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