Every story on OPS is a story a contributor heard from someone else. These stories have been overheard and misheard, told and re-told and sometimes refined over time.
"Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible." a whacky collection
narrative+history+pictures+encyclopedia; "safe, fast and fun way to learn the real story behind historic events, famous people, heroic exploits, legends, disasters, movies, plus topics of current and general interest"
how-to videos or, more commonly, audio/slideshows; useful rhetorically for both technical writing and instructional video learning; web2.0 sharing of video that is perhaps instructionally more useful than YouTube.
a very large historical archive, often from advertising, "to provide for all levels of possible viewer a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories." unique collection, also useful for many other purposes
Geography courses, both present and past, with exercises, links, bibliography. Also see Urban Studies and American Indian Studies. Understanding place as cultural should inform both fiction and non-fiction film.
very evocative discussion guides for students doing exercises in and thinking about a wide variety of physical and cultural spaces; writers can gets lots of ideas from this course and its notes
huge portal site, across disciplines; "...other terms are sometimes used in place of place, such as home, dwelling, milieu, territory, and of course, space. None of these, though, are necessarily equivalent to the notion of place."
how to create hotspots with popup notes on Flickr. Very useful for image analysis and assignment requiring students to comment on social aspects or formal aspects of image; or to formally critique them.
a large socially committed ejournal, edited by Pedro Meyer, one of the pioneers in digital photographic art; galleries, essays, investigations into image circulation and production within digital communication, especially the Internet
with a social eye, she looks at a kitchen changing with a blended family, being a soccer mom, and shooting with a hidden digital camera in a strip club at the customer-woman interactions there
many of the past issues were on thematic concerns; ever of greater importance in academic and knowledge communities is the how-to of electronic publishing
complete book online, covers many areas often not dealt with, such as porn sites and dating sites; one insight that may draw you to read more: "the times that count in cyberspace are highly accelerated and strongly individualized."
Photographyy internationally: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, lyrical, personal, abstract, human, and street photography. Essays, interviews with photographers, reviews of exhibitions and photo books.
visual anthropology open archive, photos with comments: "opportunity to examine photographic modes of communication across societies, cultures, and academic worlds"
look at ordinarily unseen places: technical galleries, attics, construction places, roofs, all those "No Entry" places that form a sort of parallel deserted town
"multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era... how technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations...including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access"
collection of images from people who photographed themselves in reflective surfaces; since this is a favorite tactics of lovers of light, many images are well composed and intriguing
"Vectors maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence."
learning from those who "claim leftover spaces in cities and live in unauthorized dwellings made of scavenged, leftover materials"; solicits contributions
Software for something between a game and literary hypertext. "Storytronics uses Verbs to define what may happen in interactive storytelling. Each Verb represents one possible dramatic action, like a kiss, a demand, or an advice." Looks like fun.
theses for a proposed book on this topic, to which readers are invited to contribute, with comments included in "symposia" after each chapter, first announcement. Later entries include chapter contributors, topics, comments.
considering a new kind of network or network-assisted art, such as Internet or cell phone facilitated performances, on or offline; using locative media; Creative Commons, etc. An older idea was Internet Art.
designers of the installations for many important storytelling projects, most notably the StoryCorps booth; "an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously."
Peter Morville, whose book Ambient Findability, is a classic about user experience of the Internet here says users want a site that is useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible. Common sense, but rarely said so clearly!