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I've built this blog to give structure to my exploration of the field of hypertext. I mean it to be both weblog and resource for myself and for others. As I come across materials relevant to the field --be they texts, books, people, events, sites, papers, or my own work-- I log and archive them.

About me!

I'm a twenty-something living in Brooklyn, NY. I grew up in central New York State, went to college outside of Philadelphia, and moved to Boston to be an adult. I spent four years there as the techie at a wonderful summer program for kids before striking out on my own as a freelance database and hypertext (web) designer in NYC. On the side I play, lead, and write role-playing games.

Hmm... my credentials, such as they are: My name is Scott Price. I've been on the web since 1997, and crafting hypertexts on and off the web since 1998. I've attended conferences when I could, and read and thought when I couldn't. Though I am enjoying freelancing, I have my resumé posted in case some school or new media-in-education thinktank is looking for someone who stands with a foot in education, a foot in literature, a foot in computing, and who is used to standing on one more foot than he actually has.

Contact information

I whole-heartedly welcome correspondence about this site, about hypertext, or about Tinderbox. You can reach me by email at sprice - at - textuality.org .

Why this site?

While I was in school I encountered Storyspace and read a few hypertexts as a sideline for a course... they were floating around on the school servers because of some prominent figures that preceded me there. In '98 and '99 I submitted a few papers as hypertexts. In '00 I student-taught a high school class using Storyspace and then assembled the materials for my teaching certification as a (web) hypertext.

Then I left it for a few years as I took a new job, moved to a new city. I'm still interested in hypertext, though, and am thinking about it as a career path. Before I could approach that, though, I need to know more about it. Stuff has changed in the last few years.

So this site is partly a tool to organize my survey of the field of hypertext, and partly to serve as a resource for others who might be doing the same.

Colophon

This whole site is created and maintained with Tinderbox 3.6.1 by Eastgate Systems. I created the "GardenStyle" export templates were in BBEdit from a design by Alison Wilgus.

Tinderbox Design

I'm using Tinderbox to make this site. Tinderbox is an information management system, which to me means that I can keep information within it in ways that make sense to me --a mix of outlines, charts, and visual maps simultaneously-- and retrieve the information in useful ways: as this website or as a bibliography or directory of people, for example.

One of the reasons that I'm using Tinderbox for this site is because I'm doing a number of slightly unusual things that Tinderbox can nevertheless accomodate beautifully. I'm keeping a blog/journal, which many tools would help me with, but the entries of this blog are also nouns in a directory: hypertext authors, hypertexts, sites about hypertext, books, and so on. I want to simultaneously see entries as a chronological log and as a categorical directory of items and reviews. The flexibility to make this kind of double-vision of information is a winning feature of Tinderbox.

As for how this site is assembled in Tinderbox, this snapshot of the outline should give Tinderbox users a sense of it:

I've got the "usual" archive where entries are dumped, a hierarchical set of prototypes that set categories and export templates, and agents to gather some of the organization. Then, thanks to an article by William Cole, I got Categories working to run the directory. The only custom piece beyond that is the triage system I have going. "Featured Links" is assembled from spaces that are basically just a URL, which serves as a place to dump things that are suggested to me but which I haven't read thoroughly enough to know whether they're worth reviewing. They're available for a quick list of "stuff I've found", though. Items with are worth reviewing I'll make into a full-fledged, categorized item and put under "pending posts", which is not exported so that it doesn't take up distracting space on the blog. Items which are reviewed then go into the archive and are full-blown, published entries.