Chris Boese's Portfolio

Introduction

Welcome to my professional portfolio.

I've created innovative and award-winning new media products since 1993, and written and edited under deadline in complex long- and short-form media genres. I’ve also taught graduate seminars on visual & written communication, blogging, journalism, creative & technical writing, interaction design, and usability.

The links on the right will take you to samples of my work in each of those areas.

KEY STRENGTHS

• Proven web author, interaction designer, analyst, researcher, project and community manager, blog producer and marketer.
• 15 years experience as a New Media researcher, futurist, and published scholar, studying cybercultures, online communities, blogs, and VR.
• Able to visualize complex systems, conduct formal ethnographic and usability studies, and analyze social effects on audiences and markets.
• Award-winning teacher, trainer, workshop leader, and public speaker, applying innovative tools and approaches to computer-assisted learning since 1990.
• Published photographer, journalist, print designer, poet, fiction and literary non-fiction writer.

From 2001 to 2006 I returned to my first career, journalism, to watch history unfold at a company I’ve long admired: CNN. After the 2001 dot.com crash, I continued my research and web development work on my own time, building a substantial professional reputation in the Blogosphere and on individual consulting projects.  I’m now back working as a full-time web consultant again, in New York City for Avenue A-Razorfish.

Please check out my  online portfolio at www.serendipit-e.com/boeseportfolio .

Chris Boese

CHRIS BOESE

LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboese
Professional Portfolio: www.serendipit-e.com/boeseportfolio
Personal/Professional Weblog: www.serendipit-e.com/blog

PROFILE:

• Proven interactive media production and marketing skills honed since the birth of the Web in 1993.
• Functional/Business analysis and technical documentation skills, with wiki documentation forms.
• Web 2.0 research into social media and the grassroots citizen media movement.
• Experienced blog designer, author, and community manager. Serendipit-e.com domain includes about 35 individual and group blogs (12 are personal publishing projects). One private listserv I manage has been in existence more than 8 years.
• Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic in cybercultures, interactive media, HCI & technical communication.
• Enthusiastic speaking and leadership style that motivates and inspires collaborative groups to exceed project goals and creatively push beyond existing limits.
• Adept multi-tasker and quick learner, able to facilitate projects through rapid prototyping and  usability testing (including experience with Agile/Scrum).
• Advanced writing and communication skills, adaptable to short and long form media genres and a wide range of publishing venues, from technical writing to journalism and PR, blogs, and literary and scholarly journals.

SPECIALTIES:

• New Media creator, researcher, social critic, and futurist studying social media, cybercultures, online communities, and the citizen media movement.
• Award-winning teacher, trainer and public speaker applying innovative tools and approaches to computer-assisted learning since 1990.
• Published and award-winning photographer, poet, fiction & literary non-fiction writer and journalist.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

Functional Analyst at Avenue A-Razorfish: NYC  Client: CondeNet, Flip.com
January 2007 – Present ( 10 months)

• Lead FA on CondéNet’s Flip.com, a major social media/Flash scrapbooking site for teenaged girls.
• Worked on Facebook Application development on 1-year anniversary of Flip.
• Gather and document business requirements, and create functional specifications.
• Organized and structured central intranet Wiki for site features and supporting materials.
• Collaborate with design, technology, and user experience teams on site interaction design features and functionality.

Writer; Researcher/Associate Writer at CNN Headline News, Atlanta, GA
August 2001– December 2006 (5 years  5 months)

• Started one month before 9/11 & wrote the on-screen 2-deck headline “ticker” from 2001-2003, through some of the most incredible breaking news in recent history.
• Cyberculture/cult media columnist for HLN on CNN.com, 2002-05: BuzzFactor, HotWired.
• Developed intranet HLN blog on spec, 2003. Project reborn for entire CNN newsgroup, 2006.
• Freelanced CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360” April 2004. Completed copy editor training, 2005.

T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at University of Montana School of Journalism, Missoula, MT. August 2005– December 2005 (5 months)

• Taught one-semester endowed visiting professorship, including seminar on weblogs and citizen journalism movement, while on leave from CNN.
• Co-advisor to student newspaper, directing the RSS-based redesign of the CMS and its online edition (Expression Engine platform).
• 300+ attended public lecture on warblogs vs. traditional journalism delivered for the endowment.

Assistant Professor at Clemson University, Department of English, MA Professional Communication Program (MAPC), Clemson, SC. August 1998– May 2002 (3 years  10 months)

• Teaching and Research in New Media and Web Design, Information Architecture/Interaction Design, Visual Communication, HCI, Usability, Pilot Laptop Program.
• Received $100,000 grant over 3 years to create and direct the PSA Interactive Resources Studio for Clemson Public Service Activities (1998-2001). www.nutball.com/archive/psaportal/ie/index.htm
• Implemented redesign of the PSA web portal and about a dozen PSA client sites with 4 grad assistants and 2 student programmers/year.
• Directed formal usability study after launch with coded video data. Hosted and directed other grant-funded, nationally-published grad thesis usability studies

Web/Computer Contractor/Consultant: Sample Clients: (1998) Cisco Systems, Albany, NY branch. Created database for the NYS government contract to access through a local node of the Cisco Intranet. (July 1995) UNISYS Transportation Sector Marketing Group, Bluebell, PA.

 

Continue reading "Resume'"

A whirlwind tour of selected web sites I've designed and built since 1994

The last time I worked with these web thumbnails was with my old Flash portfolio. As much as I've enjoyed Flash and Director over the years, they aren't the easiest end-products to update over time (unless I want to integrate a database).

So now this is my web portfolio. Some are solo design projects; some have artwork that was subcontracted out or provided by the client or ad agency. On some of the larger, more comprehensive sites, I directed the graphic design, site design, programming, and usability teams as project manager. With such big sites, the team members' contributions were essential, and I am deeply grateful for their work.

Each thumbnail listed will include a short case description of the project. This is not a complete archive of all the sites I've worked on, but each one is representative of its period in the evolution of the web.

Here's a teaser... from my most recent launch...

to an oldie but goodie...

The Continue link will go from the present, backward in time, to the early days of Mosaic and the beginnings of the World Wide Web (I'm still trying to recreate my first 1994 home page, if I can just find that old Mosaic gray background [grin]). I'll keep updating this permanent link, to preserve a bit of my own web history. You'll also find below a piece I did for one of the longest continuously publishing online magazines from the earliest days of the web (CMC Magazine), still available at all its original links.

Continue reading "A whirlwind tour of selected web sites I've designed and built since 1994"

Designing for Blogs, Part 1: A Brief Manifesto

See also Designing for Blogs, Part 2: Screenshots.

I'm an unabashed fan of working smarter, not harder.

In 1999, before I first happened on blog software or even the precursor called "EditThisPage," I was working with a few student programmers on a similar system in PHP, for classroom uses, collaborative projects, and portfolio-based active learning. What I really wanted to do was get away from the limitations of WebCT and Blackboard for more student-centered learning, instead of reproducing traditional classroom structures online. And I didn't want to have to keep teaching students HTML in classes that had other work to do.

When I saw that EditThisPage, Radio Userland and other applications were already doing what I was attempting to build from scratch in my dining room, I realized that the idea was so simple and such a logical next step, hundreds of people were probably doing exactly what I was doing, in different arenas, to make publishing accessible to more people. I saw that I could use blog tools for just about anything I could imagine with HTML and Flash, and save myself a whole lot of work.

And why did the blog idea catch fire as the killer app, when content management systems on the corporate side were plentiful? I strongly believe the answer is a timely combination of the rise of Google along with RSS.

Even though feed readers are having difficulty reaching non-tech users, feeds and tags are becoming an intrinsic structure in nearly everything we build. Quite simply, I won't build another freelance/contract web site that is not RSS/Atom-enabled. It's a no-brainer. Blogs are the display and feeds give the display legs. Technorati.com would not exist without feeds. And the massive social movement that is the blogosphere would not exist at all without RSS behind it.

So these days, rather than endlessly re-inventing the wheel, I'm primarily designing for CSS and the content-management shell blog software provides, a shell I can pour nearly anything into. Do I ever wish for the old blank-slate, starting fresh with a new audience/user interaction model every time?

Sometimes, but Web functionality is so crucial to interactive communities and a public commons that solo work in Flash feels empty to me, like an essential piece is missing. I think we'll end up one day defining "interactivity" as something that essentially must have more than one author, perhaps even many authors.

And lately, when I want to push on the limits of what interactivity can do, I find myself reaching for an even more robust system, pmachine's Expression Engine, where I can situate multiple blog modules in different contexts on the same page, and still retain my permalink archives and flexible CSS designs.

My only complaint so far is that I want some of the features I find in Scoop, features of audience-driven, "self-organizing" sites.

Not too long ago, someone asked me to predict where interactive media and the Internet would be five years from now. I refused to give an answer, because I don't get to decide. The beauty of a grassroots, bottom-up social movement like in the blogosphere is that the social structures provide an organic kind of direction and structure, and the social structure is the authority, not "industry leaders" or "futurists" or any other professional prognosticators striving for control or a first-mover advantage.

Interactivity is about giving up control.

What I strive to do as a designer and a participant in this grassroots social movement is to create tools that empower the most people with enough freedom to set their own directions. I'm not interested in herding cats. I am interested in watching and learning inductively from where cats go.

That's what Web 2.0 is about. That's why it rose from the ashes of the top-down corporate- and VC-driven creations that crashed and burned after all the money turned to vapor. What we valued most was what remained. Communities, interactions, strong ties, weak ties. Rich relationships over time. Rabid flame wars. Not endlessly pitching widgets while dropping names to bugger your Google/Technorati rank.

That's also why, in what some are calling a Web boomlet, I see business people desperately trying to appropriate blogs for various business models, proclaiming themselves authorities on their blog content niche as if they were following a stock professional copywriting formula, many diluting content in search engine-optimized blog sites that literally suck all the life out of the real reasons for blogging, the real reasons for writing and communicating online.

They claim they are dispensing value in a kind of knowledge-log "how-to" format, but as this genre of blogging multiplies, the sites look to me like little more than human-written, SEO-focused link farms, one step away from machine-generated link farms. Where is the real value in that?

Where I will stand in this new wash-out is with the commons, the spaces where real people talk, where conversations are alive with an energy of their own. The interfaces I will build for these communities and cybercultures will be interfaces that allow patterns of use to co-create the interface structures themselves.

The most creative, edgy projects I want to work on compulsively on my own time will not just employ user-centered design. They will allow social network structures to literally create their own designs.

In part two on this topic, I offer a visual snapshot into the kinds of blog-based sites I design, build, and often, host. One got 2,500 hits in its first 48 hours online. Others get very little traffic, because they are e-books I'm committed to maintaining as part of our common online library. Others are simply labors of love, my own contribution to the "real."

Designing for Blogs, Part 2: Screenshots

Atlanta Media Bloggers (launched 2006)
Link: www.serendipit-e.com/mediabloggers
Custom advanced CSS on the Typepad platform. Original artwork by Denny Lester.

Serendipit-e, Inc. Communities and Tools for Active Learners
(launched 2000 in HTML, relaunched Typepad 2003)
Link: www.serendipit-e.com

Spinning and Being Spun: The idea of journalism in a postmodern age (launched 2005)
Link: www.serendipit-e.com/spinning

Weston Productions News site (launched 2004, now dormant)
Link: www.serendipit-e.com/weston

my cnn: employee news intranet blog (in development 2006)
no public access

Continue reading "Designing for Blogs, Part 2: Screenshots"

Academic Vita

CHRISTINE BOESE
www.serendipit-e.com/boeseportfolio

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Rhetoric and Communication: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 1998. GPA 4.0. Dissertation Chair: David Porush. Readers: James Zappen, Tamar Gordon, Audrey Steinhauer. Outside Reader: Cynthia Selfe.

Dissertation: The Ballad of the Internet Nutball. www.nutball.com/dissertation
Online ethnography & rhetorical analysis was first Web-based hypertext dissertation accepted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in 1998. Since then the permanent site has received international recognition and is required reading in graduate seminars both within & outside the USA, receiving international trAce award (UK), Dec 2000. Author interviewed in New York Times article on cult TV in 2000. Research was subject of a visual rhetoric study by Mary E. Hocks in June 2003 issue of the Journal of College Composition and Communication.

Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing, Poetry: University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 1990 (sixty credit terminal degree). Thesis: Darkroom Glories poetry manuscript.

Bachelor of Arts: University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, 1985.
Major: Journalism. Minor: English.


SPECIALTIES, RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS

Weblogs & Micropublishing, Cyberculture & VR, Social Network Computing, Interface Design & Usability, Interaction Design, Hypermedia & Multimedia Communication Theory, Visual Communication, Graphic Design, Computers & Composition, Rhetorical Theory and Analysis, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, Ethnographic Research Methods, Professional/Technical Communication, Electronic Journalism, Public Relations, Literary Journalism, Photojournalism, Poetry, Nonfiction, & Fiction Workshops


TECHNICAL SKILLS

Proficiency (able to teach): Movable Type, TypePad, Avstar & iNews; Director, Flash, & Dreamweaver; Photoshop; Illustrator & Freehand; PageMaker & Quark; Excel; FileMaker Pro; HTML & CSS.
Basic Knowledge: UNIX, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, MySQL, PHP

Continue reading "Academic Vita"

Montana Journalism Review: Ethical issues between blogging and journalism

I just heard a terrific NPR "All Things Considered" piece on George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," and since that essay and Orwell's other writings influenced my piece in the Summer 2006 Montana Journalism Review below, it seemed like a good time to post this up here. The odd numbers floating in the text are references to the Endnotes at the very end of the document.

Here's the full bib citation:

Boese, C. (2006) "Challenging the Power Structure." Montana Journalism Review. Summer 2006, Number 35. pp. 8-10.

 

Challenging the Power Structure

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American "town square," the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true "commons," spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the "commons." But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare's time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a "global village." While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online "blogosphere," people are gathering. They're writing and editing their own customized interactive "newspapers" with headline readers and research they've done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term "blog" was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it's often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The "blog movement" is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what's being put online using blog software has very little to do with the "blog movement" per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person's content management system. It's like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The "blog movement" is another thing altogether, and it's having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

Continue reading "Montana Journalism Review: Ethical issues between blogging and journalism"

Course Syllabus: JOUR 494 Pollner Seminar Syllabus

University of Montana, Missoula:

Who controls a free press? Blogging and the citizen journalists' challenge to Mainstream Media

Fall 2005 Syllabus

Instructor:  Dr. Christine Boese
Meetings:  11 am to 1 pm Mondays in 2nd Floor Journalism Library & Honors Computer Lab
Class Blog:  www.serendipit-e.com/494private 
Office Phone:  406-243-2934
Office:  208 Journalism Building
Office Hours:  1-3 pm Weds., Tues., Thurs. unless I'm meeting with other classes. I'll also be available M-F during the day most days

Texts and Electronic Tools:

Available in the campus bookstore. The Gillmor text can also be downloaded free online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp, but I want you to bring the book to class, so you'll need to print the whole thing out somewhere. Also, the two optional texts are usually available with two-for-one discount pricing as a package deal at Amazon.com.

Required:

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, For the People. Dan Gillmor. O'Reilly Media Books, 2004. See also http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp.

Recommended:

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Rebecca Blood. Perseus Publishing, 2002.

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. Perseus Publishers ed. Introduction by Rebecca Blood. Perseus Publishing, 2002.

Blog Software:

Each student will be setting up at least two (if not more) individual blogs as a course requirement. One will be a blog publishing forum and the other will be a professional journalism portfolio you can use to archive your clips and career achievements and show to potential employers (also part of your final grade). DO NOT jump ahead, as I will walk you through the process if you don't have a blog already. There are certain advantages to pre-planning and I want to make sure you understand the features and options before you plunge in.

The software I hope all will use (unless you are already a web-tech whiz-bang) can be found at Typepad.com. There is a low monthly fee, but I want to make sure you set up the account that will best fit your needs. I know that free blog accounts can be set up at places like Blogger.com (and even LiveJournal, egad!), but ultimately you will find future options limited at the free sites, and this is an investment in your professional credibility. Whiz-bangs may consider excellent products such as WordPress or Drupal, but prepare to be technically challenged by the installation and maintenance (and onerous comment spam, something Typepad has cured).

Finally, I'm hoping some adventurous students will take a stab at podcasting this semester, and Typepad just set up the easiest on-ramp to podcasting I've seen so far, to go along with its streamlined interface for photoblogging and mo-blogging. Typepad has also indicated that video-blogging will also be supported with the new podcast features.

Course Description

New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling wrote in 1960, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." In this course we will examine and participate in one of the most radical restructurings of media ownership since moveable type displaced monks copying manuscripts by hand. Now the price of owning a "press" has fallen to nearly zero. In this time of great social change, the media landscape and its "powers that be" seem thrown into chaos. Some (like RIAA) are fighting the changes while others embrace them. The stress of change also releases great creative energy. These are exciting times for journalists! We will compare the social structures and technologies of broadcast and interactive media, and discuss the idea of a coming "convergence." We will also launch our own blogs and join the larger blogging "ecosystem." Along the way, we'll conduct online research into the bloggers' challenge to mainstream media (or MSM, as they call it), in an attempt to discover what is giving this grassroots journalism movement its power.

No specialized technical knowledge or web-building skills are required to take this course. We will learn to maintain web templates and style sheets with blog software. We will also learn practical writing strategies and media management skills for interactive journalism. By the end of the course, each student will have created a polished professional portfolio blog as well.

Continue reading "Course Syllabus: JOUR 494 Pollner Seminar Syllabus"

University of Montana School of Journalism: New Pollner prof

Link: University of Montana School of Journalism: New Pollner prof.

By Bennett Jacobs J-School Web reporter

Chris Boese, a writer for CNN Headline News and a pioneer in the Weblog movement, will be the UM Journalism School’s fifth T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor.

Boese will spend the fall semester at the J-school, teaching a class on blogging and working as an adviser to the Kaimin, the student newspaper. Pollner professors also deliver a public lecture during the semester.

[...]

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Curse of Cain opening Flash movie

Download The Curse of Cain book site opening Flash movie

CNN.com - The Internet imagined: 'We are immigrants to the future' - Jan 26, 2005

Download CNNSurveyResults1-05.pdf

Text version is available at the "Continue" link below.

Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/01/26/internet.future/index.html

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CNN.com - Tsunami relief effort may break new ground in fund raising - Jan 19, 2005

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/01/19/web.tsunami.aid/index.html

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CNN.com - Passport chips raise privacy concerns - Jan 6, 2005

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Find this column at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/01/06/passports/index.html

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CNN.com - Invasion of the podcasting people? - Dec 8, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/12/08/podcasting/index.html

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CNN.com - Imagining the future of the Internet - Nov 10, 2004

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CNN.com - Can you prove you're not a machine? - Oct 13, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/10/13/turing.test/index.html

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CNN.com - Will cyber journalists turn the tables on big media? - Sep 15, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/09/15/cyber.journalist/index.html

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CNN.com - An Act that induces a lot of reactions - Aug 18, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/08/17/induce.act/

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CNN.com - Surviving crashes: A cautionary tale - July 29, 2004

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CNN.com - There once was a woman who lived in her computer - Jun 21, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/06/21/smart.home/index.html

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CNN.com - Plug obsession - May 19, 2004

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CNN.com - Revenge of the 'Big Ears' - May 3, 2004

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CNN.com - Chipping away at privacy with radio waves - Apr 21, 2004

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CNN.com - The screen-age: Our brains in our laptops - Jan. 26, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/01/26/hln.hot.buzz.silicon.brain/index.html

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The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

Originally published in the 2004 University of Minnesota edited collection: Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.

Download FreireBlogland04.pdf

Reprinted here with permission.

Full Citation:

Boese, C. (2004). The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved April 30, 2006, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/the_spirit_of_paulo_freire.html.

By Christine Boese, Independent researcher

Abstract

Weblogs and knowledge-logs, or “blogs” and “klogs,” have emerged into the post-dot.com bubble online world as a notable (and often non-commercial) social phenomenon. While some hear echoes of Web homepage voices from the mid-1990s, the blogging phenomenon during the Iraq war may have taken Web cybercultures in new directions. This qualitative and exploratory research considers the viability and social effects of the altered web page phenomenon of blogs and klogs as they affect the lives of information workers, in public Internet spaces, and with implications for private intranets. It combines ethnographic observations from a single case within the Iraq warblog phenomenon with the   standpoints and personal observations from the author’s professional experience launching a klog inside CNN Headline News shortly after the war. It seeks to gain insight into the utopian and often unnecessarily technologically deterministic promise of a knowledge-log revolution and find points where the movement falls far short of that promise. While knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware   tools for organizations, klog interface features allow political openings to change corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, with a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy through workers helping and teaching other workers outside the realm of “official policy.” Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that klogs can create on a small scale. Ideas and models presented by Paulo Freire and Michel de Certeau are used as a lens for one possible interpretation of the events studied from March to November 2003.

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Longman 2001-2002 Companion Web Site for Lannon's "Technical Communication" textbook

Companion Web Site: Technical Communication, 9th ed. John M. Lannon, Longman. Content development, link updating, and hypertextual structuring for the "Hot Topics" "Web Icons" and "Student Guide" sections.

The site is currently still live and active here. But if it should go dead or be replaced by a new edition of the textbook (currently one of the top two most popular university-level technical writing textbooks on the market), PDF files of sample screens can be found below.

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Clemson Public Services 1998-2001 Web Redesign, Usability Test Plan, and Study Results

Director, PSA Interactive Resources Studio (Sponsored Research, Web Consultant, Project, Team, and Research Manager): (1998 to 2001) Clemson University Public Service Activities. Created interface research and testing division with 4 graduate assistants and 2 undergraduate programmers.

Built multimedia studio. Planned and implemented redesign of the PSA web site to test interface design theory (M.A.S.S). Directed team of web consultant RAs for stakeholders under the land grant university’s public service commitment.

Directed site test usability study and one RA's (Katlin Beck) master's project, a formal, video-data-coded usability study under an STC grant, and the team applied same methods to a formal PSA usability study.

Studio teaching of graduate and undergraduate students in interaction architecture and web consulting. About $100,000 funded over 3 years.

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ACM Hypertext 2000: Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Presented at: Proceedings of the Eleventh Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia May 30  – June 4, 2000 San Antonio, Texas, USA.

Published in conference proceedings: New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2000. 232-233.

At this same conference, I also presented the following material in a poster session:

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Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

Christine Boese
Department of English
Clemson University
Clemson, SC USA  29634

ABSTRACT

In August, 1998 the first hypertextual dissertation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was accepted (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation),  a case study applying methods of rhetorical analysis and cultural critique to the online phenomenon called the “Xenaverse,” the cyberspaces devoted to the cult following of the syndicated television program Xena, Warrior Princess. The hypertextual research site, a vital online culture, seemed to demand a new kind of scholarship to describe and analyze it. Still, there were many hurdles to getting such an unorthodox presentation form accepted by the dissertation committee and the Graduate School.

This paper summarizes a few of the justifying arguments that led to the successful acceptance this dissertation, a hypertext that could not be reproduced in any way on paper. In showing how one case for a hypertextual dissertation was successfully argued, I hope to help other scholars make similar cases at other institutions, perhaps leading to further debate on the ways arguments and epistemologies will be defined in the future.

KEYWORDS: hypertext dissertation electronic scholarship online cultural studies library archives University Microfilms graduate school Xenaverse Xena

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CNN.com - You've got a friend ... of a friend ... of a friend ... - Dec. 8, 2003

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CNN.com - The metaphysics of 'spam' - Oct. 20, 2003

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CNN.com - Internet newbies unite - Sep. 3, 2003

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CNN.com - Welcome to the 'new' Web, same as the 'old' Web - Jul. 15, 2003

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CNN.com - Living like a 'Modern Nomad' - Apr. 22, 2003

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CNN.com - Are you a 'Modern Nomad'? - Mar. 17, 2003

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CNN.com - Fans speak up for NeoPets - Feb. 10, 2003

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