A Heart of Stars: Mapping a Screen Name is a collection of various mappings that represent my internet persona. These mappings both revealed and excluded information about me as “aheartofstars.” In a sense, “aheartofstars” became a character deviation of me. I decided to use these mappings to dissect the character of “aheartofstars” and to represent the growth of this character; thus, I have used the metaphor of a “road trip” to describe the journey of “aheartofstars” throughout various network of practices.

Beginning the Journey    
In this section, I have documented the various uses of my online moniker “aheartofstars.” I have included screenshots of the name in use on the sites various Web 2.0 application. These screenshots act as evidence of my participation in one large network of practice—the internet.

Taking the Highway    
Throughout the semester I have been actively participating in the Twitter community. It has become a major information ecology in my life. By using Tweetstats.com, I was able to collect graphs that illustrate my participation in the Twittersphere.

Unfolding the Map    
During the spring 2009 semester, I blogged about various Information Architecture topics on the IAOC website. In order to illustrate the frequency of certain words in my blog, I used the tag cloud application Wordle to create a tag cloud of my accumulated blogs. In addition, I created a Wordle of my Tweetstats.com tags.

Stopping for Directions
This section contains a sketched memory map and a remediation of the sketched map into a Google MyMaps. It is demonstrative of how an author unintentionally omits details when mapping portions of their lives; thus, it argues that “aheartofstars” is an inaccurate portrayal of me.

Enjoying the Landscape    
In this section, I introduced my color palette and font. These mappings portray the character of “aheartofstars.” They are like trees and flowers during a country drive. They are essentially the landscape of “aheartofstars.”

Taking in the Scenery    
The community of “aheartofstars” is represented in this section. A Nexus Facebook mapping of “aheartofstars” friend connections is provided. In addition, a LastGraph mapping of the listening history of “aheartofstars” Last.fm is presented. Finally, a TwitFriends.com mapping illustrates the Twitter connections of “aheartofstars.” They are the beautiful depictions, scenery, of my screen name.

Heading Home
The screen name “aheartofstars” leaves more questions about who I am as a person rather than answers.

For Information Architecture, I designed a presentation using Prezi's Zooming Presentation Maker. In Information Architecture, our class examined information in several different contexts. We first looked at how language, one of the most popular vehicles of information, is structured to help people make meaning out of what they see, hear, and read. Metaphors We Live By (1980), by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, was both influential and helpful as it laid the foundation for many of the other things we would read later. From evaluating language, we then examined how technologies are created with certain values in mind. Later in the semester, we looked more specifically at information: how it is categorized and displayed visually. Our final project, using the Prezi Presentation Editor, is the culmination of this semester-long academic adventure.
 
        As I thought more about how I learned so much in the class, I kept thinking of the long nights spent talk to classmates on Twitter in which we would help each other through problems with the assignments. This led me to Etienne Wenger’s Community of Practice, which I found meshed nicely with my own experience this semester. I learned from the texts, from my teacher, but perhaps most of all, from the other students in class. When one finished an assignment, he or she would serve as a great resource to those who were finishing slightly later. Instead of finishing an assignment and forgetting about it, several people in the class went out of his or her way on Twitter to offer help and suggestions. Also, I learned that I learn by doing, by trying, and by failing. This idea has been immeasurably important to me academically and for this project.

    After all, Prezi is designed to be played as much as it is to be mastered. I have played with Prezi a lot, but I haven’t mastered it. But, I think I am proficient with it. As I played with Prezi further, I thought of the work we did in IA in a new light. It was a chance to put into practice the principles we had been discussing all semester long.
  
    I thought more critically about the information I put into the presentation. I thought even harder about how I would link one “slide” or “lexia” to the next. I think I like the term lexia better than slide as the former indicates a sort of malleable place among other pieces of a text, which does not have a discrete, aloof, place. Slides, I believe, are artificially segmented from the presentations they are intended to describe.
 
   
    Information Architecture comprises many topics and so I think it’s only appropriate that my poster designed to explain some of the ideas that informed our work in IA comprises many topics as well. My poster talks about Twitter and maps and fonts and color palettes and social learning with the overarching theme of metaphors being important to understand abstract principles. My Prezi, like many of the parts that constitute it, is essentially one big metaphor embedded with many smaller ones. But these metaphors help me understand my place as a writer within a complex ecology that includes the texts, technologies, our class, our teacher, and the MA program. While some writers shy away from abstractions, I believe these abstractions, these metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, are important to make sense of these esoteric ideas we come across in frequently in graduate school and in the real world as well.
   
   

This presentation is designed to explore the relationship between writing, technology and information.   To facilitate this, several different tools were utilized. Including Prezi, Twitter, Facebook, FontStruct, Kuler, Google MyMaps, Wordle, Tweetstats, Twitter Top Friends Network, and Nexus.  These tools work to show the connections between the writer and the users as well as to further the “Writer as Cartographer” metaphor.

With this presentation, I attempt to show the writer’s influence over the content and depiction of images as well as the many information ecologies that surround each of us.  If we look at the graphics and the presentation as a whole, we can see that the meaning behind the visual representations, that is taken away by the audience, is carefully chosen by the writer.  Of course, there are occasions where the meaning perceived by the audience is not the intended meaning in which case the outcome is often confusion and frustration on both sides.  However, in most cases the message is carefully molded by the writer.  Although that fact is not inherently good or bad, the viewer should be aware that the writer cannot be objective and cannot help but to create the message from their own perspective. 

When looking at the visual text within this presentation we can see the influence of the writer in placement, design, font, and color.  As well as, which items are prominent and the degree of attention given to each item.   All of these choices are designed to communicate a certain message to the viewer.  This idea is further explored since in this case the creator of the presentation and the designer of the font are one and the same.  Choices in the design and layout must be meticulously considered in order to further the presentation’s argument.  This is similar to a work of prose where every word is meticulously chosen based on its meaning, drive, lyrical quality, connotation, social and cultural baggage, etc.

To show more clearly the impact the writer’s perspective has on text a map was drawn by the writer from memory of Rowan University’s campus.  This map is designed to show the limitations and flaws of the human memory which were made clear when the memory map was compared to the Google MyMaps representation of the same area.  The map also forced the writer to prioritize what they believed warranted being placed on the map and what did not.  For example the building that the writer attends class in maybe present but the tree they pass on the way to class may not be.  However it you are studying the varieties of trees in South Jersey it may be much more important. 

Visual representations of activities on Facebook, a social networking site, Twitter, a social networking site and micro-blogging service, and the International Association of Online Communicators blog are also present in the presentation.  The “tweets” of user Wellthen24 can be analyzed with Tweetstats.com.  However the way that the statistics and graphs are presented and showcased effects how they are perceived.  The graphs, images and wordle’s of Twitter statistics, Twitter friends, Facebook friends, and IAOC blog entries are therefore also manipulated by the writer.  It is impossible for the writer to be completely objective therefore, the writer and audience are forced to look critically at what is presented. 

 My Prezi Presentation: http://prezi.com/37557/

 

My presentation is an attempt to map my own personal “information ecology.”  It is broken into sections with my most general and largest ecologies at the outset, and, as we move in, more specific and smaller ecologies at the inset.  Let’s  look at each section and discuss why I chose its particular placement in my presentation, how it pertains to me as a writer, and how the sections tie into the texts we’ve read over the course of this semester.

 

Google MyMap aka The Real Deal with Bill McNeil:  (I'm hoping someone out there catches this Newsradio reference!)  I thought after four years at this fine institution that I knew this campus like the back of my hand (hey, where’d that scar come from?), but as I sat with a pencil and paper, I realized that drawing Rowan University and doing it correctly was quite a challenge.  As I wrote in my blog post, I learned that Rowan is an information ecology with smaller sub-ecologies within it.  This point is demonstrated by the fact that I, as a communication major, was far more accurate and on-point with my drawings of the “Bozorth” area of campus, as this is where most of my classes as an undergraduate took place.

As I created the Google MyMap version of my Rowan map, I realized that many of my proportions were off in my drawing.  Furthermore, when I got to look at a real map with road names and paths, it began to trigger my memory of things that I missed or totally forgot about in my hand drawing.

 

It’s Time To Facebook The Music:  This also fits on the outer most circle.  This Nexus representation of my Facebook friends is a good way to show who I’m connected with in the online world (and in some cases, the outside world as well), and how my social circles are broken up.  This gives you the first glimpse into who I am as a student and as a person. 

I feel as though this is another map within a map.  I labeled each of the clusters, mainly because I was rather surprised that my friends were broken up into relatively neat groups.  With the labels intact, this simple graph becomes a window into my social circles.  We clearly see that I’ve kept in touch with a lot of my friends from high school (my graduating class was 110, so we were all relatively friendly), and that I still am in contact with my Wushu circle (Wushu is a Chinese martial art that I competed in.  I was a member of the 2005-2007 USA Wushu team, and some of these Facebook friends are former teammates, while others are fellow athletes from my Wushu school based in Virginia.)

 

My Tweetin’ Timeline: Marching Into Good Numbers:  I had never used Twitter before January.  In fact, I’d only heard the name mentioned a few times, and really didn’t know anything about it.  But it quickly became apparent that this tool was going to be a key element to the class.  I placed this in the second circle because this was the beginning of narrowing my ecology.  This connected me to my classmates both in and outside the classroom, and allowed me to make contact with other people utilizing the tool.

This brings me to an interesting point about Twitter.  I often refer to it using the metaphor, “it is a tool,” which, according to Nardi and O’Day’s book Information Ecologies, can “channel and limit our thinking, as well as bring in useful associations from other contexts.” (pp. 25)  I have learned throughout this semester that metaphors can be a great tool for us to better comprehend a concept, but they can also hinder us if we do not challenge them.  I feel that by challenging my initial definitions of Twitter, I have now given it the room it needs to evolve and grow to become an integral and multifaceted piece of my information ecology.

 

Let Me Tell You ‘Bout My Best Friend…According To My Statistics, That Would Be Dr. Wolff:  This is where things become even more specific; these charts show which people inside the twittersphere are my “best friends.”  I have 123 followers and am following 117, but this gives us a glimpse of the top 6 “friends” on my list. 

 

You Tweetin’ At Me?:  Again, we see a narrower view of “me”; now we are glimpsing into which of my Twitter followers I am most in contact with, as well as which interface I use most often to post tweets.  Here you can see that I have done most of my Twittering from the web, but my Twitterlicious usage is rapidly catching up.  If you compare my chart from last month to this current one, you will see that my web usage has stayed fairly stagnant, but my Twitterlicious usage has drastically increased.  You now have a good idea about how I’m going about posting tweets.

 

The Twitter Power Hour:  More narrowing of my ecology, as we see information that is breaking down how many tweets I average per day, how many per hour, and even which hours of which days I tweet the most.  This is a demonstration of not only that I am using this specific networking tool, but exactly how I am using it as well.

Even more specific is the breakdown of my tweets by day, and time of each day.  For those who know me, you’ll begin to notice that on nights I have to be in bed relatively early to be up for the 6am shift at work the next day, I don’t do much Twittering past 8:00.  (Those nights are Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday.)  If you don’t know me, you’ll still notice this pattern and be able to infer that there is some reason for this consistency.

 

The Bird is the Worlde:  We have now reached the most specific and detailed view of me as a writer.  These Wordles show my most frequently used words in my blog posts, and my tweets.  From this, we can now find which words I am most likely to use, and furthermore we are able to organize them into some form of an order (which are the most used, which are moderately used, which are hardly used, etc.)

We now see a very clear map of who I am as a writer, and each of these sections is another piece of my map.  You know where I go to school, which areas of my school matter most to me, and which I am most familiar with.  You know who my friends are and which ones are connected to which, you know that I Twitter, but even more important, you now know when I Twitter, what I’m using most often to tweet, to whom I Twitter to most often, and which words I am most likely to use in a tweet and blog post.

 

This presentation was my attempt at somehow mapping my mind as a writer.  I was actually quite surprised at how each one of these rings flowed perfectly into the next, with each subsequent ring revealing slightly more than the one that preceded it. 

In the end, I think that an Information Ecology is whatever we want it to be.  For me, this Prezi is a great representation of my information ecology.  It shows my location, my social circles, my most active days and times, and even the words that I use most often to express myself.  “Mapping our minds” is not about accuracy or perfection, but rather about revelation and distributing information about ourselves in a unique way.  And when all is said and done, I believe I have succeeded in this task, and I feel confident to stand at the center of my ecology and say, “I am here.”

To view my prezi fullscreen click here

My Prezi presentation is based on the premise that, as writers, we must constantly evaluate the information we encounter, questioning what it reveals about an individual, group, or culture, at the same time that we must recognize that our own interpretation is inevitably skewed by our own perception.  As we respond to and share the information we encounter, we are moving in the direction of progress, though that direction is only one path of many that we have the choice to define.

 

I have included a cluster of Wordles that reflect the definitions of writing, technology, information, knowledge, and meaning.  The purpose of the word clouds is to show how these concepts overlap (for example, “knowledge” appears prominent within the wordle for “information” and so forth).  While these wordles illustrate the vastness of concepts associated with each term, we can also use the word clouds to see how associated concepts limit the significance of the terms through definition.  My goal moving through the presentation is to show how our use of the technologies in class apply these terms in more significant detail.

 

Before we can understand why we approach technology as a tool for interaction and for writing, we must have an understanding of where we place ourselves in relation to the groups with which we identify.  I have used my memory maps of Rowan to illustrate these groups, or communities, which extend beyond the university.

 

Next, I transition to my twitter items to discuss the perceptions that affect how I use this tool as a writer.  In one respect, twitter moves me beyond the groups defined in my Rowan map by its placement on the internet.  Twitter also challenges “traditional” ideas of writing and communication by its character limit and organization.  Features such as the “re-tweet” (RT) reinforce our acceptance of characters as symbols as we look for ways around limitations and move forward in communication.

 

As writers, it is essential we question assumptions to reach new conclusions.  I have incorporated quotes to show contradictory opinions across some of the authors we have read and included screenshots of technologies from my work that show how we can, in fact, maintain the social life of information.

 

While we need to internalize and question independently, collaboration is also essential.  I have used the iaoc blog to show a different writing space than twitter, also reinforcing the movement of information as we extract information to support our own work, always with the understanding that readers will fill in the white space.

 

As a writer, I am always at the end of my current path, which is one without an end.  Behind me is the trail of information I have collected and distributed.  In front of me is an undefined space of endless possibility.

    I attempted to use “Writer as Cartographer” to drive my visual representation while analyzing the mappings “in terms of the major theories discussed in [our] class: metaphor, mapping, information, ecology, visual rhetoric, color, and classification”.  One of the major roots of many writers’ work is the work’s setting.  So I started this presentation with my map sketching.  Setting is where the story takes place; this information is a visual representation of where my story takes place.  Using the traditional tools of media (pencil, paper, and crayons), it is challenging for me to express this setting in ways that make it easier for all to make some sort of meaning out of the sketch.  Further, the errors labeling each significant building make me conclude that as a writer I need to pay attention to environment more.  The Google representation of my map uses new media to represent some of the same metaphors the sketch represents.  I used new media to structure information differently and allows for a larger audience to make some sort of meaning from that sketch.  For example, using photos and text readers can see I am a part of a class, and they see the building that I have class.  The sketch merely shows how I get to a particular place; it doesn’t show what that place is or what events take place.  Technology and new media gives us more tools at our disposal.  These tools allow us to structure and represent more information about the environment as opposed to the sketch; the tools increase the efficacy of the visual rhetoric.  For my Font and Color Palette, I chose graffiti.  The social metaphors associated with graffiti dictate the structure of the image of graffiti that I chose.  These metaphors include: hip-hop, counter-culture, minority, and fighting against oppression.  Curvy, wavy lines, thick and thin lines, and each letter doesn’t have a set format that falls between two horizontal lines, these are all characteristics that visually represent the social metaphors associated with graffiti.  The characteristics don’t work well on a grid, and they go against the status quo, similar to the counter-culture of hip-hop and graffiti.  I attempted to mimic these characteristics in my font, but found it challenging because the application used was structured on a grid.  We learned from Gage that colors from the 19th century represented social class.  Nobles were gold, freemen were red, and slaves were blue.  This fits well with the color scheme used by the graffiti artist.  Given the social metaphors associated with hip-hop, this makes sense that those who identify with that culture would use the metaphor of slavery to classify their emotions toward society.  I enjoyed the contrast of purple outlining the work.  The mood of blue suggests melancholy, while the purple suggests a potential for happiness outlining the overall mood.  The color palette comes in handy with the Twitter Tag Wordle and the Blog Wordle.  The tags used less are much less noticeable due to the lack of contrast between the black background and the purple color of the font.  The opposite is true with the tags more frequently used.  Twitter and blogging are brand new ways of sharing information with a mass audience.  This new media puts the power to share information in the hands of the individual instead of more concentrated, traditional media outlets.  The tags of the Blog Wordle show that most of the information I shared related to the theories discussed in our class.  This information also shows how I represent myself to my audience on Twitter and on the Blog, because our audience draws conclusions about us based on the information we share.  This relates to Bowker’s discussion about classification and why humans must classify our environment.  I added my work schedule because as Americans, we define whom we are by using the metaphors associated with what we do to make a living.  Work also structures how we format our lives.  When comparing my work schedule to my Twitter charts, one can see I spend most of my time Twittering at work.  My Nexus of friends shows a heavy concentration of people within one community, which is the Stockton community.  What I have learned the past few months is that I don’t have to use just traditional media to communicate information.  There are countless ways to communicate to an audience.  I also learned how to structure that information relative to the media in which I choose to write.  Readers can find my presentation here.