The Assignment:
I decided to do Pick A Bad Photo, Apply A Vintage Effect And Write Something In Helvetica as my second ds106 assignment for the semester. The instructions are in the title.
My Response to the Assignment:
The Process:
Deciding to get a jump on my homework I turned to the list of 7 pioneers on the class blog and decided to pick one at random and start researching. My first ds106 assignment didn’t really integrate the Vannever Bush article as much as I had hoped it would, so I was initially worried I’d run into the same problem with the next pioneer.
I just happened to put my finger on Douglas Engelbart, who, according to Wikipedia, laid the foundations for innovations such as the mouse, networking, GUI, and hypertext. I generally start off my research by hitting the Wikipedia page for an overview, combing through the cited sources, and then branching off my research from there. I read the introductory paragraph about Engelbart and knew there was a lot of potential reading material, but I didn’t know yet how I was going to express it creatively through a ds106 assignment.
Then only 3 lines into his early life and education section, inspiration slapped me in the face.
Engelbart directly translated to Norwegian means “angel mustache”.
In case that wasn’t clear enough.
Engelbart directly translated to Norwedgian means “angel mustache”.
How awesome is that? I ran it through Google Translate and it seemed legit. If it isn’t, I don’t care at this point.
So I immediately started searching for inspiring mustache images to alter. I knew at this moment I wanted to do something that was visual. I found the Pick A Bad Photo, Apply A Vintage Effect And Write Something In Helvetica assignment as I searched through Google for images of mustaches. As a fan of steampunk fashion I strongly believe in the appeal of things both vintage and mustached. I also enjoy sanserif fonts, particularly Helvetica. (“I’ll use Arial when Helvetica freezes over.”) So that’s how I decided on the assignment I would do.
The only problem was finding a bad photo. I actually found a photo that I thought was absolutely charming with a novel idea for a product. The photo belongs to the Horribly Eclectic Art & Accessories shop on Etsy, which is a market place both similar to and drastically different from eBay. You can buy the exact item pictured, a white mustache shaped fascinator/headband, by clicking here.
Not wanting to go through the hassle of installing Photoshop I instead headed to Pixlr and was delighted to see that they have an editor dedicated specifically to applying vintage effects on photographs. I then migrated over to the regular editor after applying my effects to add text. Unfortunately they didn’t have Helvetica, but the Leelawadee font imitated it closely enough.
The Story:
So a bit about what I actually learned about Doug Engelbart, aside from his name being pretty cool.
As I mentioned previously Engelbart is credited with the innovations that lead to computer networking and the creation of the mouse. He found a copy of Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think in a hut in the Philippines when serving as a radar technician in the US Navy. Engelbart cites this as a very influential and inspiring piece of literature that would eventually influence his future career in computers. You can read more about Bush’s influence on Engelbart here.
When reading over a transcript of an interview that Engelbart did that discusses these ideas, I couldn’t help but think about how he sounded a lot like Bush in his ideas. I guess that just makes sense, considering that he was inspired by Bush, but there were a couple of really strong parallels.
He felt that the productivity and capacity of human intellect and progress could be exponentially increased if the sharing of ideas was instantaneous. The things that he states in the interview, of two people from separate computers/workstations collaborating over a connected network, seem to embody this idea.
Think of two scientists working on the same thesis in different parts of the world. In the past they would have done this perhaps ignorant of their counterpart’s possibly complementary ideas. Today people have the ability to work simultaneously from anywhere in the world. Progress flourishes in such a connected environment where people can reach the information that they need in a precise fashion. Even Bush touches on this point in As We May Think:
Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. — Bush
He also seemed particularly in the way that humans interfaced with electronics as well as how we interfaced with each other through electronics (networking). During class a lot of people nailed that as a theme in Bush’s article. When talking about his idea of a workstation (which I need to read more about before I equate it to the theory of a memex) Engelbart says:
Well, I knew about screens, and how you could use the electronics to shape symbols from any kind of information you had. If there was information that could otherwise go to a card punch or a computer printer, that they had in those days, you could convert that to any kind of symbology you wanted on the screen. That just all came from the radar training, and the engineering I’d had, too, knowing about transistors. It’s so easy for the computer to pick up signals, because in the radar stuff, you’d have knobs to turn that would crank tracers around and all. So the radar training was very critical, about being able to unfold that picture so rapidly. — Engelbart (This is from the interview I linked prior.)
It seems like a very logical connect the dots, and reminds me a lot of Bush’s idea of compressing current technology and taking it to the next stage. Instead of cranking knobs to convey just symbols, who would of thought that we could apply that logic to create the mouse?
tl;dr
Engelbart means ‘angel mustache’. He was the forefather of the mouse and computer networking and sounds a lot like Bush, who inspired him when he was a radar technician in the Philippines.
