There and Back Again: a Retrospective Post

“I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure, and it's very difficult to find anyone.”

“I should think so, in these parts. We're plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things, they make you late for dinner.”

Returning home after the trip was almost surreal. It took about a week for my life to settle down, but when it finally did and I had the opportunity to sit down with a friend and let my mind relax for awhile, we decided to have a three day run of the Lord of the Rings movies, which he had never seen. I had the chance to think through the events of the last couple months. If anything, I think the above quote from the Hobbit describes my life before the trip.

I grew up in a suburb, doing my fair share of city traveling, making trips around the States with my family, but starting college, I’d hoped for the opportunity to study abroad. I didn’t know where or when, but I’d looked at programs as a freshman, hoping that somehow I could fit one into my schedule. For the first two years of school, that seemed impossible. I was told about the Scotland trip almost by accident, and I started looking into it on a whim.

My parents weren’t particularly fond of my desire for international travel experience, but I eventually won them over. It took time, but it worked. Looking back now, I was nervous, but at the time I did my best to hide it. Telling my parents I was worried wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

I can say today, without a doubt, that it was one of the best decisions of my life. Not only did I come away from the trip with international travel experience and a better idea of where I would like my future career path to take me, but also with a sense of mental and physical strength. Life has its twists and turns, and I’ve made it through many of late that I doubt I would have had the mental fortitude to handle before the trip.

As far as career direction goes, though I’ve always wanted to do something that would have a positive impact on others, I don’t think as many of the options were apparent to me until this trip. Medical writing, though perhaps not the most entertaining work to many people, has always held an appeal to me. Work with a medical technology company would be interesting and almost certainly fulfilling.  There are so many companies these days that work with teams around the globe, and I’ve always hoped I would end up working with a project that has a global element. The idea of improving lives on a global scale appeals more than ever, and the trip is no small part of that change.

However, my experiences also opened my eyes to small-scale work and the impact it can have. There isn’t a need to work for a massive corporation in order to impact other people’s lives. Before, I wanted to have a global impact. I wanted to make a change in the world, but remained blind to a number of issues in my own life.

The trip made it obvious: if you want to make a change, you have to start with the problems at home.

By no means does that mean that I’m not interested in a career in global communication, merely that if you want to fix something, you have to start small. You have to understand the roots of the problems through communication with a number of people, the more perspectives the better. I began to realize that making a difference or impacting someone else’s life didn’t have to be done on a massive world-altering scale. Small things, such as the nurse who took the time to explain some of the complexities of the NHS while riding the train or the man I ran into on the waterfront that talked with me about American politics, can make all the difference. Spreading knowledge and information doesn’t have to be on a massive scale to impact the world.

And you know what? That means it’s time for another Tolkien quote: 

“Even the smallest person can change the course of history.”

Maybe in this case, it will be small actions that have a large impact. Only time will tell.

On a concluding note: I am eternally grateful to the people that encouraged me to go on the trip as well as the people that made it possible for me to go. Though it may not be apparent just yet and it may take some time for me to find my path, they have made all the difference in the world. It may not seem like much, but it was the chance of a lifetime.

Multimedia and Modern Storytelling

Photo credit to the author

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to go see Neil Gaiman present his newest book in what was referred to as a "multimedia presentation". 

You may be asking "A what?"

He teamed up with FourPlay string quartet and the illustrator for his newest book in order to create four shows, the likes of which I've never seen. This could easily be the path that author presentations take in the future.

The quartet knew their audience: they started off with vaguely creepy sounding music and added a base line, and to the entire crowd’s shock, they opened the show with a rendition of the Doctor Who theme song. Neil has written two episodes for the show, so it was a reasonable guess that a number of people there would at least recognize the theme.

Neil came on to finish the first half of the show with a series of short story readings. He’s been involved in a number of innovative projects, such as a social media experiment on twitter where he asked questions, chose an answer, and wrote a short story for each month of the year. I’d highly recommend reading them, they’re available here with his journal explaining the project here. He read the October piece in Edinburgh.

The piece that hit me hardest was The Man who Forgot Ray Bradbury (available to listen to here in his blog). It's about a writer who slowly loses his memories with age. More importantly, to him, is the way he slowly loses stories. As a writer and prolific reader, Alzheimer's and memory loss are terrifying to me, yet I know full well that it runs in the women in my mother's family. My grandmother hasn't recognized me as myself in years, and the early onset form is slowly starting to have other impacts in the family.

To quote my aunt, "You either have to laugh about it or cry about it," and most of the time the family has had enough of tears. Still, the way he verbalized one of my greatest fears, almost cheerfully, never taking on the impossible frustration of losing memories, brought me to tears.

The full novelette of The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, available here is excellent, but if you’re unfamiliar with Neil’s work, there’s one thing you need to keep in mind: he is primarily a storyteller. One of the best things you can do is listen to one of his audiobooks, most of which he has read himself. The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains is based on traditional stories told about the Isle of Skye.

One of the most interesting things about the things Mr. Gaiman has produced is the variety of ways in which he has produced it and presented it to the public. He constantly interacts with fans (he has official facebook, a blog, and tumblr, as well as a twitter account he used for the months of the year prompts). The interaction not only gives fans a way to interact with him, but also ways for him to see what they want to know. In recent years, he has published short stories or prologues to pieces finished years ago, such as How the Marquis got His Coat (a companion piece for Neverwhere) and the Overture run (a prologue run for the cult classic Sandman comics). Those pieces have been released in part because his fan base has grown, but also because of the feedback from his readers.

His reader interaction is almost an art form in itself, and collaborative work has been produced from it. The Blackberry project produced a dozen short stories based on prompts from fans, which I provided a link to earlier in this post.

What are the newest ways of publishing, and how can an author grow a fan following that is so loyal, it can beat Harry Potter fans when it comes to the production of London's 51st literary bench? (That happened just recently, by the way. Details can be seen here. Neverwhere beat the Harry Potter series, most likely because of fan persistence during the voting process. It broke my heart in two to vote against Harry Potter, but...ah well.) How do you build a group so loyal, they've already started voicing opinions on the upcoming casting for the TV series of American Gods, which will be produced in the upcoming year? How can a fiction author, one who has been in the business for years, continue to widen their creative endeavors?

Those questions are being answered in different ways, but I believe that Neil Gaiman and his publishing team are certainly on the right track. His fan following has grown in recent years, and even readers that have stuck with him for a considerable time have branched out into his other work (ex: reading the Sandman comics because I enjoyed his novels so much). They turn fiction into art, and a part of how they have done it is by transforming books into stories, told on page and by mouth (Mr. Gaiman reads almost all of his own audiobooks), through radio show (the BBC produced a star-studded serial broadcast version of Neverwhere) and through TV (the upcoming series for American Gods). His stories are finding niches and cracks in almost every genre and every form of media, and the tell-tale signs in his work are like songs that get stuck in your head. You can read his work a number of times, and still take away something new each time. No matter what media source the story comes through, the seed of the story is always given over to the reader to take root and grow.

Personally, I think what they're doing is working.

Canals Come Alive

This recording below highlights the importance of canals in Scotland which ties back into my theme of history of transportation in Scotland.

Works Cited

http://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/media/1435034/scottish%20canals%20-%20a%20very%20quick%20history.pdf

http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/rrd_reports/uploaded_reports/j269946/j269946.pdf

STEAM AHEAD!!!

I have been traveling around on trains throughout the past few weeks and taking trains has allowed me to see much of the country.  Without transportation, I would not be able to travel around England and Scotland as easily.  It makes me wonder what people would do if effective modes of transportation did not exist.  I decided to look at the development of transportation in Scotland because many people rely on transportation to get around the country.  Last weekend, a classmate and I traveled to Nottingham and we thoroughly explored the city.  The one highlight of my trip was that I  attended the Nottingham Industrial Museum  and it is only open on the weekends.  It showcased different modes of transportation like trains and cars from the 1700's to 1800's.  Furthermore, it had a lot of industrial machines that were used back in the 1800s.

Luckily, I arrived on the last Sunday of the month so the museum was showcasing steam engines and it had volunteers who powered up these steam engines.  These steam engines demonstrate the theme of post-industrialism because they demonstrate the development of certain modes of transportation including trains. Without steam power, engines would not have run as smoothly during the Industrial Revolution.  If there were no steam engines, then there could have been a world without different modes of transportation which would have been a scary thought indeed.  I recorded many different video clips demonstrating these steam engines in use and I have edited these clips to make a quick video below demonstrating the development of steam power within the country.  I hope you enjoy the video!

Trains of Thought

In the States, train travel is sometimes disregarded as the slowest and most boring way of getting from one place to another. A traveler might, for example, board Amtrak's Empire Builder in Chicago with nothing to look forward to for the next thirty two hours but the prospect of staring out the window at the cold and frozen expanse that is North Dakota and Eastern Montana until they finally pull into Whitefish, Montana bleary-eyed and half mad from the whole mind-numbing experience. The urge to go to sleep and lie comatose for the duration of the ride outweighs the novelty of the situation by an order of magnitude. This was my opinion of train travel for years, and as such was not looking forward to the plethora of train trips, both long and short, that this adventure would entail.

Now at the halfway point in this journey, I realize my opinion of train travel had been tainted by my one experience on American trains (the terminally dull trek described above) and I must revise my opinions on the subject. Last weekend I had the opportunity to make my way down to Nottingham, England. While this trip could have been made in a fraction of the time had I chosen to travel by air, the cost would have been far outside my travel budget, and I had yet to use any of my fifteen travel days on my Britrail train pass for a recreational excursion, so I sat down and planned out the route I would need to take to get to Nottingham at a reasonable hour. It would be a six hour trip, and if I caught the 6:32 AM train from Dundee I could get there with only one transfer. The early morning departure and lengthy transit time were unexpected, but I reminded myself that this was really the only way I would be able to go anywhere outside Dundee, and so gritted my teeth and committed to the early morning call at Dundee station.

The morning of my departure, I was struck with all manner of concerns: What if I miss the train? What if my pass doesn't work? How can I sit still for six hours? Fortunately, these worries evaporated as soon as I boarded the train and staked a claim on a window seat. As the train pulled away from the platform, I was suddenly struck by how ordinary this all seemed to the other passengers. Trains are not a novelty here; they are a way of life. To everyone else, this was ordinary. I calmed then, suddenly confident in their trust of this mode of travel, and settled in for the six hour ride. There were no snags, no confusing moments, and no delays. I arrived in Nottingham within a minute of the predicted time thinking how much more pleasant and relaxed the whole experience was compared to flying, or even driving my own car.

Why is train travel so commonplace here, while in the US it is often only a last resort? A large part of that, I think, is the distances involved. even the longest train route in the UK travels less than seven hundred miles- a long trip to be sure, but nowhere near the distances spanned by American railways. Air travel is so much more convenient over those distances that trains seem irrelevant by comparison. In addition, US railways have a poor reputation for reliability, which further lowers the opinions of many travelers. Trains were an important part of American culture, but as soon as something better came along, they were abandoned. However in the UK, and Scotland in particular, the railways are still embedded in the minds of the people as part of a national identity. Consider, for example, the city of Edinburgh's efforts to bridge the Firth of Forth. What started as a simple ferry system 900 years ago has become two (soon to be three) bridges that stand as a reminder of the times in which they were built, and the oldest of these is the Forth Bridge, an enormous cantilever rail bridge straight out of the height of the industrial revolution. This bridge has stood as a gateway to the north for nearly 125 years, and will continue to stand for the foreseeable future. It is a testament to both Scottish engineering and the importance of the railways that the first steel bridge in the world was constructed here so as to allow trains better access to the northern parts of the country, and that it still stands strong today. 

Environmental Technology

Living Beyond the Living Room

The living accommodations with which we have been provided by the University of Abertay are far better than I expected. We have two toilets, three shower stalls, four bathroom sinks, a large kitchen equipped with two refrigerators, one dishwasher, one fully functioning oven, one large kitchen sink, and a microwave. Furthermore, each of us is also fortunate to have our own bedrooms (which is great not only for privacy, but to avoid being kept awake with one another’s snores) equipped with a twin size bed, desk, wardrobe, overhead shelf, and a small dresser. 

University of Abertay's flat accommodations at Alloway Halls in Dundee. (Photo by author)

Needless to say, our housing situation came as a pleasant surprise for all of us, however, I couldn’t help but notice our lack of what is perhaps one of the most utilized rooms in anyone’s home - a living room. There were no couches gathered around a television, with a coffee table in the center for us to prop our feet upon after long days of studying, researching, and exploring Dundee. Though I imagine each of us could access our beloved Netflix from our personal laptops during our downtime, I found myself somewhat longing for the idea of Disney movie nights with my flatmates, curled up on couches with blankets and freshly baked pastries.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining, and nor did I ever resent our lack of living room. It’s just that I am most familiar with bonding with friends and family in the comfort of a living room, convinced that I was in fact living. After accepting our accommodations as they are, I became somewhat thrilled at the challenge of pursuing life outside of the living room. Our community entertainment will not come from a screen during our six weeks in Scotland, and we must learn to live beyond the living room.

Since our arrival, I have seen and done things that could never be accomplished without a break from my comfort zone. I broke away from my introverted tendencies and made friends with complete strangers. I chatted with them in pubs, live music venues, bus stops, trains, and even standing in line at the grocery store (side note: lines are referred to as 'queues' here). I've distanced myself from my somewhat lazy habits and hiked through rolling hills, skipped the bus to walk through town, and climbed numerous steep inclines and seemingly endless steps (particularly in Edinburgh!). Instead of turning to a television or computer screen for excitement, I've visited the ruins of a 16th century castle, attended a live music festival in the city, and played lots of euchre (pronounced YOU-ker... it's a 4-person card game that is very popular in Indiana) with my flatmates at the kitchen table.

The beautiful countryside of Pitlochry... My group got somewhat lost on the way to Edradour, which is Scotland's smallest distillery, located in Pitlochry. (Photo by author) 

Live music being performed at Buskers, which a church-turned-pub in Dundee. Bands played at pubs all throughout the city for the entire weekend for what was called the Almost Blue Festival. (Photo by author)

Though a living room is certainly a friendly, comfortable place to settle down at the end of a long day, there is nothing that a living room can offer that would even come close to the vitality and exuberance I have experienced since I was forced to live beyond the living room.

Paris Maker Faire 2014: A Post-Industrial Journey

Update: For more pictures from the Paris Maker Faire, see my Flickr album
For videos, check out my YouTube playlist

Last weekend (June 21 and 22), I attended a Maker Faire in Paris as part of my thesis research on maker communities. Maker Faires are physical sites where makers--anyone who creates physical things--of all types come together to showcase what they have made, and to share technical knowledge with other makers and broader publics. These events emphasize learning how to make through play and other tangible interactions with tools, technologies, techniques, and people. Of course, learning through play can be challenging when the game is played in a language you don't understand.

As I discovered upon arrival, not quite everyone at the Maker Faire spoke English. I had been nervous about the potential language barrier (see tweet below), but had the privilege of assuming that most people would speak some English.

@jtsherri welcome on board ! Don't be nervous : we all speak english (why not use an arduino to de-code french ? #translate-hacking )
— Maker Faire Paris (@MakerFaireParis) April 25, 2014

While most of the makers who attended did make humbling efforts to accommodate my lack of spoken French literacy (for which I am extremely thankful), I was almost kicked out of the faire within 10 minutes of entering. Upon arrival, I had purchased a ticket as the Paris Maker Faire website had instructed, received my map of the faire, and was wished a good visit. Just after taking some pictures of the Make robot, a security guard started assertively directing me in French. I understood something about "no entrance... security" as he pointed toward my wrists. Meanwhile, I wondered "Wtf is going on?" I showed the guard my ticket, while pointing toward the table where I bought it only minutes before, fruitlessly trying to explain my situation in English. "No speak English" was the guard's response. He radioed something in French and shouted across the hall to another guard, trying to get the attention of someone in power who would understand my garbled nonsense. I continued holding up my ticket and pointing, as we repeated the same conversation, eventually walking down to the ticket table. Apparently, I had needed an all-important wristband to enable my physical access to the faire. Fortunately, it was as simple as showing my ticket and holding out my arm.

With my new blue wristband equipped, I strode past the guard, taking a moment to feel smug, and then I recognized that all the signs at the faire were in French. Unintimidated by my lack of written French literacy, I assumed the first maker I talked to might speak eloquent and effortless English. Not so much. We didn't make it past "bonjour." Next table, same process. By that point, I was feeling that my power-granting wristband wasn't so powerful afterall, and that maybe I had made a huge mistake by planning my entire day around an event where I couldn't even communicate. "Maybe I should leave. I'll take a walk around and see what's here, take a picture of everything, and then leave; go explore Paris, see the Eiffel Tower, maybe. I could take a bus if I leave now..."
"No. You came here for research, and that's what you're going to do. Enjoyable or not, you're here, John. And you're not giving up yet."
"Maybe I can just walk around and not talk to anybody for a while. That will be easier. That will feel safer. Maybe I got more out of the Cincinnati Mini Maker Faire than I will from this one."
"If it's challenging your spirits, and what you know, do it, even when it's hard. You came because you wanted this. It's a game, and you're new here. You're supposed to be bad at this for the first level. That's how research happens. Why are you feeling uncomfortable? What about this situation is making me feel this way?"

I decided to walk the faire for a while and see what caught my eye. I snapped a few photos, and then found a giant 3D printer printing chairs. The printer by Drawn was something I could understand easily, and sitting in a 3D printed chair was pretty cool. That alone gave me the confidence to roam around and explore a bit further.

While there were many exciting sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures at the Maker Faire, I quickly understood that within international maker communities, it's relatively easy to learn the mechanics behind a machine or the process behind making an object. For example, I successfully soldered a Make robot pin with LED eyes, despite having instructions written in French, a few notes in English, the ability to watch people around me, and no experience of soldering things together rather than de-soldering. Granted, it took me three tries to get it right, but I managed, and could explain the process to someone else. However, the nuances of the instructions were lost. The how and why explanations too. The same could be said for building almost anything.

In a post-industrial economy, in which a critical mass of makers have access to fundamental components and tools, nuances of how and why explanations behind designs become very important. For example, the primary distinction between trains in the U.K. and trains in the U.S.A. is not the technology of the train itself. Rail companies in countries around the world can purchase the same electric locomotive, the same rails, the same equipment and essential components. What separates them are the configurations of those components, as well as the fit of those configurations to different contexts. The trains here in Scotland run very quietly, and there is little difference in volume between riding in an open field or riding through a tunnel. In Chicago, on the other hand, the distinctively deafening roar of a train rushing through a tunnel is part of what defines that particular line. If one were to attempt the same configuration in Chicago, users might resist and find it ill-fitting. Thus, there is a significant rhetorical component to post-industrial configurations of technology.

And although there were many interesting things I learned from my journey to Paris, and some unforgettable experiences, the most surprising outcome was how visiting Paris and the Maker Faire changed my perspective on Dundee. What only a week ago seemed unfamiliar, with foreign accents and winding roads, now feels comforting; homely even, compared with Paris. Here, at least I can ask for a burger without wondering whether anyone will understand my request. The configurations of the systems may be different here than in the U.S., but I can communicate about both the components and the rationale behind the configurations.