Harriet Tubman: Conductor On The Underground Railroad – Graphic Novel Adaptation

On By elmediatIn Culture, educationLeave a comment

Joe Illidge and Marcus Kwame Anderson are to adapt the late Ann Petry‘s Harriet Tubman: Conductor On The Underground Railroad, as a graphic novel, to be published by Tara Weikum at Harper Alley, in the winter of 2026.

The quintessential biography for middle grade readers of Harriet Tubman, the anti-slavery hero who is expected to be the face of the new $20 bill. The New Yorker praised this book as “an evocative portrait,” and the Chicago Tribune called it “superb.” Harriet Tubman was born a slave and dreamed of being free. She was willing to risk everything—including her own life—to see that dream come true. After her daring escape, Harriet became a conductor on the secret Underground Railroad, helping others make the dangerous journey to freedom. Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad is an accessible portrait of the woman who guided more than 300 slaves to freedom. This award-winning introduction to the late abolitionist is an ALA Notable Book and a New York Times Outstanding Book. This book also includes an index.

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Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children’s books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.

In 2019, the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction.

 

 

The Art of Marcus Kwame Anderson

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AI: Hello, Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

On By elmediatIn Canadian News, Media technologyLeave a comment

A few bits of mass media observations

Chatbots visiting a Blog Very Near You

 

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The AI impact on everything from television to visual art has recently come to the forefront thanks to the writers and actors strike.

Writers, actors, authors, and artists are striking and suing to assert their stake in these upheavals. But the fight over A.I. and creative work implicates us all. Language-based A.I. models work by digesting vast quantities of existing content, tracing patterns, and then drawing on what they have learned. We marvel at their ability to generate prose that seems indistinguishable from what a human could pen; one small experiment showed Harvard professors giving chatbots high grades on their essays. Yet A.I.-generated creations are innately derivative and, by definition, at some level predictable. It is true that critics for a century have accused the entertainment industry of producing unoriginal and hackneyed content and even conditioning audiences to lap up such fare. But despite commercial constraints that can drive toward sameness, writers, actors, and other creative talents have always managed to produce original, thought-provoking, and exciting works of art. SOURCE LINK: New Republic

For blog writers, I would like to draw attention to comments to your posts. I very recently have had comments that look genuine and content related, but felt a bit off. In the first case, I gave the commenter the benefit of the doubt. I soon had a number of comments that were very persistent in asking me to follow them, and wondering why I wasn’t following them – “Very nice artwork. Why won’t you follow me?”

Of course, I ended up marking the comments as spam. I very recent comment from another blog showed up, giving a very detailed 2 paragraph response to a recent post on some nature photographs (See Photos HERE). In this case, what struck me was that the comment was really a restating of the information that included with the photos. Checking the actual blog, I discovered only content related to a product that was being recommended.

My impression is that some bloggers are using a Chatbot to assist in generating more elaborate, informative responses to posts, in order to enhance their online visibility and draw other bloggers to their posts.

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Fediverse and Mastodon Update

As more people join various the Fediverse, various groups and organizations are setting up instances (servers). Some are leaving the corporate Social Media platforms (Big Social) entirely, while others are creating an alternative space, waiting to see if Big Social will totally deteriorate/collapse. As of today, there are 10,555,990 Fediverse users, an increase of  +1,877,580 since last month. The total number of servers is 24,767, an increase of +1,594 since last month Stats are regularly updated HERE-LINK. For more current news on the Fediverse, check out The Fediverse Report, a curated blog, giving you links and context to all the news that is happening in the fediverse. (LINK_HERE)

– Changes in Reddit policies, similar in nature to X-Twitter, created a large migration of users to Lemmy, which is a Fediverse alternative to Reddit. SEE: 2023 Reddit API Controversy.

– Opt-in search is really coming to Mastodon, and is now available in public beta testing, and already available on servers like mastodon.social. It is fully opt-in, and people have to manually enable a new setting ‘include public posts in search results’ under their privacy settings. Search has always been a contentious issue in Mastodon, even though other fediverse platforms have had it for a long while, often with full opt-in consent. The full opt-in nature of the implementation does satisfy people’s requirements for getting consent to be included in search results. It does come with the cost of increasing complexity for Mastodon; people will have to be told about the option, make a decision for themselves whether they want it, and then find the button that is 3 clicks deep in the personal preferences page.

– The German Rhineland-Palatinate State Parliament has stopped using X (Twitter) in favour of open-source decentralised Mastodon. (SOURCE) X-Twitter, like Meta and Google, haves not yet complied with the EU Digital Services Act (Online moderation rules-laws) (SOURCE), and the penalties could see the platforms blocked. For this reason, German Parliament members were being encouraged to leave X-Twitter, and use Mastodon instance set up my the government.  If the Canadian government had set-up a similar solution when the CBC was blocked by X-Twitter, an official Canadian presence on the Fediverse would have helped deal with the impact of Meta (Facebook & Instagram) blocking Canadian News, as government officials and communities deal with severe weather events of the 2023 Wildfires. ~ Trudeau denounces Meta’s news block as fires force evacuations

Of Bookish Things ~ on Mastodon

On By elmediatIn Culture, Media Literacy, Media Principles2 Comments

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It’s time to talk of Bookish Things,

Of social media — comic-books — and book reviews —

Of Mastodon — Picture Prompt Bingo postings—

And why Twitter is boiling hot —

And whether the Fediverse sings.

 

The Fediverse definitely sings.

 

I’ll have more to say about the variety of protocols & platforms on an upcoming post, for now I want to talk about my new Mastodon account. (Yes, I now have 2 accounts.)

There are a number of reasons to have more than one account, the most common is a desire to separate content based on topics & target audience. (Note: Since this is the Fediverse, you can also set up accounts on other branches, and interact with these accounts.) Another reason for having another account is that some instances offer extra features.

A recent event proved to be another motivation to have more than one account on Mastodon; it also demonstrated the strength of federated servers –  part of Mastodon came under a DDoS attack on January 31.

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Because there are independent federated servers, the attack was isolated to one server. Mastodon.Social is the largest instance, but the attack could not shut down all of Mastodon, only that one instance, and even that failed. If you were on another instance, you would not be effected by the attack, unless to tried to interact with accounts on M.Social. In that case you would have noticed a slow-down or an error message from that account. Those who had accounts on M.Social and another instance, could just go to the second account to gain access to Mastodon.

I started thinking about adding another account in January. My account on Mastodon.Art was started in April of last year, when the potential Musk purchase of Twitter was first made. Since then, as I pointed out in earlier posts, Twitter has gone through multiple convulsions. The very latest is the announcement that Twitter will shut down free access to their API as of February 9th.  Twitter users and developers were boiling hot. This change would create a massive disruption in development and access/usage.

The impact on Mastodon since the Musk takeover of Twitter has been dramatic. The number of accounts and new instances keeps growing. More developers are working on Mastodon and Fediverse improvement and innovations. The February 9th will likely trigger many Twitter users heading over to Mastodon & the Fediverse.

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This growing potential for new forms of Social Media interaction perked my retired Media Literacy teacher curiosity.  The realization that my content for the Mastodon.Art account was too large in scope and quantity had me considering a different approach. I saw this as an opportunity to develop three projects.

Project Goals

1) Challenge myself and make use of collage material by creating altered book art compositions.

2) Create a Tarot Card layout that makes use of the narrative plot. I have explored this idea elsewhere, but I wanted to see if I could make more specific use of Literary Analysis and terminology.

3) I’ve found it challenging to consistently read fiction and non-fiction, and I needed a motivator that would not be a stressor. Thanks to Calmgrove’s blog, I discovered Picture Prompt Bingo. The Picture Prompt Bingo card is a loosey-goosey Reading Challenge in which you match books that you’ve read to one of the pictures on the bingo card. The key thing is that you be as creative in your interpretation of the picture as you like.

 

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Putting all of this together, allowed me to create an account Of Bookish Things. This account will emphasize altered book art, assemblage-collage, experimental poetry-prose, genre literature, comics, and Mass Media Literacy. The Mastodon instance is c.im, which stands for Creation, Innovation, Motivation. (One of the differences in this instance from Mastodon.Art is the character. Art has the typical Mastodon character count of 500. With this instance the character count is 5000)

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NOTE:

Hope you check out my accounts. If you are interested in setting up an account, my earlier blog posts about Mastodon will give you more information. Since last April, there has been an explosion of articles & videos about the Fediverse and Mastodon. This video is useful (Link).

 

Password Security & “What is Facebook?”

On By elmediatIn Canada, Canadian News, Media Literacy1 Comment

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This chart was posted on Mastodon. There are multiple ways online security can be compromised, one of the basic things we can do is maintain a strong password. Many know that a strong password includes numbers, upper & lower case letters, and symbols. What the chart demonstrates is how significant the total number of characters are in creating a strong password.

If you look at the dark orange area on the chart, you’ll see that under the last column for strongest mix of characters, the password requires 11 of them. It will take 34 years for the password to be broken. When you go to 12 characters, it will take 3k years to decode your password. I’m considering going to 13 characters for 202k years of security – you just never know what could happen.

** TIP: Remembering password have become the bane of online existence. One way to simplify the situation is to use a consistent bass line password. For example, you create a password, DOG>Chews3Z , you have a strong base, but do you want the same password for each online activity?

Well, what about banking? BkDOG>Chews3Z

A blog:  use # or @ with first letter in blog to base password.

On Mastodon? (Hint: you really should join Mastodon) use # or @ with first letter in your Mastodon name plus base password

Meanwhile in Canada: “What is Facebook”

Last February, a nightclub in Prince George, British Columbia posted videos on Facebook of their patrons and staff flouting the COVID restriction rules. The Crown charged them and the case went to court. Slam dunk case – no, not really. The judge questioned the validity of all evidence provided. The judge had questions & wanted to know:

What is a social media post?

Could the post have been hacked?

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“I know Facebook exists.

I don’t use Facebook, what is it?

What does it show?”

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The outcome did not go in the Crown’s favour, though in other such cases brought before other judges, the judges accepted the evidence. See full CBC News Report HERE.

MORE SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter Transformation & Migration to Mastodon

There is a timeline of Elon Musk’s interaction with legal requirements and his attempts to transform Twitter. It is called “Twitter is Going Great”. It presents a business that has become a chaotic comedy of errors mixed with a tragic disregard for the value of individuals & groups. Unfortunately, there are enough events & public statements, that something new is added almost every day.

The ongoing migration to Mastodon continues, though it has returned to a normal level of adding new accounts. The massive surge has diminished. More community servers are being created. For example, MSTDN.ca, a Canadian server created by a Canadian and hosted in Canada went from went from 60 accounts to 24,500 accounts in 2 weeks.

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Mastodon server growth.

The Mastodon User Count updates the stats on the total users accounts, the trending numbers here is a recent post.

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While I have found some of those who followed me & I followed on Twitter, it has been gradual. I’ve also found a few bloggers now on Mastodon. It will take time to see where all this is actually going. There are still a number of accounts that were set up, but remain inactive. People still waiting to see how bad Twitter will get, or if the under manged infrastructure will implode. Twitter will never return to what it was, so will users still want to keep it going even if Musk succeeds in his business remodelling?