your account, you can repost songs you like, which will show up on the feeds of the people that are following you (and likewise if you like what someone is posting you can follow them). All this is intended to help people share and discover music. Indeed, not every band out there chooses to post to SoundCloud, but many have done so. Including a lot of Provo Bands. 

So essentially, i will tag my playlist with things such as "Provo Bands, Provo Music, Indie, Alt-rock", and so on. This will allow people who are looking for that type of music to stumble upon my playlist. I have already gotten one follower based off this playlist. 

Curation: Trying out Goodreads

First, just throwing this out there, someone should write something called "curation myths." Internet lists are all over that kind of thing, and that's a catchy title.

Okay now that that's out of the way, let's talk about curation tools. I'm going to be trying out Goodreads as a way of collecting useful books and useful writers for the topic I am going to be studying in depth this semester. I've never used Goodreads for that purpose before. When I have used it, it has been to catalogue my own personal collection of books, and to read reviews from friends. I am excited to use it as a way of looking outwardly instead of inwardly now.

I chose Goodreads over Amazon lists because I just like that Goodreads is not trying to get me spend money. I suppose Goodreads has monetary interests just like everybody else, but on the corporate corruption scale of Whole Foods to Goldman Sachs, they seem to me closer to first end of things, similar to Google maybe, or at least what Google aspires to be. (And apparently Amazon is buying Goodreads anyway?? I guess it's time to bow down to the Man regardless.)

A more relevant feature of this tool is the ability to make separate lists for subtopics, and make shelves. I also like the community of book readers on the site. One time, I even connected with the author of a book I reviewed on Goodreads on Twitter after he found my review.

Some limitations I am keeping in mind: I am worried that Goodreads does not have every book (of course, neither would Amazon or any other source, but the possibility to sell is certainly a motivation to have a robust catalogue). And I am also concerned about the limitation that it only has books, where it may be just as useful for me to find articles and essays, published in magazines instead of on their own.

One final thought about Goodreads: when I first learned about it, it was in another class with Dr. Burton, and I was surprised that nothing equivalent existed for film, which is the medium I prefer the most (hopefully that does not make me lose English major cred to prefer films to books). I wrote a post about that, and was happy that someone who was developing a site for that found my post and commented. His site has since launched, Seen That, as well as another, Letterboxd. I have used and been impressed by both of those, though I prefer Letterboxd so far.

Teach Yourself with Google Alerts

When we first got the assignment to pick a curating tool, I was immediately drawn to Google Alerts. However, my over-analytical brain told me this wasn't sophisticated enough and I should try something I haven't ever used before, like Diigo, Listopia, or Stumbleupon. I'm not really sure why I thought that made sense. Fortunately, I had an epiphany as I was exploring these sits. These tools are very useful, but I realized that for what I was trying to focus on in my curating, Google Alerts was actually the perfect tool. Here is why:

My topic of research/curation: I am very interested in the idea of the relationship between humans and machines/the internet. I have started to explore the idea of Web 2.0 and how humans can make an impact on the internet through what we can contribute. But then I also started to get interested in the idea of DIY projects and how prevalent they are in human society. So, when we wants to learn how to do something on our own, or look for people/communities who have done the same thing, what is the first thing we do on the internet? Google it. Then, after we have created that something on our own or come up with a new idea, we can share it on the internet, making our mark and perhaps helping others to do the same.

I set up a few Google alerts that are emailed to me each day for queries such as "DIY", "self-directed learning", and "self education" to keep up with what the majority of people are finding when they search for similar things. Some of the things I have found are really interesting, like this blog post about the philosophy of self directed learning, or this one about a specific person's personal experience with self education. Some DIY projects are made to save you money, like this idea that, if it works for your needs, helps you with something practical. There are also smaller DIY ideas such as life hacks, which may or may not work, but we use the internet to get the idea out there and let people decide for themselves.

When we complete projects like these, we are filled with a sense of pride and satisfaction (assuming it worked out for you--if not, find another project!) and we want to share that feeling with someone. This is the same type of mindset for when we want to teach ourselves something new. When we find something that we really want to learn about, we will find a way to do it, and then share our product/project as well as the way we did it with others who may want to learn about the same thing, thus leaving our mark on Web 2.0.

So these ideas are all still floating around in my head, and I'm still organizing the idea as a whole, but what are your thoughts on Google Alerts? Do you know of any other curating tools that would work well with this idea?