The submission form for the essay:
These are more notes from 2011, and are the various strategies and things I’ve learned through using Korsakow that make using the program simpler, or at least easier.
To really understand what you’re doing (if you are interested, otherwise potter around), then read the Korsakow manual, the faq, the quick-start guide, tips and tricks, and tutorials. These will be more up to date than mine below, which are largely based on the common problems that seem to have turned up in classes. Continue reading
This is a cut and paste from stuff I put together in 2011. It holds good today.
This is one of the most important things to understand when using this software (and this applies to all projects on a computer!). Understand:
Then
If you go to submit your essay and the link provides a “Form Not Published” error, you are looking at when not logged in to Google with your RMIT identity. You need to be logged as a RMIT student. Why? Because I don’t want a form filled with rubbish from every dill on the internet. And also it automatically collects your RMIT name which is a simple way to confirm that you are you.
Thank you Nadya. This is not story or narrative, but a particular sort of listing. It’s great.
In network media we discussed small world networks, dense nodes, and so on. A korsakow film is exactly this sort of structure. Below is something I wrote in 2011, reposting here as it should help you understand Korsakow film as an architecture and structure that you do things with, and an architecture and structure that is, in its very DNA, the same as the networks we are working on. It’s sort of a mise-en-abyme moment really.
A significant idea that has a lot of relevance for things like the internet, hypertext, and social media (which are all forms of distributed networks) is the idea of a ‘small world network’. This is related to the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram about there being a maximum of ‘six degrees of separation’ between any two people, anywhere in the world. A small world network assumes lots of a small number of connections between individuals (nodes, clips in a k-film, links on the web, people you know), but with a few individuals who have a lot of connections. In relation to social networks these links are not about how close you are to others (whether geographically or personally) just that you know them. The existence of only a small number of people who know a lot of other people (who have a lot of connections) makes it much easier to get from one group to another, from one individual to another. The key features here are that these connections (how many people you know) is not equally distributed – I know 100, you know 200 – and that to get from one individual to another you do not need to know all the connections, all you need to know is somebody that you think will be closer than you are. Continue reading
An introduction I wrote in 2011, YMMV:
So, you’ve downloaded Korsakow. The first thing is to actually put the program in the right place on your computer. This is just good housekeeping. On a Mac this is in the Applications folder, think it is the same place on a PC. You do this so that a) you always know where it is, and b) some programs need to know where they are to work properly, and the applications folder is where they are supposed to live. Continue reading
Yep, running late this week. This is a ‘high’ academic paper, which means a cinema studies paper written in the style beloved of cinema and cultural studies. Some complicated bits. However, it is useful because it is another essay that discusses how to classify something (in this case ‘essay’ films) – you can see that academics can spend plenty of time arguing about what things mean, my refrain this semester is, has been, will be, let’s think about what things do then worry about what they mean – and that she tends to argue that if you end up with a definition as complex and vague as you need for an essay film, then it just gets a bit much really. Why read it then? Well, note how we can think of the essay film as a particular sort of conversation between your material and your audience – this matters much more than whether it is film, voice, image, picture, text. As we learn the basics of Korsakow the next step, and the point of the rather rote learning we’re doing at the moment, is to make something more complex. So how can we think of the Korsakow project you will start shortly as an ‘essay’? And what sort of documentary is an essay, with its combination of the subjective, personal, reflective, and reflexive. Along with that particular list we can also begin to think about a Korsakow film as an essay, but not only an essay between the ‘film’ and the audience/user, but also as a conversation it can have amongst itself. As clips can now exist in different, multiple relationships, with each other we can think of this as being like a conversation that the parts of the film can have with itself, while simultaneously having some sort of conversation with your audience.
The reading is: Rascaroli, Laura. “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24–47. (PDF).