Note: Sorry for the Hiatus: this entry is from my stash (imagine that a stash of weblog entries!) I’ll be back on Friday with a Hypertext entry, and hopefully some more content as well. Enjoy--ty

I think that knitted things, above just about any other quality, should be wearable. We should want to wear knitted things, not simply because they are products of our own handy-craft, or an object that our loved ones made for us, but because they are comfortable, because they fit, because they are flattering, and of course because knitted garments are a product of our (and our loved ones') handycraft. Knitting can be all of these things, and I think because of their history as working garments, knitting in traditional styles is particularly able to satisfy all of these concerns. For me, the issue of “wearability,” of a garment is often decided by features in a number of key locations. In list form they are:

• Sleeve length: sleeves that are even a smudge too short irritate me. It’s harder to make a sleeve too long than it to make it too short. As a corollary to this, it’s also important that sleeves not be too narrow: a sleeve that can’t comfortably accommodate a layer or two can be problematic.
• Collar: I’ll touch on this more in another issue, but I find that collars that are too tall or that fit too closely, make sweaters feel too warm, and/or itchy, and are thus to be avoided. In fact I “developed” an open collar or placated collar (I’ve seen them called “Henley necked” as well) style that helps alleviate this issue.
• Riding up in the back: It’s a little known fact that your back is slightly narrower and slightly longer than your front. It’s one of those quirks of how we are shaped. To compensate, for this, when ever possible I think it’s useful to make the back of a sweater slightly longer than the front. Typically I do this with short-rows, but there are other possible methods.
• Gussets: These are little diamonds that you can insert in your sweater/knitting to create a little extra room to accommodate anatomical features. Most people know about gussets from knitting socks, where gussets are frequently added to help accommodate the ankle/heel. Additionally, I find gussets greatly increase the wearability of a sweater when they’re included at the base of the underarm. This increases the mobility of the sleeve, and can help prevent sweaters from being pulled up when you move your arms about.
• Cuffs: This is, I suppose a corollary of sleeve length, but having a cuff that I’m comfortable with is generally pretty important to me. I’m not one for bell sleeve cuffs, so if you are you might want to ignore this matter of personal taste. I like it when cuffs are noticeably tighter than the reset of the sleeve, and furthermore, I like it when the sleeve, doesn’t need the cuff in order to be long enough. This can be over done, on both counts, but honest to god cuffs are important to me. Rant over.
• Vertical Lines: A lot of knitting, the notable exception being cable work/aran sweaters, tend towards strong horizontal lines. This follows from the fact that we tend to knit in rows or rounds that cross the sweater in horizontal rounds. If you change colors regularly, horizontal stripes are produced, for instance. If you select a handful of patterns and knit them successively, once again, horizontal stripes are produced. This can be overcome, through a number of clever techniques: adapting patterns so that you rows/rounds wrap around the sweater in vertical lines (easier than you might think, conceptually, but I’ve never had the desire myself), or by knitting ribbing patterns which tend to have a vertical element, or by arranging different patterns across a garment and stacking them (like cables). It’s more or less true that some people look better than other people with horizontal lines, but I’d say its even more true that all people look better in garments that have vertical lines than in garments that have horizontal lines.
• Yarn Quality:I often find myself falling into the trap wherein I say to myself “you knit because it’s fun, not to produce things, and it doesn’t matter what yarn you use, so buy something cheap because you’re broke.” And in truth, I am a college student, so I don’t exactly have money coming out of my ears, but I think there is a difference between making all your sweaters out of crap yarn, and knitting exclusively in quiviet and cashmere. There is a lot of very solid yarn out there, that’s of good quality, that’s reasonably affordable. Be smart, and know that spending 10-20 dollars more on a sweater’s worth of yarn, can make the difference between a sweater that you love to wear, and a sweater that you’re ambivalent about. I’ve found, that keeping my yarn stash fairly slim, and buying yarn for only the next project (and sometimes two) makes this a lot easier.

These are my “wines” and sensitive points regarding knitting sweaters for myself. In a lot of respects these wines/concerns form the basis of the topics that I’m likely to engage with over the course of this series, as they are the areas in, sweater knitting at least, that I find most compelling. I am starting to realize that I need to spend a little time focusing on things other than sweaters, so expect some content about sock knitting, or other objects too. And as always, I’d love to hear your input or suggestions, in the comments or by email.

Be well and Be Warm, tycho(ish)

I just got into School House Press' Knitting Camp, and my roommate is going to be someone amazingly awesome.

I’m so unbelievably excited. I think if I were to be talking I’d be reduced to squeaks. I have class in 15 minutes, this is going to be interesting.

I’ll get back to you all with more regular blogging very soon. Tuesdays are for Knitting essays after all.

Hello everyone!

It’s really good to be back. As I’m sure you’re aware, tealart was out of service for basically the last week. I’ve been calling it a hosting mishap: the details of which are unimportant. There were a few days in there where we were unsure if we were going to be able to get access to the site. As you can see, we managed to get everything back the way it should be: (there are even a few improvements¹.) Nevertheless there were a few moments of doubt in there, and while it was distressing, I found that I was able to be rather zen about the whole experience. The interesting thing is that this came at a moment where I was feeling rather energized about my development as a writer (academically and otherwise) and also about the progress of tealart and my other productions.

Having said that, it was a particularly tough week for me in school: I had one of my more impressive writing marathons, and I think I did much of the remaining important work of the semester in the span of four or five days. It’s nice to have a little bit of a breather, though, I must say. And I do think that twitter was quite helpful in surviving the bloggless period. And even though the website was down, I also managed to do a little bit of writing for TealArt that I hope you’ll get to see in the next few weeks.

In addition I did some planning for another TealArt series: this one, will hopefully not be written (entirely) by myself, and my hope is that it’ll be an experiment in storytelling of some sort. That’s the hope at least, we’ll see how it develops.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a short little entry, look for more substantive content later in the week. For now I will leave you with a little exchange from a class I was in on Thursday night.

cheers, ty.

Professor: Who decides what something means?

Foucauldian Student: I think it’s up to who ever has political power.

Professor: Why of course! [appears satisfied with the response, and there is a brief silence, as the conversation lulls before starting in a new direction.]

Tycho: but we all read… [pause]

Class looks quizzically at Tycho.

Tycho: oh wait, there was a discussion going on in my head that you all missed out on. sorry folks. explains reader response theory at some length

By the very fact that you’re reading this weblog now, it’s clear that this isn’t your first exposure to digital text, or to hypertext, so I think by hook or by crook we’ve all adapted to reading text on the computer. What I want to think about here, with you at the moment is not so much “how to read” hypertext, but rather, how hypertext changes the way we read and interact with text. So for our purposes in this discussion I’m going to take the term “text” and “hypertext” to mean the digital representation of letters and words on a computer; perhaps this was obvious to you, but I’ve been living with English Majors and cultural studies folks for long enough that I feel the clarification is worthwhile.

I’ve long said that the digital text or hypertext presents a number of key features in contrast to “dead tree” text. Hypertext is searchable, easily replicated, easily referenced, and easily modified for a maximum degree of accessible. These are all, too my mind, good things.

One of the common design assumptions of presenting text on the internet has been to just throw text on a page in long swaths of text. Though various organization or heading levels are theoretically useful for organizing texts, these features are frequently not used uniformly and can sometimes be hard for the eye to find. The quick move to digital text, got removed a couple of very important features of printed/hard copy text: defined column width and the page to constrain the presentation of text, and the organizational factor of the chapter or section. The act of looking at a page of text in a book or a magazine requires a completely different mindset from looking at a web-page. But this isn’t a call to return to old ways of reading, but rather a call to re-think the way that we consume hypertext.

For instance, one thing I’ve realized is that weblog entries work better when they’re about 750 words, and vertical columns of text work best when you don’t have to scroll up and down to read adjacent columns. While my current goal of keeping all the entries each of my current TealArt series under 1000 words, helps (I think) make these easier to read, the issue that I’m struggling with--and I think this is a key issue of reading on a computer screen--is the idea that we are completely to scroll down and down forever, but less willing to scroll side to side for additional programs. I think the program Tofu, for OS X is a welcome advancement, but in general we need to put some thought in to this.

I also don’t want to subsume a concern regarding length in a discussion of text presentation, nor do I want to collapse a discussion about what kind of forms work best for the internet, into a discussion of “shrinking attention spans” in the digital age. Not only would this not be particularly constructive, I think that the issue is that we can’t assume that “print” content will function the same way digitally that it will on pulp.

So for example, I don’t think that “click next” page options like the way that the New York Times presents its articles is quite the answer either. And to be fair, I don’t know that there are concrete answers to any of the issues that I’m presenting here, other than “we need to think about reading behavior some more.”

My last thought on the subject (for this week) bridges the border between reading and writing,which I hope to cover next time. This is the issues of citationality, more simple than just a pagination issue, one of the things that we are able to do as readers of pulp is say. “X passage, located here in a text,” but because the location of particular passages in hypertext is more fluid, we can’t do this. I’ll speak more to the academic/scholorly impact of this on writing next time, but in a sense the difficulty of conversational citationality (lets call it, for now) in hypertext, definitely affects how we interact with words on our computers.

I’ll see you all next week, and I’m fully aware that this is a topic that deserves a little more than a laundry list of complaints. Keep this in mind, because I hope that next week’s discussion of writing will help resolve some of these concerns and ideas. Stay tuned!

Read Well, tycho(ish)

I’ve run across the term “living tradition” a number of times as a Morris Dancer, and I’m not sure if the term has any great salience out side of that community, but I think it should. What I should say about Morris dancing, is that it’s very old, and if it has anything it has history. Morris also, is incredibly silly, which presents it’s practitioners with a quandary: It’s hard to be silly if you do everything “by the book.” When Morris dancers, or any other folk dance/music enthusiast says “it’s a living tradition,” it’s with great respect for the history of the folk, and a knowledge that traditions change and develop with every passing moment and every generation. I have a Weaver’s where Lee Hayes calls this the “folk process.” In the same moment, every invocation of a “living tradition” or the “folk process, is most frequently uttered right before aforementioned enthusiast/artist creates an utterly modern fabrication of absurd proportions. I could recount many such examples of this happening in song and dance, but I’ll spare you for I fear that these would only be funny for me, and besides this is an essay about knitting.

As I have conceptualized it, the knitting tradition reflects not only the more conventional thoughts about styles, primarily shapes but patterns as well. Knitting in traditional ways, but also invokes a sense play with in these traditional frameworks. For me, it is the sense of freedom that these frameworks produce that is the truly exciting part of knitting in this way, and I hope to begin an exploration of both the frameworks and the sense of play this week.

When I think of traditional knitting, my first thoughts are of the textured knitting traditions of England and Ireland, the Shetland “Fair Isle” style of knitting, and of course the Mitten and sweater knitting that typifies for many Nordic and Scandinavian knitting. These are all certainly examples of traditional knitting, and I think there is a lot to be said for looking at these forms as guidelines for creating new designs. It’s worth noting that our notion of traditional knitting is affected by the fact that the knitting traditions are the product of their collection at a very specific moment in history, but I think it’s quite reasonable to assume that knitters in the late 20th century were not the first to improvise in their knitting. Thus, it seems more proper to assume that the Fair Isle Jumper, the Aran sweater, and all their traditional counterparts are really as much a product of the late 19th and early 20th century, as they are of the “knitting tradition.” I remember reading something once that located the origins “Aran” Sweater to Irish immigrants in New York during the 1920s, even. Does this make Aran sweaters less traditional than, say a style of knitting that is far older. No. Aran sweaters deploy an inventive combination of features that are significantly older. There is a great deal of power in the “traditions” and an amazing quantity of possibilities.

I’m relatively sure that there isn’t a great deal of historical precedent for the kinds of designs I’m drawn to creating, but at the same time, nearly all the components are traditional: the shape, the patterns, the technique. And in any case the elements that aren’t strictly traditional are often inspired or reminiscent of elements that are traditional. All this by way of saying that, there’s lots of room for freedom within the tradition, and that’s part of the reason that I’m so drawn to these ways of knitting.

Unfortunately, the sense of play in traditional knitting is pretty hard to teach in any coordinated way, but fortunately, people seem to pick it rather quickly upon being exposed to traditional knitting styles and “patterns.” These vestiges of tradition, are indeed what I think most people’s first association with a knitting tradition because they are more concrete, and immediately visible. These basic garment shapes are not always the most flattering or taylored, but they are versatile, and I’ve found that with a little bit of finesse it’s quite easy to adapt these styles to most body types. Traditional knitting often still looks a little “folky” but, that is sort of the point. Beyond this, I’ve had some trouble attempting to articulate the more concrete aspects of traditional knitting, in part because there have been a number of really important books on the subject. I will recommend the books by Beth Brown-Reinsel and Pricillia Gibson-Roberts as they are both good starting places for exploring traditional (particularly sweater) knitting. My general impression of explorations of traditional knit, is that they present both a shape for a garment, and a number of patterns that can be combined in the knitting of the garment. This division seems like a useful one, particularly for the instruction of traditional knitting, because it can allow students the ability to construct their own projects that correspond to their skill level.

Traditional knitting presents us as knitters with scores of possibility, that I find hard to explore properly without getting more in to the specifics of particular designs and forms. At the same time, the mindset of the traditional knitter seems to come easily to many knitters, even though it’s harder to teach. Having said all this, the reason I’ve remained so inthralled by traditional knitting is not just because of the great sense of design possibility in these styles, but also because I find that the approach and forms (shapes, patterns) of this kind of knitting just work, for both my aesthetic and my temperament as a knitter. I hope to explore not just these shapes, and approaches to knitting, but how to convey the sense of “tradition” to the uninitiated knitters. In that sense, both the teaching that I seem to be engaged in and this series itself are part of this exploration.

Knit on in good health and good sprits, and I’ll be back in a bit with something hopefully at bit more concrete.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve had a rather wretched week. I had a lot of writing complied into a relatively short period of time. This feat of poor planning was made worse by the fact that I was just coming off of spring break, and I also received some ultimately positive news from graduate school. While I don’t think the weeks work was for nought, I did feel as if I was dead out of steam by Wednesday morning, and thus my week was very front heavy. In addition to some dread regarding a decision about graduate school that I hope I don’t have to make, I also faced some dread regarding a project presentation for class Monday afternoon.

I had about fifty minutes to discuss with my classmates, a topic of my choice, and as I’m sure some of you probably know from my twitter, the topic was death. Particularly existentialism/issues in psychotherapy, but I’m also covering some of the work on Mortality Salience/terror management theory (which is nifty because it makes it possible to talk about defense mechanisms in an empirically derived framework, for those of you who care), and also a bit about grief. But that’s not really the important thing.

The thing is that this is that one of the aforementioned papers of doom was also for this class, and it was painful and soul sucking to write. (Who knew, I could write so much about so little? I suppose you, dear readers have been on to this for a long time, but I’d been mostly left out of the loop). So I was, red-cent to say the least. Well the upshot, I was a home body for a few days and read some stuff and did some fairly low stress writing on an outline. The upshot. I have a presentation sketched out and I’m more or less done. I’ll sit around and read a little more so that I’m better able to answer questions and expand on a few points, but for the most part, yeah. This is a little weird.

The other weird part of having this presentation so written out? I just have to make things a bit more prosy, and bam! I’m marking out time on Wednesday morning to turn this into a term paper. That’ll learn me. I had been saying that I lost my newly found work ethic as I was basically sitting around and drooling on tuesday and wednesday, but maybe I just bent it out of practice a little bit.

This being a morning person thing is weird.

I’ll be back with more teleological entries soon, and sorry everyone for the onslaught. The next couple of knitting entries are pretty cool, but the real meat comes later, and word on the street is that pictures might happen soon.

Best, tycho

Sorry Folks, I totally intended to post this earlier, but it languished in a forgotten folder. How ironic is that.

I think having some sort of archiving post to point to when I’m talking about the productivity, so here it is. End tying up is always a good thing. Best, ty

As promised I’m here with a post designed to sum up and provide a gateway to my series on personal productivity that I called “Rethinking GTD.” I’d been reading the website 43folders for a while, and while I’d learned a lot of things from this website including a lot about the GTD system developed by David Allen, I’ve often felt that while GTD was the ideal system for a person with a particular sitatuion there were some of us, notably academics and writer-types, that the system really didn’t work that well for. So I did some musing, that I’m sure you can all read or not. The links are below.

• Part 1: Getting Other Things Done
• Part 2: Rethinking GTD: My System
• Part 3: Rethinking GTD: Production Times and “the Zone”
• Part 4: Rethinking GTD: Review (and A Little Rant About Footnotes)
• Part 5: Getting What Done? (An Explanation of “in the generous sense”)

Just because this is TealArt, and I have a hard time not being reflexive, I guess in retrospect, I realized that GTD has a lot to offer everyone, and while a different way of organizing lists, when contextual lists stop working is somtimes indicated, there’s a lot of useful in there… My essays explore a number of key ideas, and I think are an imporantant note and study in thinking about all the factors which contribute to their personal productivity, and I think this level of reflexivity is probably useful if you’re struggiling with this.

I hope you enjoy, or at least are mildy amused.

cheers, tycho

Hypertext? Why talk about hypertext? No one’s thought very much about hypertext in years, let alone written a series of blog posts about hypertext, who cares?

Well I do, and since I foot the bill around here, I’m going to. So there.

Actually, as I was writing the productivity series, I realized that one of my personal productivity goals of the past year or so has been to be as compleatly paperless as I can mange. The less paper I have, the less there is to move, and this means that (theoretically) I can be better organized. The truth is that as a result of this drive to remove paper from my “workflow” I’ve collected a sizeable number of PDF files (a gigabyte or so). Though I’m a huge proponent of PDF (I suppose there will be more on this in the future), PDF files are effectivly “digital paper,” and while more useful, they behave and function just like paper. Thus I’ve come to believe that this isn’t a digital revolution, but really moving from one bad system to one that is only marginally more usefull.

I don’t think it takes a lot of faith to belive that computer generated text present a lot of very clear benefits over its typeset counterparts. It’s easily reproduceable, it’s small, it’s portable, there are virtually no production or distrobution costs, it’s searchable, it’s dynamic, and it’s enviromental. I’m sure you could come up with a few more on your own as well.And while people do a lot of reading on computer screens (the success of blogs, which revolve primarily around text, are a testiment to this), yet eBooks have not yet proven themselves successful. In this series I want to explore this qunadry a little bit more. What seperates paper from pixels in practice? in terms of production and consumption?

While I will gladly accept that eBook technology is not yet fully developed--and Cory Doctrow is compleatly right that DRM presents a major road block to this development--there is another piece of the “electronic literature” puzzel missing. In an effort to explore what this piece(s) is/are, I think a renewed conversation about hypertext/hypermedia is worthwhile.

In addition to being digital, hypertext is characterized by Theodor Holm Nelson as having a non-linear structure created by “links,” much like the links that we see throughout this website and by inclusions or transclusions, where in (potentially dynamic) blocks of text are pushed through into other refering pages. We see some of this on the internet these days, thanks to the fairly standard use of dynamic markup lanauges like PHP. I don’t mean to suggest that this series will be a study of hypertext on the internet, because my attempt here is to discuss the form and structure of digital text, rather than the network and cultural aspects of the World Wide Web (when was the last time someone called it that?), but clearly there will be some overlap. Nelson (1987) is clearly a large influence on these writing--and in fairness I should note that I’m not anywhere near done with his book, hell I’m not even sure I’m reading Literary Machines correctly--but I think that it goes without saying that the internet itself has changed, and simultaniously changed the way that we operate computers and interact with hypertext(s).

Now that we’re on the same page…

This series, I hope will allow us both to explore the practicalities and implications of consuming and producing hypertext. While I am by no means a communications studies expert, or a skilled literary artist, I do read a great deal of digital text, and write a lot of content that never makes it on to paper. And I think about this a fair amount. With luck this will mean something. In addtion to thinking about how hypertext affects reading and writing, I think that we’ll aslo tuch upon the impacts on publication and the distrobution of text. This means broaching the DRM subject, and I should say now, that I’m not nearly enough of an expert on this as perhaps I should be, but I think that at least some consideration of the topic is worthwhile and necessary.

I also hope to consider some “emerging” media forms including XML, Wikis, the blog, RSS, Pod/Net/Vid-casts, as they fit into the basic questions of reading and writing text. And I would also be remiss as a blogger if I didn’t mention the influence of the discussions in academe regaruding “Open Access” to scholorly publications, as I’ve been thinking about this series and the articles contained within.

With that, I think that we’re sufficently introduced, and I hope that we’re all on the same page regarding Hypertext. If you have any interests related to an aspect of Hypertext that I straight out forgot to mention, or have any thoughts, please be in touch. I’ll see you all next week with more on this.

Cheers, tycho