Demonstrate proficiency in identifying, using, and evaluating current and emerging information and communication technologies

Introduction

One afternoon, my parents took my middle school-aged self to buy a brand new Macintosh G3. Excited to be the first of my friends to have one, my enthusiasm quickly waned when confronted by the Mario Teaches Typing learning curve. That day, I vowed to remain analog for life (SEE: “technophobe” [Brittanica, n.d.]). I wrote a paper in high school about never buying an mp3 player, then scoffed at e-readers when first released.

That resistance to emerging information and communications technologies is gone now. I am typing this essay between two touchscreens while taking emails, text messages, and watching videos-on-demand on my smartphone. Despite my devotion to pen and paper, I realized my refusal to participate would mean getting left behind intellectually, then professionally when I became a novelist.

Not many remember what the G3 or first generation iPods and Kindles look like, let alone how slow their processing was compared to today’s PowerBooks, iPhones, and Kindle Fires. This is because new technology soon becomes mundane, then eventually outdated. So to keep their skillsets relevant, information professionals (IP) should continually educate themselves on not just technologically sophisticated tools but in how their users may benefit from learning them, too.

While an indie author, then as a graduate student, I had identified, used, and evaluated a document-formatting application, a host of open source software, and a hypertext language.

Formatting a book

In middle school, my passion for reading evolved into ambitions for writing. I began with poetry in iambic pentameter, then did short stories for English class projects. However, it was not until I turned 24 that I finally found time and inspiration enough for novel-length works. When I could not get a literary agent after seven years, I bought a course on self-publishing, and the instructor recommended Vellum (180g, n.d.) for professional book formatting.

Amazon’s self-publishing arm, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), can format for their content creators; I have used their book cover design tools for my print versions. However, I saw how text in the KDP-formatted ones were difficult for my reading instincts to accept.

Wanting to promise my audience an easier experience, I purchased Vellum. Five years later, I was glad to learn in INFO 246, Information Architecture, that users appreciate a designer making information easier to approach (Rosenfeld et al., 2015).

Open source software

Open source software (OSS) is code that can be accessed by anyone to see, change, or share (Red Hat, 2019). And it is not just “free” that attracts users; OSS is also malleable for those who want to sharpen skills and tools for themselves or their organizations. Often, these software are created by students and instructors who are building up their own research or academic teams, like at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab (Knight Lab, n.d).

IPs can serve their users and support these software developers by subscribing to research newsletters, testing tools, and publishing reviews on them.

HTML5

HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language) has been under development since 2003, when there was renewed interest in evolving HTML rather than replacing it (World Hypertext Application Technology Working Group [WHATWG], 2022). In 2004, Mozilla and Opera presented possible HTML5 principles and a draft proposal of form-related features at a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) workshop. When they were rejected, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera formed the WHATWG to develop HTML themselves. To this day, the WHATWG makes sure any new iteration of HTML would be backwards compatible, meaning no programs created with an earlier version would become obsolete. This makes HTML5 very user(SEE: developer)-centered.

HTML5 is a useful technology for IPs to learn themselves, because it solidifies a foundation for familiarizing with other computer languages that permeate information systems, like XML, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL.

Evidence

Formatted for print and e-book with Vellum, a publishing software- The Devil in the Details, under pseudonym “Kaz Heaney”

The Devil in the Details (Devils) is my second novel that I published on Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Deciding that KDP’s content formatting services were not sophisticated enough to create the product I had wanted Devils to become, I took the advice of New York Times and USA Today-bestselling author and self-publishing coach, Joanna Penn (Penn, n.d.) to use Vellum, a publishing software, to format both print and e-book versions of my manuscripts.

Vellum provided tutorials on uploading content, formatting text, troubleshooting, then saving onto six publishing formats, five digital and one print. The digital were categorized by e-book vendors: Apple Books (.epub), Google Play (.epub), Kindle (.mobi), Kobo (.kepub), and Nook (.epub). The print was saved as a .pdf file. Each format was separate from the book cover art, a .jpg file; I had used a free-use image from Canva (Canva, 2022) to design it.

The feature that contributed most to rendering Devils’s main content professional and polished was the algorithm Vellum had to balance the spaces between words and their letters so that each line seemed neither too stretched nor cluttered as it filled the entire row. This aesthetic was applied to e-book text no matter how large readers wanted the words to be. In 2021, when Devils was published, I was still seeing KDP-formatted e-books that were behaving opposite to this.

Devils formatted with Vellum is evidence I know how to identify sophisticated publishing software, use it to create my literary vision, and evaluate how the results and ease of use were different than if I had employed another tool.

INFO 220 – Resource and Information Services: Digital Humanities – Tools Analysis

These are three analyses of open source software for INFO 220, Resource and Information Services: Digital Humanities.

Audacity, a multilingual audio editor and recorder, seems to have been intended for the mildly tech-literate; the software’s front matter, ease of download, and tutorials contributed to a relaxed user-introduction. Its sophisticated features were designed to expect around 20 hours of familiarizing with the system before being able to do things like overlay tracks or cut music into podcasts. I had also included possible project-types where Audacity could contribute.

The remaining two software, StoryMap from Knight Lab and TextAnalyzer, were selected and evaluated for ease of use in the same way. The former tells stories by mapping narratives across images. The latter counts the frequencies of phrases and words in texts in multiple languages.

These analyses are evidence I can recognize open source software online, learn to use them, and through that evaluate how tech-literate a user would have to be in order to successfully complete a project with these tools.

INFO 240 – Information Technology Tools and Applications – Final Project: Five-page Website

I built this five-page website for INFO 240, Information Technology Tools and Applications. The Professor allowed us any topic, as long as we demonstrated a clear understanding of HTML5 and CSS3. I decided my audience would be like casual friends at a party, where talking about art was expected.

The first page defined in what context “art” would be discussed. The second gave a history of storytelling based on how audiences related to characters. The third concluded suffering continues to be a popular theme in drawing. The fourth outlined my five favorite music genres. The fifth explained I was not an art expert. Each page also included hyperlinks and a partially relevant image.

This final project is evidence I understand how HTML5 places content onto webpages, have used it to create a site, and learned through INFO 246, Building Web Applications with PHP and JavaScript, assignments how this hypertext language can prepare IPs for other computer languages used in information systems.

(*Currently, I’m searching for a place to host these webpages, versus providing screenshots as I had for my original ePortfolio submitted on Canvas.*)

Conclusion

Technology is wild, wholly unpredictable due to each user’s comfort levels and needs. Which is why IPs have a responsibility to continuously update themselves on emerging information and communications technologies. With this awareness of digital trends, they can better understand, relate to, and teach users how sophisticated technologies can contribute to their lives. To do this myself, I look forward to following research on blockchain and broadband network developments from universities, reading Supreme Court and other appellates’ opinions concerning information technology, and building a website for my writing.

References

180g. (2022). Vellum: Create beautiful books. https://vellum.pub/

Britannica. (n.d.). Technophobe. In The Britannica Dictionary. Retrieved September 29, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/technophobe

Canva. (n.d.). https://www.canva.com/

Knight Lab. (2017). Projects. Northwestern University. https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/projects/

Penn, J. (n.d.). The Creative Penn. Retrieved September 29, 2022, from https://www.thecreativepenn.com/

Red Hat. (2019). What is open source? https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source

Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P., & Arango, J. (2015). Information Architecture. O’Reilly.

WHATWG. (2022). HTML living standard. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#history-2

For Competency J essay, please click ‘Previous Post’ below.

*It isn’t that I didn’t do the Competency I essay, or I left it out, but there wasn’t a Competency I essay to write.