from Madeleine: initial thoughts

It was delightful seeing you at the conference, and thanks very much for chairing our panel. I hope you're home safe and sound and fully recovered; your schedule looked daunting! I ended up spending most of my time away from the conference hanging out with Sophia, who's turning out to be a little party animal (see attached!).

So I noticed that the deadline for proposals for next year's conference is pretty darned soon (May 9). The interactive exhibit/room/session that you told me about--is it subject to this deadline? And if so, can I help you write up the proposal? I've had some ideas--vague and ill-formed, but ideas nonetheless :)

I was thinking it would be kind of fun if people could print something and take it away with them--a postcard, or something that could go inside the 4Cs nametag (or maybe an alternative nametag?). We could offer some images and text and let people create their own collages, maybe with some randomizing elements thrown in to make it interesting.

Another idea is to have people create some kind of collaborative piece that could be projected on a wall. A friend of mind did a project with barcodes and scanners--when you walked in the room you got a barcode and scanning it would cause certain changes to happen to the projected image. I don't know if this is technically feasible, though. One of my great desires this summer is to learn Processing, which is the language this friend used to create the project. But it's often the case that my
great summer plans get deferred....

And another possibility is to work with some of the infovis tools that are available on the Web and give folks a chance to play around with them. I'm thinking specifically of some of the tools at TAPor as well as text
cloud tools. There might be a way of helping people visualize the
conference program, for instance, in order to see the conference in a
different way. Maybe this could be incorporated with the first idea of
having something people could print out and take away with them.

Anyway, I don't know if these sorts of things are in the ballpark of what
you're thinking of. But I'm really excited to be involved in this
project--thank you for inviting me! I think it's an excellent idea to
have different sorts of sessions and to offer multimedia, interactive
experiences for people at the 4Cs. I like the traditional conference
paper as much as the next academic person, but heck, there's nothing wrong
with one or two alternatives. Let me know if there's anything I can do at
this point to get it rolling along.