Inside View

Tightening Up Content with an Audio Workflow

I'M CROSS-POSTING thoughts about the winds of change that blow me back towards the 13 years of legacy services served by  Typepad and away from quick throwaway audio clips that I've sent up to Audioboo for the past six years. The cross-posting is actually an experiment in disguise.

Click image to play on Audioboom.

I'm using a series of blog posts to determine how I might record, upload and link content that podcatchers will find and display. In this blog post, I'm offering two links to the spoken portion of this blog post. You can click to play one of the audio clips by tapping the above image. The second audio option is stored on OneDrive (below).

Standout Image #ID2015

Guest post by Fionn Murphy from the Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD).

The image of "Warren" struck me, as it clearly wasn't properly mounted on the main wall of LSAD-Clonmel. It's part of the Design Fest this November, on the campus of LIT-Clonmel, supporting the year of Irish Design.

Creating this image clearly took a lot of effort and coordination. I asked the artist, Evan Maher, back to my house for tea and a discussion about the fine details of this portrait. I wanted to know who it was, how it was created and the emotions it was supposed to evoke. I learned the subject in the picture was one of an older brother, named Warren, a man for whom Evan holds great respect. The background and geometric shapes used were to signify Warrens career in architecture.

I like the photo for its overall visual appeal and its satisfying color scheme. The overlay on Warren is very simple yet thought-provoking, using simple triangles of various colors, blended together to make a final product that almost tricks your eye on first glance into thinking its a photograph. Evan said he spent a lot of time on this as it was the subject and proved to be very tricky. Everything from the shading to the excellent background appear professional and the finishing reflects the artist's potential to create something artistic from something simple.

To see "Warren" and other highly creative works of Irish design, please drop into the South Tipperary campus of the Limerick School of Art & Design on the N24 Ring Road, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland.

Using @Sway to Recap a Week

BECAUSE I LIKE the stories revealed by selections of photographs, I'm trying the same thing by using Office Sway from Microsoft to share a storyline that originates during the last week of autumn. It's a work in progress that is going slowly because I'm trying to do the complete story using only Lumia phones.

While I edited my Sway, I embedded the work in progress on my blog. I want to see how it appears in various syndicators downstream. I'd like to see the embed updates itself when viewed several days after the unfinished work went public.

Sway is a cloud-based beta product that works well in Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. I used the Lumia 1520 as my primary editing tool and sourced the images and YouTube clip from online locations.

Taking Time to Carve Out Creative Corners

I'M MUCH MORE effective in teaching and learning when I take time to carve out spaces for creative reflection. I've shot a simple video clip that shows an unlikely space that features in my weekly routine.

The Lumia video clip includes several materials that have always played a part gathering and distilling information. My youngest daughter has reinforced one of those objects--a small 28 page Moleskine. Mia likes its miniature dimensions. I do too because it's the most portable note-taker I own. And I can get several months of use out of it without worrying about recharging it. See the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkqCc002QDk

[Bernie Goldbach is the senior pilot creative multimedia lecturer in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]

Words from tthe battlefield

A CENTURY AGO, when my grandparents were teens, The Great War ravaged the world. As I read about how Europe sleepwalked into that conflict, I can point out some vocabulary words that arose during WWI.

I point out to our children that although millions of men gave their lives on the battlefields of Europe, influenza claimed 50 million more lives in the conflict’s immediate aftermath. Some of those deaths happened in military hospital wards scattered throughout Dublin.

World War I also gave us daylight saving time, triage, chemical weapons, plastic surgery, fascism and yet another war. Man learned more ingenious way to kill and also discovered miraculous ways to save lives.

While reading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, I simultaneously read Sarah Sloat in the Wall Street Journal as she summaried words that emerged during the conflict to enter the common vernacular.

Thoughts from the Atrium #LSADmedia

AFTER A HALF DAY in Microsoft Ireland, I'm returning to campus with ideas that originated in a Skunkworks project. If my intentions are successful, I will convert that Skunkworks initiative into several clever Windows Phone apps and then watch young children time hop with their grandparents through memories of their school days.

Copyrighting Cooks

I'M WATCHING TV3 as it tries to launch a new cooking show hosted by Angeline Ball, a former Commitments star. The show is called Home Cook's Academy and its name falls afoul of copyright.

That's because Cooks Academy, based in Dublin's South William Street, has been trading since 2005 and its owner thinks the TV show infringes copyright and creates confusion among the public. Cooks Academy teaches home cooking courses. The company employs nine full-time staff along with freelance chefs. It registered its name and its red and white logo in 2006. Publicity pictures for the TV3 programme show a red and white logo.

These kinds of identity disputes can be amicably settled and sometimes result in cross-promotion of both parties.

The Biggest Space of the Summer

Photo with Lumia 1520.

I WILL REMEMBER the summer of 2014 as the time when I cleared out seven carloads of stuff from our garage and reclaimed the space. The possible utility of the space emerged during the summer.

Listen to "Reclaiming Space" on Audioboo

Photos I Did Not Snap

Photo of Racoon by Mia.

WE HAVE THREE mobile phones in the house to give the kids an awareness of how the major operating systems work. As the above image shows, our young people snap things they want to keep or share.

Our Worlds of Patatap and Friv

Screenshot from Behance.

WE HAVE A 6YO who enjoys keyboard activities. She has added Patatap to her toolkit, right after Friv. [1]

I discovered Patatap, a portable animation and sound kit, on Pinboard. [2] When I visited the Patatap website, my Chrome browser loaded an iFrame that mapped the letters A to Z to sounds and shapes. Then I watched our 6yo run her fingers across my laptop keyboard to create create melodies charged with moving shapes.

We stopped after my Dell battery died, but not before Mia switched between multiple colour palettes ("Dad! I can make it turn pink!") and matching soundscapes on the fly. [3]

"The motivation behind Patatap is to introduce the medium of Visual Music to a broad audience," explains Jono Brandel. "Artists working in this field vary in discipline but many aim to express the broader condition of Synesthesia, in which stimulation of one sensory input leads to automatic experiences in another. Hearing smells or seeing sounds are examples of possible synesthesia". I brought synesthesia into our social media classroom last week and will continue the discussion as we explore the start of a social media research project in support of the annual Pen & Pixel exhibition on the LSAD-Clonmel campus. We might try to bring Patatap's colourful visual animations to the 22 May exhibition. If you have a Chrome browser, you might enjoy what happens below the break.