Command Line and the Uncool Aspects of the Matrix - DiMe Piece #6

Some of my friends don't agree, but I think The Matrix Trilogy is probably one of the best trilogies made in the last twenty years. I understand that Neo was a digital version of Jesus Christ, and so I wasn't disappointed by the way the last movie ended. Cypher isn't the most loved character of "The Matrix," but I can relate to his position. The world he knew was traded with one decision, and he didn't like the harshness of the reality that he got in return. He became the movie's second villain, all because he preferred to live in the code and renounce all memory of the truth.

Let's put all the cool stuff about the movies, like being able to learn things instantly or defy gravity, aside and think about the weirdness of having to see buildings, people, cars and everything you have visual knowledge and understandings of in code. Think about every aspect of the way you engage with your surroundings being reduced to something two-dimensional that can be written by a 8-year-old, given enough practice. I don't think this paragraph even conveys the strangeness of how weird that is to me. But nobody ever talks about that; the code that makes up The Matrix just because that vehicle that makes what we call reality bendable and manipulable. And it's that thing that makes Keanu Reeves fly.

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So the point of all this is that, to me, command line feels the same way. I'm not exactly a stranger to command line. I was one of those kids lucky enough to be in a school program that exposed me to computers before the advent of Windows 95. As I typed "cd:\games" to access the Jeopardy game that was uploaded with one of those big, actually-floppy disks, I didn't really understand the significance of typing those things. I saw them as simply directions that needed to be followed to get to an objective.

But that was a long, LONG time ago. By the time I really began to understand how computers worked, everything was visual and interactive. Seeing a folder called "Games" and clicking on it to get to a game made more sense to me. Manipulating program operations with mouse-clicks and dialogue boxes is easier to wrap my head around. Watching the visual progress of downloads through colored bars is more comforting to me. Now, our digital methods assignment require that I go back to using command line to some degree.

There's something scary about that black or blue screen with nothing but words. Putting what feels like cold input in and getting cold input back. Errors in command line are scarier than a pop-up box with a harsh-sounding tone; command line errors tend to be longer, and if there's more than one, they seem like they blend together. Doing complicated tasks with command line demands that you make textual pictures of your location and actions rather than rely on the convenience of being able to see things and click on them. I know that command line is a different way of interacting with the same operating systems; I know that it gives me powers to do things that a graphical interface doesn't. I feel like Cypher though; "Yeah, that's cool, but my dinky yellow folders are comforting to me." "It's true that I prefer keyboard shortcuts to leaving the keyboard to move a mouse, but the key word there is 'shortcuts.'" Shortly, I'll begin to engage with data and text using programs that depend on command line. I'll literally be stumbling around in the black, or the blue, trying to figure out what I'm doing. I don't look forward to it with any relish. Maybe with enough practice, I'll become like the heroes of Zion and develop a comfort with seeing my computing world in harsher, less visual terms.

The Dreamweaver Attempt - DiMe Piece #5

(originally composed 11/15/14)

I'm using my shift at the weekend boot camp to start building my own webpage. I have Adobe Dreamweaver, which I've never used. I think rather than letting someone else's imagination determine what my page what should look like, I'd rather try to build something that matches the vision I have.

The Dream

Ideally, I'd like to start with some animation. What I'd like to do is have about three black and white images scrolling behind my full name in a bright color on an invisible banner, Carlyn Pinkins, written in large, lowercase letters. At some point, the "arlyn" of my first name will change a different color than the rest of the text and swing down like an arm under the "c" at a 90-degree angle. The "c" will then join "pinkins" and a ".net" will suddenly appear to make the name of the URL - "cpinkins.net" The letters of "arlyn" will rotate to upright positions and become the first letters of links that are written out in a different font. For example, the "a" (in a large fat arial font) will be my "About" link. I imagine the "bout" part will be written in a cursive script.

The Reality

Opening the program for the first time is intimidating. I thought I'd be opening something that would let me build my page as simply as a Microsoft Powerpoint slide, turning my creation into code with little to no effort on my part. It gives me options to build new pages, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are among them. I should probably start with Java, but the two introduction videos I watched before have pretty much confirmed that I will need to have a good bit of knowledge of code to be able to do the things that I want to do. But I don't know how to do that. Any of it. So I thought I'd just try to work backwards and build the page that shows up after all the animation is done.

After stumbling around with what I barely remember about coding, I manage to figure how to change the background color to gray with their Page Properties menu and put some pink text on the page, but the positioning is all wrong, and despite the heading being H1, the size of the text is wrong too.

The Trouble with Margins...

...is that I don't understand how they work. Even in Codecademy, the positioning of lines is nebulous. I feel like even when I created my own CV from raw code, I was randomly plugging values into a line until I got what I wanted. If there was a way to understand webpage margins beyond random numbers of pixels, I could probably get this moving a lot faster.

The bones of Dr. Gibbs' webpage is sort of the way I'd like mine to be. I've looked at his CSS code before and I still can't make sense of it, but maybe I can play with moving my elements around using his margins.

Decided to try to find fonts that might work with my vision. Time sure flies when you're frustrated.

Now what?

Having secured the code for the fonts I will want to use, I went back to Dr. Gibbs' CSS code to figure out which part sets up the margins for his home page. I also created a CSS sheet in Dreamweaver. I really don't know where to go next. I don't remember what a container is or why one would even be necessary as its own separate thing.

Downloaded Notepad++ onto this laptop and started a new index html sheet called "new_index." Checking out tutorials again to get some idea of how to start this thing.

The W3 website has convinced me that I'm thinking of "margins" in the wrong way. I'm confused about how I should think about them.

Text vs Images - How to Make the Links?

Now it's Sunday, and while I should shift my focus to the other projects that I need to do for the class, I'm still stuck on how I should go about trying to set up the page. One of the issues I'm thinking about is how to make the links that I want to make. Should I make buttons that combine the two fonts I want, or should I just use spans to make the first letter of the text different from the rest? If I do that, could I move the cursive text close enough to the block to make a single link or would have to make two. The writing I'm doing now, I realize, is just based on ideas and not actually trying things to see. I'm scared. Might as well just suck it up and try.

I didn't bring my big laptop back to camp. What I'm realizing is that Dreamweaver was never meant for beginners with only a design idea. Being able to use it requires that the user has a good understanding of coding. It may create a lot of shortcuts, but not sure that would be worth it for me.

By the end of the day, I've managed to figure out how to make a static vision of what I want (minus the background). I think I'll leave the flashier stuff for later. I had to reteach myself some things, but just using Notepad ++ and Xampp, I was able to create the vision I wanted without some fancy program doing it for me.

Reclaiming Space Through Google Maps - DiMe Piece #4

The renaming of space as part of settler colonialism is a hot topic in native scholarship. Tonawanda Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman made representations of space through the perspectives of native women in literature the focus of her book, "Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations." She argued that even though settler mapmaking changed the names of places and features and imposed boundaries where none previously existed, native people have preserved the names and meanings of places significant to them. Native women serve as keepers of that knowledge. Jason Farman's article also discusses traditional mapmaking as a tool of empire. While digital maps, like those created in Google Earth, don't eradicate the problems of misrepresentation and renaming space according to knowledges of the dominant culture (in fact, they create new problems in that regard), they give users the ability to define their spaces and create maps that have meaning for them.

Farman's main goal is to show that the interactivity of Google Earth has the potential to map a digital empire. He writes, "Though the World Wide Web continues to be a mostly unmapped territory for most Internet users, there is still a desire to locate oneself spatially within cyberspace."¹ That's cool, I guess. The important thing I took away was that the nature of Google Earth's interactivity opens doors for users with different spatial conceptualizations to represent their worlds, to some extent, and essentially allows them to "claim" their spaces. For indigenous users, the use of overlays in Google Earth offers the possibility to "reclaim" spaces from settler colonialist understandings. Places and features could have traditional meanings and significance reattached and borders could be redrawn or even erased in these altered representations. Tribes have the option of creating digital representations of traditional cartographies to pass on to future generations, preserving some aspects of their cultural knowledge. That possibility is exciting for scholars of native history, like me; they could increase our understandings of how indigenous peoples create and conceptualize their spaces.

As awesome as that possibility is, Farman reminds of us of the limitations in creating such overlays. Firstly, Google controls how the overlays work which limits how users create and interact with them. That constricts users to working with maps solely in the ways that Google Earth's developer imagine users would.² Secondly, not all of Google Earth's potential users have access to broadband or even the internet, which is required to access the program and add information.³ According to Farman, what that adds up to is that Google Earth's developers only had one type of user in mind - one with broadband internet access.⁴ Though he posits that we're forced read that Google Earth as reiterating "Western dominance over information distribution and adhering to centralized power over user interactions," it seems like he leaves out one thing about Google's prospective user: one who has Western European understandings of space.⁵ Those of us who have grown up with Mercator maps and road atlases that use English pronunciations of names and words see state and international lines as absolutes. The possibility that others may see the same geographical spaces differently and that their representations are just as valid as our doesn't occur to most of us. If those who have differing perceptions of spaces we all inhabit are given the opportunity to share their views, it could lead to a cultural awakening for many of us.

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¹Jason Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire: Google Earth and the Process of Postmodern Cartography,” New Media & Society 12, no. 6 (2010): 16.
²Ibid., 23.
³Ibid.
⁴Ibid., 24.
⁵Ibid.