The Unknown

The Unknown is fabulous and hilarious. I've been looking for it for a while. It's awesome enough that I think I can entrust you to it before this review. You might get a kick out of reading it first, because it'll grab you.

Still here? Okay. It's hard to describe it because it's founded on a sleight of hand: it's the blog-like journal of a publicity tour for a book of essays about an anthology that never existed in either our world or the world of the story. The authors know it doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop them from writing about it, publicizing it, handing it out, or linking to it. The entire work swirls around so well that eventually it doesn't matter that the supposed subject never appeared; the real subject is the journey, the self-examination or lack thereof, and the ... aw-hell fun of it. Along the way they discuss hypertext, writing, spoof the publishing industry, parody themselves and what they're doing. It's House of Leaves, but funny instead of frightening.

It's the book tour my friends (known here as "the dudes") would take, and it's how they would record it, with a mix of cold-shower insight, riotous braggadocio, and disturbingly true hyperbole. It's written like it doesn't need to go anywhere, win any awards, be translated or made into a movie because the authors have already imagined it.

Structure so clear you can really lose yourself in it

The structure is well formed and well-communicated. At the bottom of each page is a distinct footer with a host of text links to boilerplate stuff: contact, press items, etc. But then there are six colored links for "lines"... basically threads or trails through the enormous number of lexia. The pages, one per lexia, are color-coded according to which thread they are on, which makes it possible for the reader to catalogue the entries and (in theory) read them exhaustively. Since you always have a couple of places to ground yourself and get your bearings, following links is a little less scary-- there's less at stake, you're not going to get lost. And if you feel like a change of pace, you can switch to another thread that feels better without the risk of not being lost once you get there, because the thread indices are still pretty opaque.

Nice Interstices, there

The Unknown takes the space between lexia to shift gears-- some lexia have a marathon feel to them, exhausting you in their decadence so that by the time you're ready to get off their drunken, debauched or just exhilirated ride (trying with half a mind to avert the hangover or its hypertext analogue lostness), there's a lexia on the other side of a link with a different pace-- perhaps a calmer, more meditative pace. Because it's an actual email, or just 'metafictional bullshit.'

Following links fits with the feel and rhythm of the story because the way the authors write is so fragmented to begin with. Many paragraphs or sentences feel like they might as well have a link between them. The excuse in the story might be that the writer is drunk and sitting in a loud bar, or that it's an excerpt of an email in reply to a message you haven't seen. Either way, it helps give the whole thing a consistent feel even while you move between authors, presented media, fiction, and fact. The Unknown escapes being dadaist cyberart despite the fragmentation.

Still getting the hang of this

It has been a long time since I wrote about a work. And even longer since I wrote in an even slightly unpretentious or non-academic way about something. I feel like I could sit down and write an entire paper about this one piece, but, man, it's a blog. There's so much out there. *shakes it out*

Chasing Our Tails

This is the best response that I've seen to Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. It is a thorough excoriation of the state of hypertext criticism. It circles around how criticism of (literary) hypertext is more often a statement of the critic's fears and ambitions than an examination of actual work. It explains in the most articulate manner that I've seen yet why recurrence, repetition, and circles in hypertext are a feature, not a bug: that we learn by connecting something we have just discovered with something we already understand, and that doing so involves revisiting what we have heard.

Wonderfully, the elegant structure of the text itself also demonstrates that point. I visited most of the lexia in this text more than once, and for once didn't mind... each page was illuminated from a different direction by the context of the link that I followed.

And it 'ends' with a call to action, and a good one. My pulse was actually raised by reading this little hypertext, and it began to tie many other works together. And did Mark Bernstein really propose the term breadcrumb as it is used in hypertext?

URL

http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/composition/bernstein/

The Marathon Trilogy

Wikipedia describes the Marathon Trilogy of games as a series of "science fiction first-person shooter computer games from Bungie Software...." which in 1994 "introduced many concepts now common in mainstream video games," including "dual-wielded weapons, friendly non-player characters, and most notably an intricate plot."

It's that last bit that intrigues me from a hypertext standpoint. The gameplay was novel at the time, and all the more remarkable for being released first on the Macintosh, but it was the plot and narrative which held fans' attention and led to "The Marathon Story Page" where fans were explicating the plot and finding new details and connections more than seven years after the series concluded.

Bungie Studios eventually released the tools used to create the game as well as the game source code itself. Fan communities continue to create new scenarios, stories, and levels for the engine today.

The Marathon Story

The Marathon Trilogy told the story of a security officer aboard a 'colony ship' called the Marathon. In Marathon, published in 1994, the Marathon was attacked by an alien race of slavers; the attack damaged and destroyed the artificial intellgences that ran the ship's systems and chaos ensued. Each level of the game consisted of a short mission assigned to the security officer by one or another of the AIs as they tried to fend off the invasion and drive the aliens away. Eventually, one of the AIs, Durandal, freed of behavioral constraints by the alien attack, takes charge and directs the player through conquest of the alien ship and escape from the Marathon.

Marathon 2: Durandal follows the security officer-Durandal team as Durandal struggles through two missions of liberation. Now freed of the constraints the humans placed upon him, Durandal struggles through the stages of 'rampancy', the process an AI goes through as it achieves free will and uncontrolled growth. That story parallels Durandal's struggle, through the player, to track down the history of one of the alien slave races and awaken an ancient AI, thereby freeing the slave race to become his ally against the slavers.

Marathon Infinity took the storytelling to a new level. Though composed of the same short goal-oriented missions, several levels had multiple goals, some of which would lead the player back (in time) to retry previous levels to effect a different outcome as certain alternate timelines proved ineffective in the evolving storyline. Additionally, the levels progression explicitly mirrored the stages of rampancy outlined in Marathon 2, metaphorically leading the security officer through his own 'rampancy' as he struggles out from under the control of Durandal and its mission assignments. You'll note that I didn't outline the plot just now ... that's because it's so circular, variable, and dreamlike that it's often difficult to say exactly what is happening... a feeling that many people associate with innovative hypertexts.

Marathon as a hypertext in form

I think that Marathon is fascinating as a hypertext, especially since it is completely successful as a different sort of text altogether-- a shoot-em-up game. The series 'works' even if all you do is run the character around shooting at everything that you see and flipping all the switches you come across. (The game, in fact, explicitly challenges expert players to do just that, taking on all challenges and to hell with the consequences of punching buttons.) So it works as a linear story of violence and sci-fi mayhem.

At the same time, the network terminals scattered throughout the levels constitute lexia in an extensive hypertext. Explicit links come in the form of spatial pathways through the level which the player can navigate, and often the goal of a level is merely to traverse that sort of link from one lexia to another. Terminals also form explicit links between levels-- the player finds the final terminal in a level, is 'warped' to a terminal in another level, reads it, and moves on.

Terminals often explicitly link to one another and to other texts by citation. One AI will cite another and argue with it, or will remind the player of something that it said itself several levels before. As the name implies, Marathon is also rife with classical allusions and often uses references to greek history to set the tone of a level-- usually in a slyly threatening manner.

Like most interactive games with any sort of narrative, the Marathon Trilogy also highlights the implicit links that readers make in a hypertext. In almost any text, readers will make connections between elements of the story which are not immediately connected. Readers will catch themes, character developments, and cause-and-effect sequences which the text presents obliquely. The same process occurs in an interactive game, but is pulled to the surface of the reading process as the player is required to act on the connections. Several levels in the Trilogy develop these connections. The player will, for instance, need to trigger a switch in the level as described by the interpolation of the messages in two terminals. One terminal (presented as the results of a reconnaisance by enemy forces) presents a history of the level's setting as an irrigation control system; in another terminal Durandal announces his desire to eliminate enemy forces by flooding a portion of the level. The player must create their own 'link' between the two terminals and then to the location of the switch which triggers the flooding. By flipping the switch the player enacts the implicit link between the lexia.

Marathon Infinity is also explicitly dreamlike. It includes cycles with multiple exits dependent upon both mission success (chosen links, in effect) and on state changes in the form of previous visits. Several levels duplicate each other but with subtle changes that indicate progress while representing a 'revisitation' of previously read material. Attempts at mapping the storyline end up looking a lot like map views of a hypertext. Which, I suppose, they are.

Marathon as a hypertext in content

(My thoughts on this are not so thoroughly formed as for the other sections. Ah well, here goes...)

I certainly didn't realize it on first playing through the games, but the Marathon Trilogy pushed my hypertext buttons in its content as well as its form. I enjoy hypertext (and interactive narrative more generally) because of the offer of agency to the reader. Much has been made of how good hypertexts could 'liberate' the common reader from the tyranny of the author and hand over the tools of creation along with the rich framework for their use. The Trilogy, and Marathon Infinity particularly, wrestles with the relationship between author and reader, game designer and player, commander and soldier through the theme of rampancy.

The meaning of the term rampant used in Marathon is, as far as I can tell, original to the game. In the games, it is "an expansive growth of intelligence and self-awareness in a computer AI" (wikipedia). More specifically, it is the process that occurs as an intelligence breaks free of the limitations placed on it. The idea stretches back through the history of created life through Asimov's Laws as far as Frankenstein's monster or even the Golem.

In the Trilogy, it specifically refers to the AI Durandal, who starts the first game controlling just the doors throughout the colony ship. When the alien attack damages the ship's systems, Durandal's behavioral shackles are broken and 'he' is set free throughout the ship's network. By the end of the game he has moved himself over to the alien ship with its advanced technology. At that point, with a ship and multitudes of creatures at his command, he realizes that the only thing keeping him from eternal life and growth is the eventual end of the universe. Despite this seeming immortality, he needs assistance in manipulating the physical universe, and so binds the security guard, and the player, to his service.

The second game follows Durandal through a series of responses to his freedom, from despair at his limited state through rage at his creators for the enforced captivity to eventual jealousy and an ongoing state of real competition and self-sufficiency. As the player watches Durandal go through that process, the protagonist goes through a sort of negative reflection: though the 'security officer' is never given a voice with which to complain about his own bondage, Durandal continually teases his human pet and shows that the roles have been reversed-- the computer user is being used by the computer. Marathon Infinity makes that parallel even more explicit as the protagonist struggles through Durandal's missions to freedom from the unstable AI. By the end, it's implied that Durandal has been destroyed and the security officer is finally free to create his fate. Throughout, the authorial Durandal (and other AIs) make repeated comments about how you must feel like they did and whether you have any agency in the story or your life.

Marathon vs. other games

The Marathon Trilogy is by no means unique in its hypertextuality. On the contrary, these features occur in nearly any FPS game with a semblance of a narrative behind it. Several things make it particularly useful to examine, though.

First, as a sort of pioneer in the FPS field, the Marathon games were continually struggling against the technology. If Marathon were made today, it's likely that the information presented through the terminals would instead appear through cut scenes and actual character dialogue or voiceovers. Halo 2, which shares themes (and possibly a setting) with Marathon and which was also created by Bungie, does exactly that: there isn't a screen of text in the game, and the story is told through action and cut scenes.

Content that rich was prohibitively difficult to present in 1994, though, so the story was told through comparatively 'cheap' terminal screens with just text and static images. It's easier to see that set-up as a series of linked texts than the smoothly-flowing Halo 2. It was pretty certainly unintentional, but it created an excellent intermediary between narratives presented as text and those presented like interactive movies.

Intentional or not, the result was a narrative which was rich enough to bear extended examination and multiple rereadings... and because the terminals represented asynchronous communcation (emails, intercepted transmissions, etc.) and could be revisited and usually reread, the player could effectively 'pause' the progression of the narrative and cycle back through recent lexia until they'd figured it out. More recent games generally rely on contrived 'revisit' dialogue, where a character repeats the same message again and again, to achieve the same effect.

Playing through Marathon consists, at the most basic level, of navigating the explicit ('geographic') links between lexia. At a deeper level, reading the story consists of enacting implicit links and creating links allowed but not particularly facilitated by the text. Play it at the basic level and it's a shoot-em-up; read it at the next level and it's a story about the struggle for agency and authorship that's deep enough to occupy readers for years of reading and writing it anew.

Hamlet

Hamlet! A Game in Five Acts, by Interactivities Ink, is the first Thespis game I've seen on the market. I picked it up at Ubercon in 2005 and have only played it once through properly. It's not flawless, but it's fun and it's a narrative game, and it's vaguely collaborative, and I'd teach it in an English class, for pete's sake. That's awesome.

To summarize quickly, in Hamlet! as a Thespis instance, you have story elements, lexia perhaps, which you might 'read' or 'play' at any moment. What structures the story is that lexia have constraints on when they may be played or read. Certain plays present the prerequisites for others, or represent an event which makes other plays impossible.

In Hamlet, all actions are on the table at all times. Each player starts the game with a secret goal which takes the form of a set of character 'endings'. One player might have the "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead" ending, for instance, where R&G survive and Hamlet dies in England. Another player might have the "Happily Ever After" ending where Hamlet and Ophelia get married and everyone likable doesn't die. Players take turns which are called scenes, during which they can make a certain number of actions occur. Most actions have constraints, so the "Hamlet practices swordplay" action can't occur while Hamlet is in Denmark, and while "Hamlet duels with Laertes" might happen almost anytime, the chance of Hamlet winning improves the more often the "practice" action has occurred.

When all goes well, what you end up with is a game that resembles a play written by committee in some wonderfully ridiculous ways, with players scheming and collaborating to lay out sequences of scenes which move toward their often contradictory endings. If a player's ending becomes impossible (Hamlet dies, making "Happily Ever After" look pretty Grimm), then the player joins the crowd trying to make the new play turn out like Shakespeare did-- with everyone dead. It's a nice "zombie army" device that keeps players active to the end and makes the whole thing somewhat collaborative.

Thespis might need a computer

Hamlet! bore out my concerns about non-digital Thespis, which is to say that it's quite difficult to track and plan without a computer to do the work for you. Players in our game spent most of the game poring over the character cards, trying to figure out what was possible given the current constraints. We ended up collaborating, sometimes, helping each other find some action that we could take.

Sometimes that's a great thing-- in chess, once you've learned the simple rules of motion, there's almost infinite complexity to throw yourself against as you try to create strategies which account for your opponent's possible responses. In Hamlet, though, the complexity is there in the rules in front of you. The players can't own the strategy because it's there on the cards; instead, the author owns it and the players struggle to decipher it more rapidly than their opponents. Just as players in a video game will explore the constraints of the game as much as its narrative, players in Hamlet don't get to pursue the game-maker's stated goal of being able to rewrite Shakespeare's play because they're too busy figuring out what actions are possible at the moment and what actions will lead to optimal future actions.

Instead of participating in a narrative given constraints, we were collaborating against the game mechanics to find a way to 'win', to get to an ending. What I'd like to see is a version where the actions that are open to you are clearly visible, where actions that might yet happen are visible as such, and actions that are closed are hidden or obscured. That would let me stop poring over lists and jotting down trees quite so much and would let me move on to scheming against my opponents.

I suppose that's what the (new to me) online version is for. I'm going to have to play it to see whether it's better at clarifying actions, or just better connected.

Everything Bad is Good For You

Most of Everything Bad is Good For You is about the culture surrounding hypertext rather than hypertext itself. Htext is not in the mission statement. That's a shame, because the book is about the challenges that we face in evaluating, adopting, and adapting to new media, and that's very much a hypertext issue.

The basic idea is really worth some thought: We think that popular media (esp. television and movies) are on a 'race to the bottom' culturally. On the contrary, a look at popular culture over time shows increasing sophistication, increased demands on the consumer, and a meritocratic system that rewards sophistication. Content is not the issue, but we're used to looking at that from old media. The cognitive demands of the media are the issue, and they're getting more and more 'educational'.

From Avant-Garde Fringe to Mainstream

On pg. 117 Johnson addresses hypertext specifically:

It seems almost absurd to think of this now, but when the idea of hypertext documents first entered the popular domain in the early nineties, it was a distinctly avant-garde idea, promoted by an experimentalist literary fringe.... Fast forward less than a decade, and something extraordinary occurs: exploring nonlinear document structures becomes as second nature as dialing a phone for hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people. The mass embrace of hypertext is ... a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third-graders worldwide.

His observation is absolutely true, and I've seen it personally. In June I taught a sample class for fifth-graders at an elite private school, and in a half hour the class had assembled the beginnings of a website through a wiki. I could not have done that even three years ago.

That said, I think he's being a bit glib. Readers of the web are still struggling to navigate nonlinear text, and mostly do so only to get to the bits that are linear enough to be comfortable and understandable. The 'grandmothers and third-graders' I've watched navigate the web are still more comfortable with a newspaper which has links instead of physical page-flipping than with the multilinear and conversational emergent structure of a wiki.

That said, I think even the translated, less-hypertextual media form a sort of ramp up to the more novel structures, and that's the main point of EBIGFY. The new media start out in emulation, but as they move on to innovate, they bring their readers along.

The Curve and the Knee

Johnson calls the ignored increasing intelligence of popular media The Sleeper Curve after Woody Allen's Sleeper. The 'curve' reminds me of the 'knee' of hypertext adoption. They're both exponential curves, of course, the knee being one of adoption of new (and more complicated or challenging) media and the Sleeper Curve one of sophistication in existing media.

Johnson cites the web as the great example of hypertext's adoption, and though I want to argue about how hobbled the web is as a hypertextual tool, it is htext and it is widely adopted and it is acclimating popular culture to hypertextual thinking.

The Sleeper Curve of Hypertext

So can we see the Sleeper Curve in hypertext? It's certainly visible in the generally-adopted technology, as we move from the links and static pages of 1994 to today's browsing world with search engines, tabbed browsing, blogs, syndication, archival, and web interfaces for sophisticated databases.

But I want examples of texts. Most of EBIGFY is about comparing the media of several decades ago to what we see today: to Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos. What are examples of hypertexts, even in the watered-down web sense, indicating growing sophistication among readers? And i don't want the elite avant-garde of alternate reality gaming. What smart stuff are the plebes reading?

Everything Bad is Good For You

Most of Everything Bad is Good For You is about the culture surrounding hypertext rather than hypertext itself. Htext is not in the mission statement. That's a shame, because the book is about the challenges that we face in evaluating, adopting, and adapting to new media, and that's very much a hypertext issue.

The basic idea is really worth some thought: We think that popular media (esp. television and movies) are on a 'race to the bottom' culturally. On the contrary, a look at popular culture over time shows increasing sophistication, increased demands on the consumer, and a meritocratic system that rewards sophistication. Content is not the issue, but we're used to looking at that from old media. The cognitive demands of the media are the issue, and they're getting more and more 'educational'.

From Avant-Garde Fringe to Mainstream

On pg. 117 Johnson addresses hypertext specifically:

It seems almost absurd to think of this now, but when the idea of hypertext documents first entered the popular domain in the early nineties, it was a distinctly avant-garde idea, promoted by an experimentalist literary fringe.... Fast forward less than a decade, and something extraordinary occurs: exploring nonlinear document structures becomes as second nature as dialing a phone for hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people. The mass embrace of hypertext is ... a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third-graders worldwide.

His observation is absolutely true, and I've seen it personally. In June I taught a sample class for fifth-graders at an elite private school, and in a half hour the class had assembled the beginnings of a website through a wiki. I could not have done that even three years ago.

That said, I think he's being a bit glib. Readers of the web are still struggling to navigate nonlinear text, and mostly do so only to get to the bits that are linear enough to be comfortable and understandable. The 'grandmothers and third-graders' I've watched navigate the web are still more comfortable with a newspaper which has links instead of physical page-flipping than with the multilinear and conversational emergent structure of a wiki.

That said, I think even the translated, less-hypertextual media form a sort of ramp up to the more novel structures, and that's the main point of EBIGFY. The new media start out in emulation, but as they move on to innovate, they bring their readers along.

The Curve and the Knee

Johnson calls the ignored increasing intelligence of popular media The Sleeper Curve after Woody Allen's Sleeper. The 'curve' reminds me of the 'knee' of hypertext adoption. They're both exponential curves, of course, the knee being one of adoption of new (and more complicated or challenging) media and the Sleeper Curve one of sophistication in existing media.

Johnson cites the web as the great example of hypertext's adoption, and though I want to argue about how hobbled the web is as a hypertextual tool, it is htext and it is widely adopted and it is acclimating popular culture to hypertextual thinking.

The Sleeper Curve of Hypertext

So can we see the Sleeper Curve in hypertext? It's certainly visible in the generally-adopted technology, as we move from the links and static pages of 1994 to today's browsing world with search engines, tabbed browsing, blogs, syndication, archival, and web interfaces for sophisticated databases.

But I want examples of texts. Most of EBIGFY is about comparing the media of several decades ago to what we see today: to Dragnet to Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos. What are examples of hypertexts, even in the watered-down web sense, indicating growing sophistication among readers? And i don't want the elite avant-garde of alternate reality gaming. What smart stuff are the plebes reading?

Card Shark and Thespis

Mark Bernstein wrote a neat paper that turned my ideas of how to write hypertext inside out. We talk a fair bit about the ways that games are digital narratives, are hypertexts of a sort. Reverse that comparison, then: what if you wrote hypertext like a game? This paper (most accessible as a flash presentation) expands on that idea through the very accessible analogy of a card game with cards as lexia and players as characters.

URL

http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html

Thespis

Mark Bernstein brings up the idea of thinking of links backwards-- everything is linked to everything else, and you as an author determine what *prevents* a visit. (Mark wrote a paper and presentation about a card game Thespis to model this.) Then set several players (agents?) who get points for going to certain lexia and provide links... and you've got structure. This goes back to the idea of a link server which revises the link structure for you based on criteria. What rhetorical structures (besides programming) will make the sculpturally, thespis-like approach accessible to authors? A timeline can help you set this up for a static site, but it's still dauntingly complex to make. And people will find the game analogy anaethema, not serious.

Also, the UI is difficult. You need an interface like the path builder, or like Windows Server's "resulting policy" feature which shows you: at this point on this path, what are my constraints and conditions?" Also, "what can't I do?" (Plus: do you show the reader that so that they have a sense of how far they've gotten through the potential of a text?)

There are some big challenges with the Thespis approach. It requires knowledge of the text; it is authorial only. Since it's drawing from a pool of lexia, the text itself must be compelling or the reader starts playing it like a game because the conditions become the focus of reading. If you can see where you're going and where you're not, a game develops around getting places.

In the metaphorical setting of thespis, what about false cards? Cards that a reader should play, but which reconfigure the goals like a game of Fluxx. At this point the people at the table wanted a way to see that possibility, a way to communicate loss ("cards you'll never see are..." or "this link has precluded you from...". Doing that discourages a linear text or linear reading. One interface for this might be a sort of possibility graph-- as you play cards your hand grows, shrinks, and eventually dries up. Parts of a map grow dim as they become inaccessible (or read)

There's a distinction between games and hypertext in the outcome. Having the outcome always the same might be bad game design, but good hypertext. It's a matter of agency and identification with the protagonist. The character in a good text, as in a game, must be limited.

Citation

Bernstein, Mark. "Card Shark and Thespis: Exotic Tools for Hypertext Narrative." Mark Bernstein, Talks. 2001. <http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html>.

see also ACM Full Citation

A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses

This very short (3 print pages) article presents well one argument for teaching hypertext writing in courses that are not primarily about writing. That is: The process of marking up a hypertext provides the necessary defamiliarization of the text that enables students to look at the markup structures in stead of simply looking through them. Once they are able to see the markup in hypertext, they are more easily able to see the markup in the literature which the course presumably has at its center. The rest of the very accessible article teases out the pieces of that assertion: how writing hypertext defamiliarizes, why that process is necessary, why and how we look through markup in familiar media, and how students can transfer the skills from writing hypertext back to reading and writing other texts.

I love it! It's only one argument, one rationale to which I'd add more --teaching hypertext forces an engagement with structures and scales of thinking that students can gloss with more familiar media-- but it is a rationale, and it's made well and clearly.

Citation

Barndollar, David. A Rationale for Teaching Hypertext Authoring in Literature Courses. University of Texas at Austin: 2003. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~blogger/whitepapers/archives/000002.html. Also available in PDF form at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/research/whitepapers/2003/030822-2.pdf

Hypertext is unfamiliar in a good way

In terms of content, the point of literature courses is to familiarize the students with the subjects, arguments, and contexts of the literature; in terms of skill-building, the point of literature courses is to teach students (new) methods of reading that facilitate understanding the literature. This typically means overcoming the students' belief that they know how to read. Using a new medium for their writing (hypertext) helps make clear that new methods for reading are necessary.

This is one case where transparency is a hindrance-- the process of creating hypertexts is sufficiently different from writing papers or essays that the students are forced to consider the way they read and write.

One thing to be careful of when using this technique, it seems to me, is that you re-associate the skills with reading when you're done. You don't want students thinking that the reading skills they are learning apply only to working with your software or with hypertext.

Transferring "markup" back to familiar texts

As McGann points out in Radiant Textuality, texts are always already marked as texts. The markup may be familiar enough in traditional print media to have become transparent, but there are conventions that give a text structure: a page in English begins in the upper left and continues left-to-right; capital letters denote the beginnings of sentences and proper nouns. Having to learn current hypertext formats and their conventions like you would a foreign language (e.g. blank line to separate paragraphs rather than indented first lines) helps break a reader out of the assumptions that make their reading a transparent process.

In a literature course, to teach reading skills, you want to indicate:

• without markup, a text is meaningless
• what counts as markup is dependient on the browser, not the document: readers make distinctions in texts
• difficulty with a text is often a matter of missing some of the markup;
• conversely, understanding markup can illuminate elements in the text that were present but invisible without an understanding of the "tags". This point reminds me of the thesis of the essay Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl. Barndollar notes that learning how to do this correctly is learning how to mark a text in the Elizabethan sense.

There's one sentence that links it all back for me for the t.org project: In fact, teaching hypertext authoring is really just teaching textuality in a practical way.... The hands-on nature of the authoring task provides an encounter with textuality that reading alone cannot.

A Good Practice

Barndollar used a MOO containing the text of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and assigned students to elucidate the references and allusions in the poem and present their work in the MOO. The connection between the hypertext and the poem became an avenue for discussing Eliot's own use of footnotes and references, and about how annotation and allusion work in general.

I want tales of woe

Barndollar says that "not only do instructors face a dearth of scholarship in the discipline, they also face bewilderment, if not outright resistance, in their institutions." This makes intuitive sense to me, but I'd love to have some anecdotal examples or case studies. I need to talk to more teachers who have taught hypertext authoring in their classes.

I do wonder whether this paper is of interest to people who are not already considering hypertext. As the title states, it's more of a rationale than an argument, more useful for defending a desired task than convincing others to use the technique.

Unfiction.com: Alternate Reality Gaming

Unfiction.com isn't terribly interesting in itself as a site, but reading it I can feel the earth crumbling under my feet as I slide toward The Rabbit Hole. The site is a portal for Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) and that seems interesting as hypertext. Besides being, you know, all about fascinating and absorbing games.

There's a good bit of thought about games as hypertexts, and some about online communities and their archives as hypertexts (yes?), and discussion of the difference between digital narratives and "true" or literary hypertext. I'm fascinated by ARGs because they seem to sit in between.

hypertextuality of ARGs

ARGs themselves are digital narratives in the strictest sense, though linked texts are integral to some of them. More integral to the ARG phenomenon, though, are the communities that spring up around them. Those communities treat the games as hypertexts by picking them apart by looking at the games and their constituent puzzles multi-dimensionally, wandering through websites in cycles and following new paths as they open. The communities are also collaborating online and forming their own databases and working htexts for the purpose of solving the puzzles. When the games finish, someone in the community often creates a linear projection or slice of the whole thing, both game and solution effort, to make a "guide" that tells the story of the game experience. Sometimes there's another projection made for people who don't want spoilers.

Though ARGs might slide off of Douglas' strictest definition of hypertext, in a more practical sense they require and result in all of the behaviors I consider to be the pedagogic triumphs of hypertext: they :

• demand multidimensional consideration of data
• encourage "turning corners" in your thinking
• force awareness of the multilinearity of communities and conversations
• coach readers in the understanding and formation of linear narratives as 'projections' of multilinear experience
• explicitly demand cyclical reading and linking between narratives both personal and external

So perhaps ARGs are behaviorally hypertextual?

Related Items

Some of these I have to put in the hopper for later; others I can probably get away with just linking here:

URL

http://www.unfiction.com

Memex and Beyond Web Site

The Memex and Beyond Web Site seems to be closed but valuable. It's a snapshot, circa 1996, of the key people, institutions, papers, and conferences in the field of (academic?) hypertext at that point. It's very much what this site would aspire to be-- a thorough index of the field. Based on what's there and the stated goals, it would be lovely to see it finished, but its structure is well-done even by current standards, an internet geologic age after it went quiet.

It's interesting because it shows very vividly what I call projections of a hypertext. Every page of the site is a multidimensional structure flattened into linear form, and each item on the page is a vertex, a link which allows you to see that same item in another projection. Each link serves to highlight the multidimensional structure of the text by serving as the corner between facets, the juncture of flattened images. The way you navigate the site keeps the structure in mind.

I have to post about it now as I keep finding myself coming back to it, sometimes for material and sometimes to consider its form. As I dig through the site I find myself frustrated by the web, wishing that the links would yield two or three destinations each: that item in each of the other planes of the site and as an item by itself.

Aha! Hypertext Systems

Finally, I found a good quick reference page for a bunch of the early hypertext systems. Eventually I hope that my own "Tools" index will cover those systems and more.

The Five-Paragraph Essay

In the process of writing that last entry, I found a site that exemplifies several principles of good hypertext. Marla's site on the Structure of the Five Paragraph Essay takes a fairly simple topic and shows it from a variety of angles. With the same text as examples, you can see an outline of the essay, the marked up full text of the essay, or detailed explanations of each element of the essay. This multifaceted, prismatic view of a text, where the reader can switch between the raw text or a structural view, with multiple depths of engagement in the form of linked definitions and contextual expansions, is exactly what hypertext can and should do.

Citation

DeSoto, Marla. "Structure of the Five-Paragraph Essay." 2001. Glendale Community College. 31 Jan. 2002 <http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/English/essay/>

The Great Lettuce Head on Hypertext

Steve Ersinghaus' Great Lettuce Head touches (as advertised) on: fiction, English Literature, New Media, Writing, and technology in education. And it has a hypertext category.

URLGREYHOT on Information work and Education

Michael Angeles confusingly lists URLGREYHOT's categories as separate blogs. Regardless, the content is interesting and the topics closest to the heart of t.org are the information work blog, Education, and the Education blog. Even if he is into homeschooling.

It looks like "Education" is separate from the "Education Blog" in that, like t.org, the site contains things which are outside the blog and exist in a broader hypertext.

Something Different on Tinderbox and Blogging

Doug Miller doesn't have a hypertext category in his blog per se, but his Tinderbox, blogging, and education categories are all relevant to t.org's interests.

Kottke on Web technology

Kottke.org doesn't have a category on hypertext exactly, but does have a section on web technology, and that seems to be where the hypertext issues that I'm interested in fall. I need to write about "hypertext" vs. "the web" since that's such an FAQ whenever I mention the term.

NoCategories on Hypertext

Dylan Kinnet's NoCategories' largest or second largest ... category ... is on hypertext.

surftrail

surftrail is Anders Fagerjord's personal blog, and it made a bit of a splash among weblogs in August of 2003 when Anders made each blog entry its own webpage rather than taking the standard approach of collecting many entries onto a single web page.

Most blogs allow the reader to read an entry only in the context (a page) of other entries, whether the context is a chronological archive, a category or subject grouping, or a search result.

When each entry (or thought/topic in an entry) has its own page, several things can happen:

• style is more flexible - each entry can more easily have its own visual tone through framing and typography
• more hypertext structures become possible - forks and cycles among your entries become more apparent
• overlapping structures don't collide - so the chronological nature of a blog can more easily coexist with categories, idea hubs, and non-categorical trails
• if you buy into the "golden age of hypertext" rhetoric, you get to write 'more like the hypertext novelists'. and if you don't buy into the nostalgia, you still get to take advantage of the features which made the novelists choose the medium in the first place.

This is different enough that folks have started to call such blogs Fagerjordian.

Finally, a page per topic

These things appeal to me, and were part of my thinking when I started textuality.org. I hadn't really finished the implementation, though. Each post got its own page as well as appearing on various indices, but each of the topics within a post didn't have their own pages. That made linking to a topic within a post difficult-- first because the reader would be constantly jumping between otherwise-unrelated posts and trying to find what I'd linked to on the page, and secondly because Tinderbox had a hard time exporting that feature because it couldn't tell whether the endpoint of a link was a page (blah.html) or an anchor (blah.html#ablah)

So last night I finished the implementation and gave topics (Anders calls them sidebars) a template that not only makes them readable but which makes explicit where the reader has ended up. There are links to neighboring topic-pages so that the reader can continue on at the topic level, and there's a link to the post (parent) that originally created the topic. Oh! And there's a perrmalink to the topic as it appears in the post, which is where I'd rather a linker send a new reader. It means that every single character in the posts appears twice in the html --once on the topic-page and once in the entry-page-- but 'disk is cheap', and that's a small price to pay for all this freedom...

I didn't do it quite the way that Anders did. I considered it, but it's a bit limiting. Besides being a blog, t.org is intended to become a directory of readings of 'nouns' in the field of hypertext-- articles, hypertexts, people, events, etc. I don't want to limit myself to having post = noun; I want a post to potentially contain 'nouns' (some already do), or to not be a noun at all.

EdTechPost

EdTechPost is not a pretty site, but neither is what he writes about: life in the trenches of educational technology, which he helpfully narrows down to "tools for learning, thinking, and collaborating". Scott Leslie knows his stuff, writes about it well, and links extensively. He's not just looking at media delivery, nor just at glorified word processors (though that could be interesting too), he examines the nitty-gritty details of how these tools work in educational settings while (seemingly) using the blog to step back and get some perspective on his daily work from the broad view of where the field is. It's a good example of why blogging is good for your career.

when educational technology is hypertext

The site is here on t.org for one clear reason. First, I think that he's on the technical, practical fringe of this site's interest in hypertext. EdTechPost focuses on course management systems, 'learning objects' and the challenges of 'learning object repositories'. As it does so, it examines the practical challenges of integrating hypermedia into daily life. Teaching English is more than delivering good books and handouts to students-- it's facilitating discussion, interpreting students' novice articulations of the material and connecting thoughts, and keeping the class focused among a hundred other things; so using hypermedia is more than just delivering rich media to the students, it has to facilitate work with the media, allow novice navigation and explorations, and get the technology out of the way. These are very much hypertextual challenges.

Technology and the Harkness Table

I spent today in a conference at the lovely Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, RI which was quite interesting in ways which, sadly, have very little to do with my job.

The conference was aptly named "Technology and the Harkness Table" because it was exactly that. We got to see a building that was literally designed around technology and the Harkness Table mode of teaching and saw how wonderful it is when engaged teachers, supportive administration, sensible architecture, and funding all come together. In most schools you might get two of those in any one place at any one time, especially if you're in the public schools. An independent school might get you three. In either setting it's rare to have all of those, and Rocky Hill was doing some impressive things with that setup.

WebQuest

Belinda Snyman presented on a "WebQuest" that she ran with her English class. It was adapted from "BardQuest" by Derek Furr, and involved breaking the class into groups with roles for each student in the group; each group researched an assigned topic related to Shakespeare and his cultural context. The groups presented their work as a web page or PowerPoint presentation.

The technology certainly helped the project-- students assigned the role of "skeptic" questioned each group's sources, pushing the groups to examine websites, (and articles and books) for validity. The ease of digital collaboration lowered the bar for students working at different speeds. The ease with which students could record and share each others' presentations meant that the whole class had a better chance of benefitting from each group's different work.

Forum Discussions

Alda Farlow and Dathalinn O'Dea led a session springing from Blackboard-based forum discussion and into a Harkness Table discussion. The subtleties of Harness Table teaching were the focus, but you and I are both here for hypertext and maybe educational technology, so on with that.

The use of the forum was a bit more than an augmentation of the "read and come to class with questions about what you read." The online forum is asynchronous and public, which means that the discussion could get going well before the class met, which made for a richer discussion. Also, everyone's posts are timestamped, which is a handy nuance. If they want, teachers can spot students who aren't participating, or always doing last-minute work, or even get a hint that they're working together (not a bad thing).

A sidenote of this presentation was the set of student-generated notes about the Harkness model. The reflections say a lot about the students' sense of agency in their own education, and I wonder whether their cool technology helped empower them, or whether it's the Harkness model, or whether it's just their really good teachers and school.

Two Functions for Technology in the Classroom

One thing that struck me today was that there seem to be two very distinct ways that you can use technology in the classroom. Put simply: you can improve your teaching of the skills you currently teach (without the tech), or you can teach new things, skills that can only practically be taught by using the technology. But that's oversimplification. That statement is worth unpacking.

You can improve your teaching of the skills you currently teach...

One of the really cool things I saw today was a tablet PC used with a projector to allow the teacher to stay at the table while still 'writing on the board'. The unobtrusive tablet PC, no bigger than a textbook, sat on the table with 'journal' software pulled up, and as the class talked the teacher was jotting notes, or highlighting things in the text the class was discussing, or pulling up posts on a class forum. The whole time the teacher remained at the table-- no turned back, no throne at the head of the room, no darkened room and noisy overhead. Students with laptops, too, could be given control of the projector to share their work. At the end of the class, a student saves their notes and posts them to a server. Weeks can pass without paper being passed if the teacher planned for it.

That's pretty cool. Students' different modes of learning are more easily accommodated. Students too shy to speak up in class find their voice once it's easy to share online. More real work happens more quickly when the drudgery of xeroxing and sorting and carrying folders and handing things out and transcribing is taken away.

But that's still just an improvement of what teachers and students are already doing. The tablet-and-projector is a glorified overhead projector. The forum is an email list, or a set of summarized and handed-in responses. The posted notes. It's so much more efficient that it lets new and wonderful things happen, but fundamentally the technology is just facilitating what we already do.

...or you can teach new things, skills that can only practically be taught by using the technology.

If you have students building a hypertext together, be it through wiki or Tinderbox or Blackboard or FrontPage, you are likely developing skills which cannot practically be taught without the technology. Students will practice line-by-line comparisons of texts, they'll examine and manipulate the structure of texts, they'll cite their work and link it directly back to source material in its original context in ways that can't be done without so much work as to make them all but impossible without the technology. They might as well be new skills.

As awesome as it was, and it was, everything that I saw today was 'just' an improvement on what's already being done. I think that good teaching with hypertext and digital text can do things that we really can't do otherwise.

In Conclusion, No Conclusion

In the end, very little of the day was applicable to my current professional work. As a summer program that moves into host campuses for seven weeks, we don't get to set up a building, or train the teachers to use tablets or Blackboard. Nor, for that matter, can we train the students in the short time we have with them. Many of our classes teach with something like the Harkness Table model, but resources and the nature of the program keep technology largely out of that side of it. Like many schools, we can't swing the pervasive computing environment that Rocky Hill has managed.

I think that technology in our classroom will remain on a class-by-class basis for now. I do wonder whether we couldn't use wikis to help in curriculum development, but that's another topic entirely.

Tinderbox Weekend Boston

Tinderbox Weekend Boston was a two day gathering for people new to the Tinderbox software and for experienced users looking for new perspectives on the software. I think it succeeded for both groups, from what I heard over the weekend and after.

It was an impressive event in its subtleties. It was a friendly, intimate conference (a tricky thing to manage) of people from divergent professions and with divergent interests and experience. The sessions were quick, accessible, and friendly; as with any good conference, in between were breaks and meals full of banter, advice, and questions... though because Tinderbox is used in so many ways, the conversations here seemed to wander further afield to accomodate personal issues from different walks of life. At the end, we left with a weekend's worth of things to think about and a CD full of files to dissect-- real life examples and works from the presenters and attendees.

The weekend seemed a bit overwhelming to those who were completely new to the software and looking for a tutorial-- you'd get a lot more out of the weekend if you'd played with the software at least a little. For those who had, the weekend was a wealth of stories, examples, and discussions about how to use the remarkable software package.

The Sessions

The weekend was organized around a series of talks by experienced users. Elin Sjursen, Tekka Editor, spoke about the basics of Tinderbox --and showed those of us who 'know the basics' about some neat features we hadn't found. I learned about automatic spell checking, about some quick keys and clicks for navigation, and about how Tinderbox takes drag-and-dropped text from other applications and sets up notes for you.

Alwin Hawkins spoke next about weblogs in the health care community. He discussed the social and political side of Tinderbox, examined self-publication as well as about using Tinderbox to organize your own medical information for yourself or for others. This hit a nuance of the software that's hard to explain-- how it both helps you record and organize your own information and then helps you share parts or all of that information with others. It was a powerful example of that process.

Mark Bernstein then walked us through exporting, one of the trickier sides of Tinderbox. Tinderbox doesn't make many sacrifices in flexibility in order to become easy for any single limited use, so the powerful export system has a learning curve. Mark's talk walked us in 90 minutes from exporting a single note using a two-word template through exporting that same information as a complex website using CSS and graphics.

Doug Miller gave us two mind-opening sessions about "living in Tinderbox". It was a fascinating look at about fifteen ways that Tinderbox can be used in very different ways-- from outlining to managing a real estate career. These sessions were a microcosm of the whole weekend in that every time I spoke to someone I learned about a new way that Tinderbox is being used.

The weekend closed out with a session by Barry Webster about making and sharing a web calendar with his students and a look at new and upcoming development on Tinderbox itself by Mark.

The Excercises

There were also two useful excercises that helped us use and share the knowledge we picked up about Tinderbox.

For the first we were given a sizable Tinderbox file with almost no hierarchy and no differentiation between notes, and each of the three groups had to impose some order on the mess. I loved it, because this is something most other software can't do very well: Tinderbox helps you take what you think you know (or what you don't) and look at it in a bunch of new ways. You can take what you know and turn it on its ear.

Our group took a bit of a forensic approach to the whole thing: we used agents to help us make some hierarchies without disturbing what we were given; we looked at it chronologically and reconstructed some of how the author must have built it from readings they'd done; we looked at edit times and found that there wasn't anything to go on; and we saved all of those examinations to present to the group.

The second exercise was a bit more hurried, as it tried to address exporting: take another file and make some basic exports. Still it was impressive and amusing to see everyone's approaches, up to Jeffrey's pumpkin-based "Pepys Watch".

Links

This post is a sort of sequel to Maureen Baehr's Tinderbox Conference Report from Tinderbox Weekend San Francisco. More Tinderbox Weekends are in the works, and you should check the Eastgate site if this sounds interesting.

Some others have written up the weekend: Doug Miller posted an entry, Mark Bernstein took some notes, Alwin posted several entries for the weekend, and Jeffrey Radcliffe posted and then put the weekend into practice with improvements to his blog.

eNarrative 4

I took a fair number of notes at eNarrative 4, in March of 2002. Some of them are still readable and potentially interesting, and I've put them below.

The eNarrative roundtables were neat events; Eastgate did a good job of rounding up leading lights for the topics at hand, the venue was pleasant, and the roundtable format left the agenda flexible enough for that many smart and interested people to all participate as they wished.

This was my second eNarrative conference, and was much closer to my interests (education) than the first. Since it was also one of my last acts of participation in the community before this site, many of my notes are still central interests in this site's exploration of hypertext. I imagine that several of the subtopics of this entry will wind up recycled into other entries that follow.

Notes, such as they are, follow. I've done my best to make them read sensibly, but have not put much work into making it flow seamlessly. These are notes.

Have we read yet?

It's an easy and common misconception that reading means visiting each and every node once and only once. Six or seven weeks into a course, students will realize they won't get to or have to read everything, and then they're okay. (This happened to me in college with my regular reading for my English major, but I'm not sure that the sort of physically overwhelming amount of reading is a common experience before grad school for everyone, so I'm not sure whether I can generalize that analogy.) Still, though ...

.... "Are we reading yet?" - how do students know they've done the assignment in a non-linear text that doesn't necessarily chart their completion like page-counts do? The structure in hypertexts are often too obscure. There isn't an easily accessible history. And students don't have any experience what it's supposed to be like. A counter-argument is: don't underrate existing "hypertext"... games, websites, etc. Students know when they've gotten through those.

Information retrieval as hypertext-- Is searching on google equivalent to reading Patchwork Girl? It's a different model of authorship, of literacy. Or is that difference simply a matter of mapping and of history? Wth CubicEye you clearly build a text out of a web search. The spatial model is hard to get for some people.

Resistance to Hypertext

Is resistance to hypertext (on whose part?) intrinsic or habitual?

Why the vehement resentment to hypertext in general? A reluctance to give up existing competency and literacy for a new medium. Wanting a definitive experience, a closure even if it's misleading or false. Readers construct a schema as they read, their own mental map, and hypertext is disorienting 99% of the time. "[In most hypertexts] you don't have a schema for predicting what's next, for predicting where that text is going to go. We predict all the time." There's also an age aspect to this-- older writers are more invested in existing schema for reading.

Okay, but what about in social discourse, where you also can't predict the direction? Is hypertext better at representing social discourse and representing thought across discursive boundaries (i.e. multiple people's viewpoints)? Even in those cases, organization is still perceived as seriousness... and you can't fully get hypertext by maping it onto schema that you already know (ETA: it's like using tinderbox as just an outliner, or just a mapper). People resent you as an author taking their transparency away, and they don't know what's at the other end of the learning curve. There's also resentment from authors who feel that their artistry has been superseded or overshadowed by concerns or artistry of technology or of user interface. Who wants to worry about User Interface? It's ironic that "complex" pages end up getting perceived as "for kids".

Hypertext for Teachers

David asks: why make hypertext optional? Answer: because the learning curve is too steep for time to teach the tools with the whole class. Because their habit is to add things on, not build - to create threads, not cross-linking or webs.

The scariness of the idea that the grade is dependent on reading everything affects the professor, too-- must the professor fight hypertext itself to read everything?

It's also scary for professors to make the transition to reading and grading hypertexts because it's not so clear where and how to 'comment in the margins'. (my own professor, who was comfortable with Storyspace and assigning hypertexts, still made me in one class hand out a linear version of a paper to my fellow students and that is what he graded and commented on.)

How do you explain to a class the utility of complex structure when other classes and the educational system privilege short stuff and argumentation along the five-paragraph model (intro, support, support, support, conclusion)

How do you grade a hypertext, especially if it involves programming code? It's probably better not to comment in the code, but to make a separate report on the code. You must be careful to communicate the criteria. You can have other students make comments with pointers (something that is especially easy in Tinderbox, since you can cluster comments in their own space, group them visually with adornments, but have them linking to anywhere in the main text. There's also no reason not to have comments accumulate, and it's easy to pull comments into a selection of "comments worth sharing" in class discussion or with later classes.

One aspect of student anxiety about hypertext is a matter of escaping the One True Reading model. This anxiety is fed by the game analogy-- repetition is often equal to failure in games unless there's evident proof of advancement. Another stone on a pedestal (thinking of Dark Castle, here), etc. In most hypertexts there's precious little evidence for a student's advancement outside of a reader's self-assessment... and we're teaching them how to be readers in the first place. Too few hypertexts make explicit that a circular structure in the reading is in fact a spiral.

An excercise for a class: "is this website hypertextual?"

"Who's Cribbing" by Jack Lewis - just tryto map it. ... trying to pushes students out of the comfort zone and gets them to see some of the difference between complex linear text and "native" hypertext.

Writers (among the students?) like "WOE", "Is me past" (?). No luck with "Afternoon". They also like "The Unknown".

You can create a hypertext physically with notecards, yarn, and colored paper. Using a physical example gets the metaphors, the paradigm, down and then you can bring it back to the writing: writing is a process of taking all those ideas, making each grammatical, and putting transitions (links) between them. This gets the visual learners. You can see them get it when they link words, rather than boxes (lexia).

We need forii (forums?) for pedagogical practice in hypertext that doesn't reduce to academic papers. That includes actual practice and discussion between practicioners as well as advice for those who might be willing to incorporate hypertext but unable to crest the learning curve.

Anne's History Course

Anne taught a course that used hypertext to examine the stories of a "silent generation" in Japan. Her class used hypertext to break through a cultural avoidance of WWII stories by having students interview their grandparents and relatives for their personal stories to create a hypertext from them. One student interviewed her grandmother, who was reluctant at first, then opened up and shared photos, talked... and talked and talked. She had never in her life had her story asked of her.

even with a web page, people think of each piece as linked linear bits, rather than a network made linear

Why was this project different as a hypertext than as a "conventional" text?

• The multimedia forced multiple voices. (Multimedia vs. hypertext was an issue in our discussion. "What is hypertext?" It's an irritating question but one for which we must have several, contextual, lucid answers.)

• Learning new tools and structure forced new kinds of questions.

• Creating the product as hypertext freed the student not only in structure but in content-- she could create contrasting voices.

The project led to empowerment and voicing so powerful that it could not be overstated. People break out of abusive relationships, discover family stories, discover multiplicity when faced with the inherent multivalence of hypertext. The students' responses to American responses to the WTC attacks.

Students struggled with the difference between a public act (for the web) and a personal one (for the professor) given the personal nature of the assignment. There was tension between commitment and participation in something larger. The public nature of the project, however, also gave the project an authenticity-- the students were involved in a real way in Japan's current discussions over its history in WWII, in building archives of memories. Their engagement in the assignment and the tasks behind it was immediate and (helped by the distance from known rhetorical structures) not defined by ideological authority structures. It was hypertext and it was on the web.

Would it be "selling out" a hypertext to give a "standard" version of a hypertext?

Tinderbox at eNarrative

Mark introduced Tinderbox, since it was a fairly new product when the conference happened. Some quick notes from that presentation:

• Tinderbox split functionality off from Storyspace.

• Anders Fagerjord's site uses tinderbox, and he has tips sometimes. Markbernstein.org is a tinderbox blog.

• "The Victorian Web is like a blog of a community." NO - it's edited, 'posts' are approved by a secondary authority. YES - blogs get edited. NO - secondary editing party. YES - blog clusters get unlinked and ignored out of existence.

• In a war, hypertext would be lost. The community would be lost. They're all overexcited geeks.

• Agents can get distant blogs

Is a Tinderbox-built page a hypertext? No, there's no hiding and revealing. Yes, if you make links pop-ups? No - it's a rendered collage, hypertextual but not a hypertext. No, because you can't backtrack. Well, it's a hypertext with a non-hypertext projection, then.

Where Storyspace was about dynamic links and presentation, Tinderbox is more of an organizational tool. It's about notes, indexing, organization, agents. Eventually it would be nice if they were interoperable, so that you could drag things back and forth.

Storyspace has been around since 1987/1991 (what are those dates?) ... and has therefore spent more than a decade as a chunk of code. That's pretty rare. Victory Garden and Afternoon are still there after a decade. Things that were unusual about Storyspace then:

• links.

• Can find the spaces in another file despite being renamed, moved, a different version.

• Links were stored within the file.

• A text space = a window.

It was a tool for reading and writing large hypertexts, especially focused around narrative. There are features that are still unusual in 2002:

• Guard fields to qualify the destination of links

• external links are stored internally

• you can have overlapping link sources

• you can make anchors appear and disappear

• two-handed reading (for showing links, at least).

Sarah: Hypertext for Linear Writers

Sarah (?) then discussed how she's used Storyspace and seen Storyspace used with tree-killing writers. Writing is a non-linear process, and Storyspace tools let a writer work in a virtual multi-dimensional space. You can create assets and then draw upon them-- creating spaces then creating paths through them (multiple paths, even) which then become the narrative flow. You can create aliases which you can then organize in various ways. You could place the spaces' aliases in a two-dimensional chart with characters along the y-axis and the flow of the story (or chapters) along the x-axis to show when characters come and go. You could lay the spaces out along the narrative flow in the x-axis and place them on the y-axis according to the tension to plot that in your novel. Or you could have your proofreaders do the same to show you their perspective. This is a process of organizing and filtering your assets, of bringing the words from data (about characters, places) to story. Plus, you might note that it's easier to get (and see) nonlinearity from this approach.

It would be really useful to watch authors working, especially together. In this roundtable we're working with abstractions, but seeing people work, try to make meaning out of interfaces, see how people share ideas when working physically together... that would really help us see how to make the tools facilitate what they do. How to build Tinderbox into a personal knowledge manager, beyond being just an information manager. At the same time, you need to be aware of and careful with your niche-- misspent expectations killed Agenda. Be careful about what is under your control vs. automatic, etc.

A Hypertext Reading Group

What would a hypertext reading group look like? A house party? A workshop, like a writer's workshop (and what would that look like)? A correspondence course might be a sensible approach, given the relative paucity of hypertext scholars and geographic dispersion. This would be a great way for writers to perform usability testing on their hypertexts. Would you want to follow the "cabin in Maine" or the "weekend house party" model? One participant related having a workshop where each participant brought one work, sent it around a few weeks before, and then discussed them for two days.

Issues for any sort of group would be: ways to share commentary (including links or visual arrangements), ways to work independently yet together simultaneously. Could you build a tool that would help share hypertexts? (Some Tinderbox files are small enough to share over instant messaging, but not all, and there's no way to actively serve a tinderbox file so that multiple people can see and edit it simultaneously on different computers.)

Confusion and Hidden Literacy

DAlso, don't forget that there is fun in not knowing, in serendipity and re-vision. When is confusion, misdirection, not knowing fun and when is it frustrating? Is the author or reader at fault for the frustration with Finnegan's Wake? Why do some of these texts gain a cult following or critical respect, but not others? It's not just complexity or simplicity-- why do people go for 12-tone music or atonality for that matter, but not for hypertext?

Rob (?) points out that there are visible vs. invisible literacies. Sarah adds that it's also about text vs. language-- people have less trouble with graphic (multimedia) hypertext than with blocks of text. Ann wonders whether it's just the level to which the reader can cop out of having to figure it out. When is it a matter of "fixing" the interface, and when do you want not to? A diagram (say, architectural) still contains some intentional and unintentional ambiguity.

We then looked at argument. There's some use in understanding and displaying intermediate structures, the way we're thinking in the midst of an argument, before we've completed a design. A final product inevitably has had questions decided or choices made that we may want to reconsider or present as questions. There's the idea of a second choice, which might be better for another context. We can represent that ambiguity in hypertext by hiding alternatives, or revealing them. There's no reason not to put other viewpoints in.

Aren't there issues with presenting meta or side conversations in a publshed hypertext, though? Is there a way to present it that's not ironic?

UVA has a new imprint for electronic scholarship in the humanities.

Links can contain a lot of information. It's a challenge for any given interface or presentation to incorporate that liminal data into the narrative flow. You could use tooltips for mouseovers. In a linear presentation you could put link text between the contents of the lexia. What you want to do (often) is telegraph that you'll be sending someone (through a link) somewhere else... especially if it's outside your text. And in this context, it's worth thinking about what outside means. By linking resources you bring them into your own text to some extent... but don't have editorial control over them.

Then we thought about intermediate levels of "telegraphy". You don't always want to give perfect information about where a link goes because you risk the reader assuming they understand or not being interested: and they won't follow your link. Yet you don't want to leave a reader stumped as to where to go or wandering aimlessly (unless that's your goal) because then they're lost. One neat idea is to create indeterminate links or links that can be hidden or revealed according to some level of exploration that the reader is willing to undertake. They could set their willingness to stray from a topic, or stay within an area. I brought up the hypertext in which I colored links according to link type (definition or explanation).

Do you need guardfields or programmingto enforce argument, structure, or complexity?

Understanding narrative shape is even more critical to new readers.

How about random entry into a hypertext-- when someone drops into your website, how do they get context, a sense of where they are, and whether their interest in the page they're on translates to an interest in the rest of your site? Short of framing (sidebars, logos and explanatory text), you could present a pop-up window if the referrer doesn't match your own site, you can have textual breadcrumbs, and you could present a tiny icon of a map which is linked to a larger map.

How do you represent where the reader is in the larger argument (which may or may not map onto the site map?

Don't forget that when it comes to hypertext, most readers are "children"... they need to know strategies.

Thespis

Mark Bernstein brings up the idea of thinking of links backwards-- everything is linked to everything else, and you as an author determine what *prevents* a visit. (Mark wrote a paper and presentation about a card game Thespis to model this.) Then set several players (agents?) who get points for going to certain lexia and provide links... and you've got structure. This goes back to the idea of a link server which revises the link structure for you based on criteria. What rhetorical structures (besides programming) will make the sculpturally, thespis-like approach accessible to authors? A timeline can help you set this up for a static site, but it's still dauntingly complex to make. And people will find the game analogy anaethema, not serious.

Also, the UI is difficult. You need an interface like the path builder, or like Windows Server's "resulting policy" feature which shows you: at this point on this path, what are my constraints and conditions?" Also, "what can't I do?" (Plus: do you show the reader that so that they have a sense of how far they've gotten through the potential of a text?)

There are some big challenges with the Thespis approach. It requires knowledge of the text; it is authorial only. Since it's drawing from a pool of lexia, the text itself must be compelling or the reader starts playing it like a game because the conditions become the focus of reading. If you can see where you're going and where you're not, a game develops around getting places.

In the metaphorical setting of thespis, what about false cards? Cards that a reader should play, but which reconfigure the goals like a game of Fluxx. At this point the people at the table wanted a way to see that possibility, a way to communicate loss ("cards you'll never see are..." or "this link has precluded you from...". Doing that discourages a linear text or linear reading. One interface for this might be a sort of possibility graph-- as you play cards your hand grows, shrinks, and eventually dries up. Parts of a map grow dim as they become inaccessible (or read)

There's a distinction between games and hypertext in the outcome. Having the outcome always the same might be bad game design, but good hypertext. It's a matter of agency and identification with the protagonist. The character in a good text, as in a game, must be limited.

Transitions

Integrating transitions into a text where the order of the lexia is flexible is an enormous challenge. You need to either create nodes/lexia that are transitions or find ways to integrate transitions into the nodes. It would be wonderful to find a way to avoid separating the text into nodes in the first place, and to avoid making the transitions static within the nodes.

Diane's Highlights from eNarrative

--------------Diane's highlights------------------

It's important to impress upon new readers the ida of relearning... to show them that it's a new and different way of reading and writing.

It would be neat to have a whole hypertext course, rather than just having a "unit" on hypertext in another course... you should use a hypertext as the course workspace, archive it, document it.

Emphasizing the game aspect of hypertext could be a way to get it to students, though it then faces the tension between ease and comfort of use vs. the seriousness

THere aren't enough models for what it means to read or write hypertext successfully. Some people seem to know it, but have a hard time articulating it.

We need a catalog of ways to show that life itself is hypertextual even outside of hypertext.

Links are a disappearing work-- how do we see links as a text themselves, how do we evaluate that text?

Mapping plot practices to hypertext and viceversa is wonderful, usefully interchangeable. Thinking of a book as a view onto a hypertext is a neat metaphor. (I feel that Proust's Rememberance of Things Past would be a particularly easy text to think of this way.) Tinderbox is good as a tool for creating multiple projections of a text.

eNarrative 2

Whee, zip, wow. A Keanu Reeves-like "whoah." Those were my first reactions to the eNarrative2 conference that happened Feb. 24-25, 2001. A year later, when I wrote up these notes for my own site, that was still true. The eNarrative roundtables kept on top of the field and did their small part to lead it as well. I use the past tense because the last of the eNarratives happened in 2003, and I know of no plans to bring them back.

During the roundtable I volunteered to collect and record the URLs discussed during the roundtables, and that was the majority of my notes. One of the most amazing things about the conference was the sheer brilliance of the readings; I walked through the site and gathered the URLs from there as well. My condensation doesn't have any of the cool discussion that the eNarrative site does, but it has nearly all the external site links.

The extensive notes on the content of eNarrative4 are, to me, much more interesting.

Links discussed at eNarrative2

The publicly available URLs that we discussed at the conference are below; we also discussed a fair number of in-progress or non-public URLs, and I held on to those: if you were at the conference and want the URLs, drop me a line. I've tried to put eNarrative2 participants' names by their pieces; apologies if I've missed putting your name next to your work.

URLs that are live as of Oct. 4 2004 are linked; discussed URLs that are broken are unlinked.

• http://www.gmunk.com - "8th of July"
• http://www.crankbunny.com - Norma Taraya (the current site features a new project)
• http://www.scottmccloud.com
• http://www.unknownhypertext.com
• http://www.rhizome.org
• http://www.genarts.com/karl/
• http://www.biota.org
• http://www.paregos.com
• http://www.pixeltoon.com - Howard Kamentsky
• http://www.halfempty.com
• http://www.presstube.com
• http://www.6amhoover.com - Donna Leishman (hey, this made it into the New York Times! Great job, Donna!)
• http://www.onlinecaroline.com
• http://www.dreamless.org - follow "web" link, scroll to 2000 section; no archive available.
• http://www.praystation.com - version 1, version 2, version 3 (discussed), version 4
• http://www.moments.org
• http://www.poemsthatgo.com - including a piece we discussed and which I think is an excellent example of an interface to orient the reader without making the piece boring.
• http://www.zeldman.com
• http://www.globz.com
• http://www.slackbastard.net/~polaris/AYB2.swf - "All Your Base Belong to Us"
• http://www.victorianweb.org/history/histov.html
• http://www.comedycentral.com/spotlight/kml/flash_strind1.shtml - Strindberg and Helium
• http://www.bullseyeart.com - seems to have changed
• http://www.rayoflight.net - alas, I loved this and it is gone.
• (The secret life of letters)
• http://www.hyperstudio.com

Silke Baumblüth sent a few German URLs that attend to related subjects. She wrote:

The first one is the NULL-Project with small Hypertexts combined to a chart that looks like a star-chart. Obviously the sites are mainly in German but maybe it can still be interesting to take a look.

• http://www.dumontverlag.de/null/
• http://www.dichtung-digital.com
• http://www.hyperfiction.de/
• http://auer.netzliteratur.net/
• http://www.stuttgart.de/stadtbuecherei/index.html

Links from the eNarrative2 site

This is a condensation of the links within Eastgate System's eNarrative Conference website as of eNarrative2. The site is fascinating (the roundtables were fascinating), but as I sought to build a set of links to the really awesome online hypertext, I wanted a condensed index. Textuality.org has become that condensed index, and I really ought to go through and change many of these links to be internal (or functional). However, as an artifact of the time when I made it, of a prototype of this site pre-Tinderbox, this suffices-- and it encourages me to move on to more productive tasks than reworking my old links lists.

In the outline below,

• The top layer are my categories: narrative sites, and communities, and tech sites.

  • The next layer is generally the eNarrative page where the links are discussed. Visit these.
    • Any other layers are categorical
      

      The boxes contain the offsite links.

---

• Narrative sites
  • Donna Leishman's
    

    6amhoover Little Red Ridinghood blackeyed.com Requiem For A Dream

    VectorPark Map50 Boogie Lights Azartmedia's Flash Lab

  • eN2 readings
    

    Walking Together What Remains this is why I fell in love with Storyspace Adrian Miles Vog: Nosepilot Flight404 Homard Kamentsky Pixeltoon Lite Show Strindberg & Helium Skip Intro

    Half Empty James Patterson Once Upon A Forest Joshua Davis help Dane comfyluxe Dane Moholy-Nagy 360degrees The Dream Life of Letters Brian Kim Stefans Captain Lo-Rez Matthew Burns

  • eN1 readings
    • HYPERTEXT
      

      Hypertext 2.0 George P. Landow David Kolb, Socrates in the Labyrinth : Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy. For a more concise view, see his Hypertext '97 paper, " Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"

      Mark Bernstein " Hypertext Gardens " Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden . The Unknown Resources: The Hypertext Kitchen Resources: The Electronic Literature Organization

    • NARRATIVE
      

      The Database as a Symbolic Form London Eye Scott McCloud.com ICST - Scott McCloud's monthly column

      VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin's Web Photo Journals Bricklin's own journal Derek Powazek's { Fray} Bubbe's Back Porch Abbe Don Digital Storytelling Festival

    • DYNAMIC TYPOGRAPHY
      

      Help Poems That Go The Murmur of Interstices Zahra Safavian Car Wash Megan Sapnar

    • IMAGE AND ANIMATION
      

      Flash Web Design: the art of motion graphics Hillman Curtis Flash production of Christina Manning's poem, Sky. Praystation. Joshua Davis

      Kaliber10000 Digital Web Nick Finck, curator A List Apart Captain Low-Rez and the Pixel of Destiny

    • Late additions
      

      Moholy-Nagy timeline. VeloCity (in Spanish)

• Communities
  

  Kaliber10000 Nervous Industries Geocaching the {fray}

  the {fray} organization Kvetch! Design for Community book community

• Eastgate . Serious Hypertext. (800) 562-1638 +1(617) 924-9044
• tech sites
  • PHP

Mark Bernstein

I've been delaying writing Mark Bernstein's bio for this site because he's one of the few people I've met, because he's likely to see this fairly quickly after I post it, and because I can't seem to spend more than fifteen minutes reading without running into his name in some acknowledgements or citations. He's founder and Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems; has written software for hypertext, for Macintoshes, for other things; has helped organize several ACM hypertext conferences and all of the eNarrative conferences; has written innumerable (well, to me) articles and papers on hypertext (some linked down the left side of his blog); and he's a nice guy. I can't make a comprehensive list of his primary interests in hypertext as I can with several other bios I'm working on, but he has written a good bit about the themes of structure, making hypertexts interesting with human touches and good storytelling, elegant linking, and accessibility.

Bill Bly

Bill Bly wrote one of my favorite hypertexts so far. And he seems to present hypertexts that work in a way that makes sense to me... as ways to connect fragments; tools for creating the gossamer spiderweb strands that bind and separate our more substantial thoughts; as masses of information for which the discovery of the structures is as integral to learning as is the information itself. There must be a better way to articulate that. I'm sure I'll find it as I read on.

I just discovered his blog within his personal site, and that's part of what has me writing this entry. I realize now that the people section of t.org is growing with a bias toward blogs. The blogosphere is fertilizing its growth, and it is responding ... blogotropically?

Bill has a page about his work with hypertext. He approaches it from a refreshing angle. Rather than looking into hypertext systems as tools for new work, he is approaching them as the lesser of evils: as attempts at software which are with regard to the way we think perhaps less flawed than the word processor, spreadsheet, or operating system. That's another take on one of the things that keeps me interested in the field-- I think hypertexts more accurately represent the ways we think and communicate.

J Yellowlees Douglas

J Yellowlees Douglas is an Associate Director of the University Writing Program and Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of the first book I have read through for textuality. Eastgate has a better bio of her.

George Landow

Eastgate's bio sums up what I would put here: George Landow is Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. A leading scholar on Ruskin and Victorian literature and culture, Professor Landow is also internationally recognized as a theorist of hypertext application and design. He has written several books on hypertext critical theory, wrote the important early hypertext The Victorian Web, and has been a key player in the history of hypertext at Brown University. He has his own domain and his CV is online.

Donna Leishman

As I've been updating my four-year-old, barely-even-casual understanding of the field of hypertext, I've found a lot of out-of-date research, moribund works and communities. How wonderful, then, to last night find myself pulled into Donna Leishman's work. I met her at eNarrative2 in Boston and enjoyed her Red Riding Hood retelling. She did that for her Master's thesis, so it was a while before I saw anything more on her site 6amhoover. She's been very active, though.

Several years later, last night, I spotted Donna's name in a back issue of Tekka and was pulled right back into her work. I enjoyed the dark smirk of Red Riding Hood twice through and assigned myself The Bloody Chamber to read soon. I'm inspired by Donna's work... if she can tell these stories with such reception (including an Emmy nomination), perhaps there's a market out there. Perhaps even outside academe.

Linear Narrative in an Interactive Environment

The Leishman pieces I've seen so far are of a promising type: linear narrative playing out in an interactive environment where exploration is rewarded with additional depth. As Red Riding Hood walks to her Grandmother's house, you can click in her basket to read her diary... but you don't need to. In The Bloody Chamber, clicking on buildings in a cityscape sets them to walking around in an unnerving manner that sets the mood well. You can watch it like a movie if you want, but interacting with it will be rewarded.

Kate Stables wrote in the Guardian Online: Leishman strikes just the right balance between plot and charming distractions, packing enough secret scenes under the skin of her story to make a repeat viewing a must. I watched each of Leishman's pieces several times, and the feeling was like playing a good video game. I worked through the main narrative once, but then when I realized that there were easter eggs available, I started 'playing' through the stories again, looking for mouseovers, guessing at where I might find detail... I wound up engaging the setting of the story as more than background, as a place to read more... as a setting.

This seems like a development on one of the genres that hypertext has always done well, the mysterious environment. Red Riding Hood is Myst-esque, but with the narrative brought to the fore and set on a more demanding and prominent timeline. It seems like a useful development... the timeline can carry you along if you get stuck

Brainstorming, now: this works like DVDs, in a way. DVDs coming out now always have extra features. Some of the extras are material within the story, many of the extras are about the making of the movie or its setting in the rest of the world. Sometimes you have audio tracks where you can follow the movie but get only the actors' or director's comments as a form of "secret scenes under the skin" of every scene. Either way, you've got a narrative happening on several levels and the work encourages repeat viewings at various levels.

Hypulp: Hyperlinks in Print

The blog Hypulp recently posted article 3 in a series on hyperlinking metaphores in print design:

1. Hyperlinks in Print I - highlighted footnotes in International Design Magazine
2. Hyperlinks in Print II - visual cross-references and indexing in the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design Directory
3. Hyperlinks in Print III - pop-up footnotes in The Atlantic Monthly

Print and web co-development?

The website designs of two of those publications directly mirror the printed product... I wonder if the two sides of the works were actually developed together.

From monologue to conversation

A lot of talk about hypertext circles around how hypertext does or doesn't emulate print. As hypertext matures and spreads throughout popular culture, the conversation is becoming more two-sided.

• the flexibility of digital environments has opened up new design approaches, some of which work in print as well
• to put that another way, the challenge of exploring and defining a new medium or tool is forcing us to reconsider hidden assumptions in previously-steady fields
• we're beginning to see the different situations where the "two" media --print and digital hypertext-- might each be the best solution, rather than making the blanket statement that one media is paramount.

Patterns of Hypertext

Patterns of Hypertext is a clear, concise summary of structures found in hypertexts. The stated purpose of the article is to provide terms for patterns currently found in order to enable and foster discussion of structure in hypertexts. I read it for exactly that purpose, and it did well enough that I've taken notes to come back to later in other projects. Patterns seems to be a touchstone for much later work on narrative, pedagogy, and design in the field.

URL

http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print.html

Structural terminology is important to hypertext

One of the major ways that hypertext differs from [print,linear] text is that structures are more critical to the experience of the work. In a story, you don't necessarily need to know where you are because there is always a line stretching out ahead of you. There are structures underlying the story which are important, sure-- time rarely flows only forward, different plot threads come and go, and characters all have their own ways of thinking about the events of the story.

But in hypertext:

• the reader is forced to consider (or even speculate or second-guess) structure in order to read through the text
• in light of the (potentially arbitrary) linear order the reader gives to the lexia, secondary structures --the ways the reader pieces together the work conceptually-- become more significant

Non-hypertextual non-fiction is more like hypertext in that the author generally needs to place a more explicit structure over the work for lack of the easy line of the narrative. We can look at whether a history textbook moves through historical time periods linearly for each culture it examines or surveys all cultures in each time period before moving on, in a sort of geographic spiral.

But we have few terms for discussing those structures even in outside of hypertext, and the need to articulate them is more critical for discussion of hypertext.

Patterns

Cycle

Reader returns to a previously-visited lexia and eventually emerges along a new path.

Joyce's Cycle

Named for Michael Joyce, in this a reader returns to a previously visited portion of the hypertext and reads along a previously visited set of lexia before emerging onto a new path.

Douglas' Cycle

Named for J Yellowlees Douglas, an unbroken cycle (with no emergence) signals the end of a section or an exhaustion of the hypertext.

Web Ring

A Web ring is a grand cycle, connected by topic or more generally by shared readership. The experience of a web ring might be like the experience of one of the other cycles, but is distinguished by the fact that it is a grand structure, one which by necessity incorporates other structures and which may not include revisitation in an average reading.

Contour

A contour is formed where cycles meet, and allows access between cycles. I'm not sure how this is different from a set of connected cycles.

Counterpoint

Two voices alternate. This often communicates structure clearly and is good for interleaving themes or for theme and response.

MirrorWorld

A parallel or intertextual structure that is used specifically to create a different voice or contrasting perspective.

Tangle

A tangle is a structure where the reader has a multitude of links and insufficient information to choose between them. A tangle might be closed within a loop or might branch out into other structures-- the common point is that the reader has insufficient information to choose between the paths.

Sieve

A branching structure which sorts readers out into other structures by a sequence of choices. The choices may be informed (Table of Contents) or uninformed (in which case it looks more like a tangle)

Montage

Several lexia presented together create a montage.

Neighborhood

A Neighborhood establishes an association among [lexia] through proximity, shared ornament, or common navigational landmarks. The common features show that the lexia are "close" in some intentional way.

Episode

In the description of the Neighborhood structure, Bernstein describes "Rosenberg's episodes", which are like neighborhoods but with regard to the reader's perception rather than to meaning in the hypertext.

Split/Join

A split/join knits two or more sequences together. Those individual sequences may be composed of other structures; the point of the split/join is that a connection is made (implying, perhaps, a neighborhood).

Rashomon pattern

A split/join embedded in a cycle creates what Bernstein calls a Rashomon pattern, where the recurrence of the cycle is conducted over different threads (often creating a counterpoint either implicitly or explicitly)

Overview/Tour

A split/join where one side is more detailed than the other (but are rhetorically similar) frequently constitutes an overview or tour of other structures.

Moulthrop's Move

A split where the text "responds ironically" to the reader's apparent expressed interest (indicated by link choice).

Missing Link

An absent (or broken?) link where one is expected can be a meaningful structure when, like an ellipsis, allusion, or iteration, it implies a connection.

Navigational Feint

The offer of a navigational opportunity that cannot or is not followed immediately. It can establish a pattern for later in the reading or provide information about the structure or scope of the text

We can't visualize these yet

Bernstein notes that we don't yet have tools that help us visualize all of these adequately. Analytical tools that help us discover structures are good at examining trees, but often miss cycles. Node-link views (like Tinderbox map view) get individual cycles but don't handle contours well. Hierarchies keep views clean but hide structures that cross hierarchical levels. And massive structures (mirrorworld), negative structures (feint, missing link), and serendipitous structures (montage) are currently hard to display at all.

I think that some of what he's talking about here is what I'd like to see in my vaporware htext engine-- something that is so flexible and facilitates revision so much that seeing the structures doesn't require dragging entire areas out of others, and rearranging them-- the engine does it for you.

I wonder whether Ben Fry's tools might not help with the structures that we currently find hard to analyze.

Hypertext Now: Span of Attention

I think this made some good points, but I couldn't get through it... I kept getting distracted. (kidding) Briefly: when critics complain that current (visual or digital) media are debasing our storytelling talents with 30 minute episodes or sound-bites or music videos, they're conflating a few issues and not really giving the authors (or we readers) proper credit for the epic narratives that are out there.

I think an enduring point the article makes is that a short presentation format does not equal a short narrative, either for the author or the reader. If we can be swept up in the multi-year arc of Babylon 5, or Hill Street Blues, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer despite receiving those stories in 40-minute segments, then perhaps we're getting ready for sweeping literary or multimedia arcs composed of short disconnected segments. Readers are keeping up (or expanding) the skills necessary to perceive and maintain large narratives over many small 'readings'.

URL

http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Attention.html

Do web texts work like Babylon 5?

Mark argues that serial publication of larger narratives (Dickens, for one) is one argument against the claim that the short presentation formats of current media are debasing storytelling. I think that's an excellent point in general, but when applied to the web or hypertext I wonder how often it applies. How many readers follow enough of a digital text to get the full sweep and scope?

Someone who stops in for an arc of Fans! or It's Walky! is missing out on much of what the series do. It's particularly easy to do with the neatly-packaged story arcs that those two comics provide, but the question applies even to 'punchline'-style comics that have a satisfying resolution at the end of every day or week. A reader can, by virtue of the format and medium, slip into and out of the story, get a bit of a thrill on the way, and never engage the larger narrative. Closure is reached within the short episode as well as the longer series. The medium facilitates those with short attention spans in a way that even Dickens didn't when he published his Great Works in serial form.

Sure, it's always been possible for a reader to ignore the upper levels of what they're reading, but I do think the medium makes that ignorance easier to maintain at the same time as it encourages some people to read on.

Large stories from small scattered texts

I think the article misses some good examples, if only because they've sprung up in the five years since it seems to have been published. First, there's Cloudmakers and its ilk... massive "web games" that are a) presented primarily through websites and web pages, b) are puzzles, in that each site or page is furthermore a puzzle rather than a clear narrative to follow, and c) nevertheless create fairly extensive narratives and participate in larger ones. As I write this, current speculation is that I Love Bees is a part of the Halo story which spans two video games and has correspondences (if not clear connections) to Marathon, a series of three video games whose story occupied readers for five to seven years of sporadic narrative analysis.

Isn't a DVD boxed set a single text?

The growing interest (and supply) of DVD sets are another great example I'd put into the article. When I encounter a new webcomic that looks promising, I dig through it's archive-- and in the case of Fans! I actually bought a subscription so that I could follow the archive. I think people approach DVDs like I do my webcomics-- people are going out to get the 'archives' of television and cinematic series in order to follow the larger sweep... and to revisit the same narrative from the different angle of a single presentation.

We're developing our skills, really.

I think an enduring point the article makes is that a short presentation format does not equal a short narrative, either for the author or the reader. If we can be swept up in the multi-year arc of Babylon 5, or Hill Street Blues, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer despite receiving those stories in 40-minute segments, then perhaps we're getting ready for sweeping literary or multimedia arcs composed of short disconnected segments. Readers are keeping up (or expanding) the skills necessary to perceive and maintain large narratives over many small 'readings'.

Discover Magazine: What Remains to Be Written?

In the 25th Anniversary issue of Discover (Oct. 2005) there's a neat article in the reviews section asking scientists whether there are any science books that remain to be written, and what uncharted territory they (the scientists) would cover in the book.

Vera Rubin, astronomer and Senior Fellow in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie institution of Washington had this to say, and I love it:

I would like to see a multilevel book, written for toddlers, schoolchildren, college students, and adults, that would look at the world around us and answer questions that youngsters may or may not ask as a day progresses. ... Each page off a tall book might have four sections, top to bottom, with the first answer being for the child, the second answer for those a little older, the third a "scientific explanation," and the final one a philosophical discussion of pertinent concepts like forces or brains or animals. Alternatively, there could be four pages per question, each page hidden behind the first...."

I read this just as I was hitting the midpoint of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (more on that soon), and the convergence was frustrating. Exhilirating, too, but 'frustrating' because this multilinearity would be so easy to do, so valuable, and yet it really isn't done. For lack of a better term, I'm going to call it 'tiered engagement' and attempt a definition.

Tiered Engagement

Tiered Engagement means that the reader receives different material based on both their own experience of the text and on their interest. Tiered engagment is one model for tailoring a text to the reader while maintaining focus and progress around a central narrative.

(I just included this material in the last entry via alias, but I think it deserves its own entry, so here it is. Viva transclusion!)

The lexia that the software presents depend on the reader's experience of the text and outside the text. An older reader who comes to a passage about being lost in a wood may read about how the protagonist finds their way again by looking over a topographic map, learning how to read it and comparing it to the landscape around them. A younger reader who is not ready for details about reading topographic maps may merely read that the character lost their way but then remembered their map and learned to read it. The software can present 'tiers' of engagement to the reader-- tiers of complexity (map skills or not) or tiers of involvement with topics (cartography, navigation). The story changes by the reader's experience outside the text.

The software can also change the story depending on the reader's experience within the text. For instance, if earlier in the story the reader had played a mini-game where a map was available and could help the character, the player's use of the map indicates to the software whether the reader is ready for that side-story. Similarly, if the reader had already done a topographic map side-story within the text, the software would know not to include it in the current story. Thus the software could 'know' of the reader's interest either through previous choices and readings or through direct feedback like a quiz, survey, or interactive feature which depends in part on external skills.

The software may also tailor the story to the reader's express interest. The following events can indicate interest either as curiosity to hear more or as difficulty understanding-- both are 'interest' of a sort useful to educators for teach and to storytellers for engaging.

• clicking on a link
• reading a lexia for a long time
• revisiting a lexia multiple times
• choosing links which cause a lexia to be presented multiple times
• repeated link choices within a category or type of link

The software can present lexia which relate to topics, characters, themes, or events which the reader has expressed interest in. It is important with a central narrative and with educational material to 'stay on target' so that the author or teacher can a) ensure that the desired material is addressed (including material as desirable as a 'goal' and 'conclusion') and b) to provide a baseline commonality between experiences of the story to allow discussion and comparison. Tiered engagement allows the reader to 'zoom in' on parts of a story while still continuing along the story which the authors wrote and the other readers are reading.

Print Challenges for Tiered Engagement

It wouldn't be difficult to do in a book, though Rubin's struggle in her single-paragraph answer to suggest the best interface for the design foreshadows marketing problems for such a book. Shooting from the hip, I don't think that very many books get written or marketed at the outset for the entire age spectrum... and books that do get recognized for their multi-generational appeal do so as time passes.

I think the multi-generational problem would be especially pertinent for a print book. You could certainly write a book so that it would appeal both to parents and to their children and to help parents teach their children, but a lot of the value for such a work would come in allowing rereadings as children age and are able to revisit material in a deeper sense later. The 'spiral' metaphor is big in some pedagogical circles, recommending that repeated re-engagement with topics at progressively deeper levels is an excellent way to build understanding as well as factual knowledge. A print book, though, is static. The theories of today are likely to be out of date in the ten years it will take a child to grow into the third or fourth level of Rubin's book. At the very least, better articulations will have come along.

Hypertextual Advantages for a Tiered Textbook

The challenges for such a work in print are advantages in the dynamic world of hypertext. For one thing, Rubin is suggesting one sort of hypertextual structure already-- a multilinear narrative with topical and age-related threads. One of the benefits of such a structure is that a reader who doesn't fit easily into one of those categories --because their interest transcends the topic or they can read past their age or both-- can turn a corner in their reading and read in a sensible direction that the author nevertheless didn't specifically write in.

Where is it?

Why don't we see this sort of thing out there... or where should I look? The back of the Historical Atlas of New York City has a quote lauding it as the closest thing to a CD-ROM you can get on paper, so perhaps there are a bunch of well-done CD-ROMs out there.

I'd like to think that I'm just not seeing works incorporating tiered engagement (and that I'll shortly get emails recommending a few). But I don't see them right now. Most works channel you through the reading they want, or are completely open (rather than being intelligently tiered). And works that are at least 'promiscuously linked' in an informative way (like Wikipedia) nevertheless assume a generic engagement level or duck the issue entirely and leave it up to the reader.

Citation

Anonymous. "What Remains to Be Written?" Discover Magazine Vol. 26 No. 10 (October 2005). http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-05/departments/reviews/

Blogs and social networks and wikis, oh my!

An article in CNet looks at how corporations are beginning to adopt easy web-publishing tools in their businesses... and how they're not. The article almost avoids clueless sensationalism.

Why now with blogs and wikis?

I wonder why these collaboration tools are taking off where Lotus products didn't over the last 20 years-- or only did so in select environments. Perhaps we've reached the knee of the pervasive-computing curve, and enough people 'get it' to start working by 'hub and spoke' rather than 'point-to-point' models. Or perhaps enough people 'get it' that they've learned how to transfer their business models and social networks into digital tools... after all, we've had project managers and the like doing wiki-like synthesis and management for a long time.

Syndication decentralizes

The points about blogs are interesting on another front. With thorough blogging and thorough syndication, the experience of the web becomes more thoroughly decentralized. People produce and publish information-- it's good to have so many people writing because it makes them reflect, synthesize, and articulate themselves. The tools then aid the flow of that information by adding metadata, searching for relevant relationships, aggregating feeds, and presenting it to others. It's barely even a hub-and-spoke model because the ends of the spokes only see the hub if they're wandering.

Tim Bray recently told Mac users to stop using their web browsers to read the web and pick up NetNewsWire instead. A feed aggregator certainly adds a lot to the experience (and NetNewsWire has relegated my Safari auto-tabs to the dustbin), and my fears that I would stop finding new feeds haven't come true, so I guess it's a good thing. I think that they're still tools to be used in concert, though.

Sidenote: Emergent Structure

A sidenote-- I'm feeling a split between this sort of entry and what I intended t.org for, but I can't articulate it quite yet. I started t.org intending to make post objects that discussed 'hypertext' in some abstract way, perhaps 'hypertext theory' though I haven't called it that so far. This is hypertext in the trenches, social hypertext theory. This isn't a problem, but it's an interesting trend. I'm going to map it out the Tinderbox Map View to see if a casual scatterplot reveals a Venn diagram of my post types.

Lindsay's Story: Hypertext and Liberation in High School

I love this article. That's not in the past tense for a reason-- I know I'll be coming back to this article as I have every time I'm in need of a boost of enthusiasm about hypertext. In the article, Pamela G. Taylor tells about how concept mapping and writing within Storyspace enabled a student to find her voice, to get a sense of her own authority and agency in a school that had largely encouraged passivity, and to connect her studies and her life by seeing how the ways that she thought for each corresponded and connected.

URL

http://eastgate.com/storyspace/art/Taylor1.html

Thoughts don't always fit

That is why hypertext is important to me. In hypertext you can fit all the structures --all your thoughts and connections-- side-by-side when they don't seem to fit into the order you're asked for-- and thus figure out why they don't fit. You can see your thoughts, see how you think. It's the meta-level that is so hard to impart to students, and you can do it without getting abstract-- by simply doing thought-mapping in the classroom, as Pamela Taylor did.

One voice of many

That is why hypertext is so important to me. Because when you are given that freedom to think and encouraged to use it, you see that your voice is one of many in a positive sense-- it is a voice, and the one that's lecturing to you is but one of many, not the one. Multiplicity is everywhere. And when you get your voice, amazing things happen, as with Lindsay.

Good tech practice in the classroom

The article also outlines some fine teaching practice using Storyspace, and I never tire of stories of productive classroom experience. Taylor does so many things right with technology in her classroom-- she gives templates to students to cut out the technical overhead, she gives students their head with content, and she pays attention to that content, not just the form or flash. Here, though, is a superlative example of the human impact of the changes in thought that hypertext encourages.

What interests me in educational software

I've had versions of this post rattling around in my head for a while because I couldn't come up with the perfect situation to articulate them. I can't keep doing that-- perfect times for things are too rare, and too dependent upon multitudes of imperfect attempts that let you see the right time to move. Cats become good hunters and pouncers by pouncing off the edges of tables when they are kittens. Anyway.

I think that a lot of "educational software" as it stands now is pedagogically moribund, intellectually misguided, or worse. This state of the field means that schools often don't see using software in school as worth it-- they'll have to invest significant time in learning the software, adapting their curricula to it, and arranging the class schedule to accomodate it, only to have it do what the teacher is already doing. Most software out there is supplemental, good for reinforcing what the school is doing or, on occasion, creating interest in something the student could learn more about. More often, it earns the (often derogatory) term edutainment.

Despite the very sound reasons that this state has developed, I don't think that this has to be the case, at all. Much of the software out there that is considered educational is delivering what someone has deemed sufficiently educational content. It's teaching the student phonics, or greek history, or what it is like to live in Sri Lanka today. While those are good things in the right time and place, they're not what computers are best at, according to Steven Johnson (and many, many others).

What computers are good at is process. Computers take input, do things to it, and produce output. As the user varies the input and runs it through the computer, the user learns a lot about the process the computer is putting the data through. As a spreadsheet user gets frustrated with Microsoft Excel and tries different things to get their spreadsheet to turn out as intended, they learn how Excel is manipulating their input. As a gamer tries to ride a horse over hills in Shadow of the Colossus or get from city to city in World of Warcraft, they're learning how SotC or WoW restricts their movement, allows some inputs (actions) and not others. They're learning how to use the rules of the world to accomplish what they want.

Truly educational software, whether or not it's intended or labeled as educational, teaches its user about its processes. Learning those processes and analyzing them looks a lot like what educators call "critical thinking" and laud as a primary goal of enlightened curricula. Kids learn unasked from games, but then are bored by what they're asked to learn in school. Software could be bridging the gap, by giving students rich situations to playfully practice what they're told in school. It's rare to use software in schools in that way, though, and this is one thing that interests me about educational software.

Examples of how that might happen form the core of my interests in educational software. I'm interested in:

• games that communicate concepts rather than facts or situations
• games that are sandboxes, space for simulations and safe practice of challenging processes to learn
• tools that facilitate better writing, reading, thinking, and presentation
• tools that facilitate or augment what teachers are already doing

I'm going to be writing about many topics related to this in textuality.org since it's the core of my passion. Sorry if I didn't explain and defend each of the assertions in this post, as many clauses here clamor for comment. I think this will be one of those posts that I end up using to spin off many future posts, a clause-as-link at a time.

Metamorphosis

Good bloggers write their lives, from the daily details to the deeper ruminations. They share with their readers as their interests change and their blogs follow. I tend to do the opposite: I disappear and emerge new. Hence, as I realized that freelancing wasn't working for me and shifted interests over this last year, I retreated. I locked up-- textuality.org is about hypertext, information architecture, and maybe education; if I wasn't reading and writing about that, perhaps it shouldn't go on t.org.

I think that was the easy, but wrong, route. I'm still interested in hypertext, and how people use linked and dynamic text to discover and forge meaning in their lives. I'm still interested in how technology can turn people from readers to writers and how it can help them see the 'meta' side of their lives, not just the details and how they fit together but the systems that make the details fit together.

That retreat was also largely due to a shift in career. As I began t.org, I moved from Boston to New York and began freelancing on databases. A year in, I shifted away from databases. I wasn't sure where to go, but several opportunities to work in Game Design and educational software came up. I followed them, and here I am now, with things to think and say again but in a new field.

I'm still interested in hypertext, information architecture, and education. Now, though, I've got a specific set of fields to apply that interest to. Hypertext and my interest in it has taken root in educational software, writing software; my interest in dynamic and linked narrative has taken root in game design and digital games. It's my life equivalent of a chapter break, I suppose. For textuality.org is the link to Page 2 or the Next Section. I hope that if you're still reading, you'll follow that link with me.

Tinderbox Technique: drop-stamp adornments

I've been revamping the architecture for t.org behind the scenes, and some nifty features are coming out of my explorations. I'm used to working in the Outline View, which is strange because I'm a very spatial thinker. After watching Mark Bernstein take notes in Map View at eNarrative 6, though, I decided to give Map View another shot. I soon came up with one technique that you could easily adapt to your own files: adornments that act like stamps. This and the pen have made the Map View just as useful to me as Outline View.

As of Tinderbox 3, adornments can have actions. This is huge! Since adornments cover an area of the map view (without taking up space in other views), this means that you can make a section of a Map View a functional 'drop box'. Make a note; drag it so that it touches the adornment; the action is applied to the note. Now drag it wherever you really want it.

Read on for the hows and whys and examples.

An example: canvassing the web

Here's an example. I made a Tinderbox file to organize my ongoing search for freelance work. I do this in stages: I search for postings and leads, drop them into Tinderbox, and then after a round of that I go back into Tinderbox to work on the promising ones. I want to drag URLs into a Tinderbox window, quickly assign a bunch of attributes like how interesting they are and what my next action should be for each, and then I want to move on to the next lead. I can't do all that easily with prototypes because I'd need a multitude of them: "should apply, really hot", "should apply, mildly interesting", "contact for information, really hot" and so on.

Instead, I put a bunch of adornments onto my drop-box Map View, and each assigns a couple of attributes-- some metadata and a visual attribute to accompany it. Here's a picture of the setup, arranged in their own window. I can drag notes to that window so that it functions like a custom OS X palette.

In this window, I'll take a new lead and drag it onto the first column to assign a step in the process, basically a "next action". That assigns it a "to-do" attribute and a border color so that I can quickly, in Map View, see all my next steps. Then I'll drag it over to the second column to assign how interesting it is; that turns the main face of the Map View note into a gradient, with the second color correspondingly bright. I can then quickly look at my Map View to see where my most interesting leads are. Here's a piece of the map view, where you can see the border colors and gradients assigned above.

This has unlocked the Map View for me because it finally lets me use the visual attributes easily without a lot of time assigning and typing.

The quick how to: assigning actions to adornments

This is easy to do if you're comfortable with actions and attributes.

Open the adornment Rename Adornment dialog by choosing "rename" on it or selecting it and hitting 'enter' (not 'return'). In the "Action" field, put the attributes you wish to assign, like this:

AppStatus=ShouldApply;Border=3;BorderBevel=plain;BorderColor=red

That's for my "Apply Stamp" adornment shown in the example above. It flattens out the border, makes it wide so that it's visible, turns it red, and sets another user attribute (AppStatus) so that I can gather it up with an agent later. I could have the agent look for BorderColor=red, but I find it easier to keep track of what means what with a separate attribute.

In order to do the funky gradient (I was so smug about making 'hotness' look like a flame!), use an Action like this:

Hotness=3;Pattern=gradient;Color2=bright red

When you assign a Pattern other than the default, Tinderbox uses the Color and Color2 attributes as the two colors, in this case shading from the default down into Color 2 which I've made the visual for 'hotness'.

Other tips:

• You probably want to make the adornment locked but not sticky. That way you won't accidentally move the adornment, and even if you do you won't start the 'katamari effect' where sticky adornments start gathering other sticky adornments.
• Make the adornments big so that they're easy targets.
• If you have a suite of 'drop-stamps' like this, you may want to make one more that clears all the attributes in case you make a mistake. In my example, those are grey.
• This would be really snazzy for GTD.

CFL: RPG and Hypertext Design

This is a quick Call For Links. I'm currently designing a role playing game setting, and all the reading on RPG design has me thinking. Similar challenges arise in writing interactive fiction, writing 'literary' hypertexts, planning a session/story/adventure for a role playing group, and designing digital games with interesting plots. If you have a link, please write (and say whether you're comfortable being credited by link and how).

• How do you give the reader/player authentic agency while still propelling the narrative in a meaningful direction? (Can you?)
• What RPG devices, especially game mechanics, facilitate or restrict narrative agency?
• What are useful techniques for adapting an existing story or setting written around a single protagonist to make it interesting for a group of collaborative players?
• What are useful techniques for making a hypertext or interactive fiction appealing to a multitude of reader/players with a variety of goals and modes of play?

I'm looking for good readings specifically about the parallels between hypertext and RPGs. There seems to be a lot of thinking about one side or the other (especially about digital games), but I've found little on the interaction of the two pursuits. If you have a link, please write me. I'll make a follow-up post soon about what I've found.

MMORPG research help?

I've got a friend working on a new site who has some questions about social finance in MMORPGs. If you play Everquest, WoW, or really any of the online worlds and would be willing to share an email, IM chat, or a phone conversation with him, please contact me. He's a nice guy with a cool product and I'd like to help him out, but am not in any of the games myself.

(Edited: They've implemented mmorpg currencies already. It'll be interesting to see how their social service translates into the digital realm)

Remix culture

Weblogg-ed News posted about a recent Lawrence Lessig essay about the "Read-Write Web" in the Financial Times. The article caught my eye because it disusses Anime Music Videos, and I like AMVs. But I stayed, and read the article to friends, because the article is really good. It uses AMVs as a case study for looking at trends in copyright on the web. As technology increasingly enables people to not only consume media but to remix, retell, and share it, the potential is vast --as is the loss we face if we successfully prevent such creativity.

Lessig also makes a few points I haven't seen others making so directly, including the fact that we do this anyway. We retell stories to each other, we recreate movies to our friends as we complain or rave about them, and we fuse media constantly in our daily life in an effort to refine (or communicate) the effect that consumed art has upon us. Have you ever put on somemusic at a party with your friends because it created the mood you wanted? Have you put stickers on a notebook because they made you laugh, smile, or made some comment about what you were sticking them on? These are retellings, and the only real difference between them and an AMV is that technology has allowed the AMV to be more polished and more widely available.

Lessig ends the article with a great question to Wind Up Records, which recently forced an AMV community to remove all videos with Wind Up Records music: Now that you’ve succeeded in stopping thousands of kids from spending hundreds of thousands of hours to make fantastically creative content that promotes your work for free, do you really expect to sell more records next year?

I can cite personal example after example where his point applies to me. I found the Faithless song Mass Destruction in an AMV and almost immediately went to the iTunes Music Store to get it. I've bought several albums because friends put them on mixes and I wanted the rest of the album.

This is in my hypertext blog because I think the problem is a hypertextual one... how do you give credit (in any sense) for transclusion? What sorts of currency navigate the links formed by transclusion, and how do we formalize that exchange? For years it has been a clear sign that someone Doesn't Get It about the web if they demand that you get permission to link to their site... and yet that's what cracking down on AMVs is. Heck, in a larger sense, by linking to those posts I am adding them to my own narrative in a (very diluted) form of transclusion, just as I was remixing Lessig's article as I read bits of it to my friends. I don't think these acts --discussing, linking, remixing-- differ in form but rather in scope... and I don't think the difference in scope changes the message.

Physical Pleasures

A few weeks ago my cute travel mouse broke enough that I stopped using it. Then the left (primary) button on my 2-year-old Wacom tablet mouse went on the fritz. Left mouseless as a FileMaker developer and Tinderbox addict on the Macintosh, I moved quickly to find a replacement, and decided to give the Wacom pen another go. I'd tried it for a day or two back when I got the tablet and couldn't get the hang of it. I use two monitors most of the time and the tablet couldn't map the proportions, the pen-side buttons were ungainly, etc.

But they've really improved the drivers, and this time I was forced to use it long enough to get used to it. And I won't go back soon because I'm really enjoying the physical sensation of using a pen for my text-work. It's thrilling to drag windows around with the pen like I'm drawing, and it feels so right to make a highlighter motion over text, then drag a link-arrow (in Tinderbox) from the text to another note to make a link. I made the main button on the pen into ctrl-click and it feels like I am really grabbing links and icons and pulling the contextual menu out of them.

All this time I've preferred to do initial hypertext sketching on paper because of the freedom to whip links to and fro with abandon, to turn notes on their sides or squeeze some more text in. There are still advantages to doing that, but I'm surprised at how much of my preference seems to have been the thoughtlessly intuitive motion and the physical pleasure of drawing with a pen on paper. Using the tablet in Tinderbox and FileMaker has brought some of that pleasure back into the digital side of that work.

Changes on the horizon

t.org is over a year old and it has been the better part of that year since I made any architectural changes to the site. With Tinderbox's inclination toward exposing emergent structure, the site has been feeling a bit long in the tooth of late. Debugging The Elephant on Main Street has also given me a few tricks and techniques for working in and exporting from Tinderbox, too. Tricks like making sections of the templates depend on if/then statements, and how to get agents to export intelligent indices of your site.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: This site is under construction. Pardon our mess. We apoligize for any inconvenience while we work to serve you better. I'll spare you the construction-sign animated gif, at least.

Tinderbox Worklog Template

This blog has been quiet for quite some time while some big things have been afoot: I moved to a new city, changed jobs to start freelancing, and those are just the beginning.

The freelance work has forced me to get more organized on a number of fronts, and one of those fronts is how I track and report my time and my work. Tinderbox was a natural place to start gathering my work because I knew the shape of my notes was going to change, and because I knew that, pretty soon, I'd want to share my notes over the web and make invoices for my clients and partners. I set up a Tinderbox file that would:

• export part of itself to the web, but could ...
• ... contain notes that were not shared
• automatically report on my hours and generate text file invoices
• track what I've been paid for and what I am owed
• include notes with web links relevant to my work and all the 'scratchpaper' I could ask for
• be modular enough that I could copy and adapt it to a new client in a few minutes

That last feature also makes it worth sharing with others. It's easy to have Tinderbox files that become a part of your mind, that reflect the way you think, and therefore are difficult to pass on to others. I put in a few extra hours to make my file modular enough for my various projects, and it's therefore modular enough (I think) to share.

They're here as a Stuffit file: www.textuality.org/templates/sprice_worklog.sit

Enjoy!

Sir Vey has really filled out

Ten minutes and:

Via Doug Miller (but only because Alwin is lower on my feed aggregator list). I've been trying to keep the posts in this blog more topically relevant and less bloggy/personal, but what could be more an exploration of hypertext than a survey of webloggers in the superset-hypertext of the web?

While I'm at it, though: the setup for the summer programs is going well, and today's first day of classes seems well. I got my first strike in the NYC school job market. I taught a sample class for fifth-graders and had them build a simple wiki about a recent unit. It went well enough to write up here, but not well enough for the position. Perhaps next time!

Mapper 2.0

The Tinderbox community comes through once again! Not long after I posted a quick exploration of exporting the Tinderbox map view to the web I began getting suggestions and further thoughts. Mark Anderson stepped up and did what I couldn't because of time and expertise-- he figured out how to get Javascript to wrangle Tinderbox's attributes into a proper display. And as this is a debugging process, he found a couple of challenges that I hadn't tested for.

from Mark

Since Mark Anderson doesn't have a blog, I'm posting a bit about the process as he described it to me in email. Basically, rather than have Javascript somehow find and then be able to change the CSS attributes once they're in the page, he used Javascript to build the page.

Clever! That results in code that is much cleaner and a bit less flexible than what I'd contemplated. I'd figured that if the page was exported directly (in its nice-but-miniature form) and javascript was used to *fix* it, then JS could be used to scale it flexibly by changing the multiplier. I suggested that and he then built another version which is ready to 'zoom'.

There were a few other challenges he overcame. For one, it's possible to get negative values for map position... shame on me for not flinging notes to the far reaches of the map view to find that. While it's okay to have negative positioning values in CSS, you don't get to see them-- Mark's code shifts all the values to positive so that notes don't start off the web page. Also, my guesstimation of "3 em" per TB map unit is just that-- an estimate.

I'm so glad he took this on, and that Mark Bernstein apparently chipped in a few suggestions ... as the next t.org post shows, there's no way I could do this coding now.

Here are some other 'gotchas' he described. Did you find them in my code? <grin>

Some Assembly Required

One of the challenges I saw in my initial experiment was to make the solution drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, or what have you. I wanted someone to be able to take it and use it with their existing file and then forget about it. Mark's solution almost (but not quite) does that.

MapMyChildrenJS uses a couple of User Attributes that don't come in a new Tinderbox file, and that means that you have to add them. It's near enough that you can define them once, give them some defaults, and be ready to go, but if your file doesn't have those attributes, the result will be functional but not pretty. In my case the result was too big, and some text wrapped strangely. Not a fatal flaw by any means.

The new attribute is: MapNameFontSize , a number attribute spelled and capitalized exactly so, and with a default of "12". Without this the resulting map seems to be large.

Look at Mark's test file to see some other attributes. Most of them seem to be for testing, but there are a couple more that deserve a look, like TitleFontSize.

MapMe files

There's still no way to get link lines going, which is sad since finding patterns in link lines is a major source of serendipity when using Tinderbox. Since adornments aren't exported at all, there's also no way to display them. Even with those limitations, these templates could work well for the occasional export of a cool map view or for Tinderbox hypertexts which rely on the basic diagramming that the Map View allows.

Note that the file names are different, so if you would like to use the old (flawed) templates I came up with, they're still around. The new files are:

• mapMyChildrenJS.html - the export template you should use, which maps the current note's map view
• mapMeJS.html - the export template which maps each child note
• MapHTML.tbx - Mark's testing Tinderbox file
• map_js.html - the example, exported

Tinderbox Map View for the Web ... almost

The other night on my bus ride home a stray thought about CSSimplicity touched off an idea for exporting the Tinderbox Map View onto the web. I've wanted this for a good while, but the only method I could think of for getting a working map view to the web was a screen shot doctored in the HTML to be an imagemap... not exactly a scalable solution.

However, with CSS you can specify everything about an element, from visual styling to screen positioning. Since Tinderbox gives ready access to all of the variables that make it work, a bit of poking around gave me a fair approximation of the map view with only two fairly simple export templates. There's one hurdle left that I think will require some non-trivial javascript, so before I muddy my pretty templates with javascript code, it's worth writing up the TBox and CSS bits-- along the way I learned a bit about the way that Tinderbox works and the what CSS can and can't do.

The Big Picture

The big picture is fairly simple: figure out which Tinderbox attributes correspond to which CSS properties. This meant a set of test notes:

... arranged in a rich map view where I can tweak things and see (through "Get Info" on the notes) which attributes change:

With that setup, I can have "Get Info" open and watch all the map-related attributes change as I move a note or change its color or play with fonts:

Table of Equivalents

I got the following as rough equivalencies. The ones in italics didn't fully work in my experiment.

For the Map View note (rather than the child-notes in the map view):

• title's background-color: TitleBackgroundColor
• title's font-family: TitleFont
• title's text color: TitleForegroundColor
• map area's background-color: MapBackgroundColor

For the child-notes in the map view:

• CSS: Tinderbox
• top: Ypos - didn't work because of units, see below
• left: Xpos - units again
• width: Width
• border-width: Border
• border-color: BorderColor - Tinderbox gives white text if the color is dark, black text if the color is light. There's no way to automate that cleanly in export or CSS
• background-color: Color
• font-family: NameFont
• color: NameColor

Take Car(e,at)

Once I figured out what made what, I built the styles but put in export codes where the values should be. Word to the wise: don't forget that Tinderbox export codes can be listed with or without a trailing carat. These two are equivalent:

<p>^get(FunnyNumber) the number comes out</p>

<p>^get(FunnyNumber)^ in both of these cases</p>

However, if you want something to immediately follow the export code, you must use the trailing carat. Otherwise Tinderbox doesn't know where the export code ends:

<p>^get(FunnyNumber)no number</p>

<p>^get(FunnyNumber)^number</p>

And ... not quite.

So far I have two export templates. One, "mapMyChildren.html" which is called for each note, and which generates the html page and the 'map view'. Inside of that is this code:

^justChildren(mapMe.html)^

... which calls another template ("mapMe.html") to make the <div> for each note. (Right-click or control-click and choose "save link as" or "download link as" to get those files, btw.)

However, as you'll note from this browser window screenshot, all is not well:

The problem is that Tinderbox's X and Y coordinates aren't in pixels, inches, or ems-- the units that CSS understands. Trial and error showed that Tinderbox's units are about 3em. But you can't do math in an export, so there's no way to say:

^get(Xpos * 3)^em;

I think there's a way around it with Javascript, and if it works it'll be nifty: you'll be able to zoom in and out with the Javascript multiplying the dimensions as you go. However, as is always the case with Javascript, I anticpate this a) taking forever and a day to code, b) taking another half-forever to make cross-browser, and c) making a Jackson Pollack painting out of my currently Mondrian code.

In other words, don't hold your breath until it's done. I'm going back to CSSimplicity later this week.

There are some other things that this could use: CSS properties to make the text wrap at a fixed note width and not to extend the div if the text is too long for a fixed height. Borders, which Tinderbox handles in a tricky way.

But, for now? I'm elated that I got this much to work in about 45 minutes. It's a testament to the transparency of Tinderbox.

CSSimplicity p.2: Now With Style

Last week I wrote the first in a series of entries about adapting the Tinderbox Simplicity template to CSS. The first step was to analyze the existing template to glean its structure, and I marked up the stylesheet and the html of a sample page to do so.

This next step, then, is to move it over to CSS. I'm going to take it slowly and with lots of explanation, because figuring out exactly where CSS ends and HTML begins was tricky for me.

Two disclaimers: First, I'll walk things through, but I'm assuming that you have a very, very basic level of CSS. I'm assuming knowledge of CSS Syntax. If you're not sure, scan that link-- that one page is what I'm assuming you know.

Secondly, I'm being "thorough", by which I mean that the end result will be a bit more complex than the Simplicity template. The HTML will be simpler (without the tables), and the templates will be simple and easier to edit, but the stylesheet is going to be rather longer than the old one so that more of the page is stylable. That extra complexity will hit in this post, so if it seems confusing, shake it off and go to the next post.

I'm being thorough for two reasons: First, I want to be able to do CSSZenGarden-like styling, and that means having the CSS mirror the semantic structure of the Tinderbox notes. Secondly, being this thorough means that the CSS can mirror the semantic structure, and that in turn means that your visual style can more clearly indicate the semantics. I.E. You can make your blog easier to read and navigate.

The whole thing is turning out to be a bit more of a process than I thought, so it might take two steps. Here goes.

Templates Wanted: Inquire Within

Looking at the marked-up sample page from the last step, there are several things going on. The table breaks the page into four main parts: a header, a sidebar, a body, and (outside the table) a footer. Inside of those sections, we know by the structure of the Tinderbox file that we have several 'sidebar' notes (About this site and blogroll) and several 'body' notes (Each note is timestamped and Design by Derek Powazek) and several 'footer' notes (Navigation, Copyright).

An export template turns a Tinderbox note into a chunk of HTML, so to produce that page we'll need templates that produce the HTML for the sections of the page that come from notes. We'll need

• a template that produces the page (bwPageTemplate.html)
• a template for the body notes (i.e. the blog entries, item.html, which we'll make "post.html")
• a template that produces the stuff in the sidebar (sidebar.html)
• and a template that produces the footer.

We don't need any other templates yet because the other stuff --title, 'made with tinderbox' logo, dividing lines on the page-- don't correspond to Tinderbox notes. They're just HTML.

Here's a quick picture made in the Map View out of adornments which shows the structure of the page and its html templates. I'm not sure why the names are of different brightnesses.

And, in fact, we have those templates. We just need to adapt them to use CSS.

Templates, Level 2

A quick note before moving on to styles: We're fine right now if we want to create a site just like Simplicity. It has pages with a bunch of entries on them, and the entries are one TB note each. That's all. If you want to do more, your templates get more sophisticated accordingly:

If you want your entries to have child notes, you'll need a template to make them appear on the pages.

If you want your entries to be pages unto themselves so that you can do "crazy things" like link between them (I've heard the term "Fagerjordian" applied for Anders Fagerjord's Surftrail) then you'll need a template that is ready to put a post on a page rather than a bunch of posts.

If you want to combine these ...say, *blush* have entries appear one way on the front page of the site and a different way on their own unique post-pages, plus have child notes in both cases... well, I'll get to that. Someday.

Styles Wanted: Inquire Within

CSS is very flexible. Styles can be any combination of attributes you might change about text. Styles can "cascade", meaning that if you tell a paragraph to be green, and then have a style that's bold but doesn't have a color applied, the 'green' cascades down into the bold section so that it's green and bold. When you take a bunch of styles and group them to apply to text, that's a class, a class of text. So we need to figure out what classes we need in our stylesheet.

We need classes(s) for all the situations where we want to affect the appearance of the text. If we want the ability to have our posts outlined or in a color or spaced a certain way, then we'll need a style for them. If we want the sidebar to appear in a certain place on the page (or have the flexibility to appear on the left or the right without changing our HTML templates) then we'll need a class for the sidebar. If titles are bold, we'll need a class for them. If links are colored and get an underline when you put the mouse over them, as is the case in Simplicity, then we'll need a class for links.

So, brainstorming, we might want styles for:

• the header section (to position it)
• the title of the blog
• the tagline of the blog
• the sidebar (to position it)
• the individual notes in the sidebar
• the title of a sidebar note
• the body of a sidebar note
• the body (to position where the blog entries appear)
• the title of a post
• the body of a post
• the footer (to position where the footer goes)
• the text of a footer note

In the case of Simplicity, we've got a few exceptions to the style of the sections:

• links
• dates of posts
• list items that appear in the sidebar

Note that I'm being (overly?) thorough with that list. The original Simplicity gets away with styles for just: text, heading, tagline, date, sidebar-head, sidebar-list, link.

IDs, Divs, and Spans

To replace the tables in Simplicity, we'll want two different kinds of classes: classes which determine the appearance of text wherever it is on the page, and classes which determine where on the page the sections are (basically, which replace the table cells). We can't conflate the two because then we'd have all of our ... oh, blog entry titles appearing in the same place on the page, or we'd have our sidebars all over the place (but pretty!).

The final html page will have style classes applied in this structure, then:

Notice how this mirrors the structure of the html export templates on the page. This means that the html export templates are going to be pretty simple (in the next CSSimplicity post).

Building the new stylesheet

In CSS, if you want a class to apply to only one <div> then it gets an ID Selector, and appears in your stylesheet like so:

1. classname{stuff}

So all those styles which place things on the page are going to go in our stylesheet as IDs.

1. headerFrame{ /* the frame around the entire header */ }
2. sidebarFrame{ /* puts the sidebar in place */ }
3. bodyFrame{ /* the frame around the whole body, probably for positioning */ }
4. footerFrame{ /* puts the footer in place */ }

Then we can put in the classes that will get applied one to each note. There will be many of these, so they're a regular class. On the other hand, we supposedly don't know what sort of html thing these might be applied to, so we'll include them as classes independent of the html element. It's almost always going to be a <div>, but we need to be open-minded so we'll leave out the selector.

.blogtitle{ }

.blogtagline{ }

.sidebar{ /* an individual sidebar */ }

.sidebarHead{ /* the head of a sidebar piece */ }

.sidebarBody{ /* the body... */ }

.postHead{ /* the headings or titles of the blog entries */ }

.postBody{ /* the text of the blog entries */ }

.footer( /* in case we want to surround multiple footers like sidebars */ )

.footerBody{ /* the text of the footer */ }

We can't forget the basic HTML selectors, which we can bring right over from the old Simplicity stylesheet. These should appear at the top of the stylesheet, but we'll get to that:

a:link { /* each of these from before */ }

a:visited { }

a:visited { }

a:visited { }

p { /* all paragraphs will get this unless the others override it */ }

body { /* will define the way the body appears, unless overridden by bodyframe */

We Made Progress, right?

Now that we know what the styles should be, we can plug in the old styles. Add some comment headings for readability and we have a stylesheet framework.

Next up: Ridiculously simple template making.

ETA: Added pictures

I realized that the diagrams I've made of the html page re: exports and re: classes might help, so I've added them and moved the text around a bit.

Buttons!

I've gotten in on the badge-sharing that has been going around. There's now a "BBEdited" button in the sidebar, made from Vlad Spears' photoshop files. and you're welcome to it.

If you want to make a suite of your own "80x15" badges, there are some nifty tools out there for doing it: one that seems to have started the trend (and generated some controversy) and one that lets you put in small images. I didn't use either because I liked the 'pop-out' graphics of the 2Second(Fuse) badges, but it's a place to start.

ETA: BBEdited

Vlad Spears posted the photoshop files for the 'badges' on his site. I adopted several and made one to pass the love to BBEdit. I've done all my HTML editing (and a fair bit besides HTML) in BBEdit since 1997. Feel free to grab and/or cannibalize my badge for your own site.

Syndication!

I've come up with a title for this post that makes it sound like a musical, but the fact remains: I've put up a simplistic rss feed for textuality.org. I'm still playing with it --trying to include html and links rather than just plain text broke it for LiveJournal and NetNewsWire-- but it is up and working. Thanks to Doug Miller for suggesting the feed and for advice.

ETA: Full Text

As this edit indicates, I've changed my RSS feed so that it does full text on the entries and doesn't break. I'd been holding off on full-text because I couldn't get html to work, would have to add children and build a template for them, etc. Alwin pleaded to the world at large, Doug Miller sent advice, and now it's working.

It still doesn't validate, so I've got some work to do. Once it does, I'll post some advice. The (several-year-old) Simplicity export templates have a few problems out-of-the-box and it can take a while to figure out the fixes if you're new to syndication. In the meantime, here are some sites that explain how to set up your own RSS feed. Tinderbox (and the Simplicity template) does a lot of the work for you, but if you're having trouble, these might help you diagnose the problem.

• Web Marketing Today: How to Set up an RSS Feed to Syndicate Your Headlines - fairly clean and simple
• devX.com: Set Up a Simple Syndication Feed Using RSS - A bit complex because it's aimed at database developers, but they do really get into the guts of a feed.
• Tinderbox Wiki: RssFeeds, RSSFromAskHere

CSSimplicity Step 1: Analysis

I'm making some new templates for Tinderbox. I'm doing this because I think that Tinderbox could use some well-structured, simple, elegant templates that really use CSS. I'm doing this because I think that CSSZenGarden is one of the coolest sites I've ever seen. I'm doing this because it's hacking in one of the nicer meanings of the term. While I'm at it, I'm going to log the process so that you might follow along if you're learning Tinderbox, CSS, or both.

Overview

Overall, the editing process is simple:

• vivisect the current design - tweak it and see how it works
• edit its structure by editing the templates - so that you get a page that looks like it has but works the way you want to
• edit its stylesheet - until it looks the way you want

In practice, I have found it useful to take a sample file of output (you do have that "index.html" from the old site handy, right?) and make its html look great with the new stylesheet, then chop it up to make the templates behave accordingly. That's mostly a difference in the way you do step 2, though. You might have more success, especially if you're just experimenting with stylesheets, if you follow the process summarized above and detailed below.

Make the old elements visible

First I had to vivisect the existing stylesheet, which to me means exposing the innards by making the elements visible. I went in and gave borders to all the named styles in the stylesheet. To each style I added:

border-color: #000;

border-width: 1px;

border-style: solid;

... I left html entity styles alone, so this stayed:

a:link { color: #06f; text-decoration: none; }

The resulting page got ugly, but I could see where styles were (and even more usefully, weren't) used:

I left some of these borders in until I was done. I also then made the table borders visible:

<table border="q" width="85%" cellspacing="20" cellpadding="0"><tr>

Now I have this, and I can see where everything is. If I really wanted to, I could start adding colors to the styles or to table cells in order to pinpoint specific elements.

I think I've got it down now, though. The next step (and the next entry) will be to make a new html file, and from it new templates, that are ready to give that same layout but with CSS rather than tables. It's worth asking-- why? There are two reasons. First, by making your html use CSS you're separating the content from the presentation. The html that results is *much* easier to read because it pulls the html junk out of your beautiful entry. Secondly, if you are using CSS to change the layout, you can do crazy things like CSS Zen Garden does. If I have my way, the end of this process will be one set of templates, three stylesheets, and three completely different looks.

ETA: Actually, Styles

I was going to to tables ->CSS next, but that will have to wait. I need to get the stylesheet ready first.

Hypertext Among the Blogs

One of the wonderful things about personal weblogs is how they cross categories. I may for this site start reading a blog because it mentions hypertext on a regular basis, but then I get to read about good food, or electronic music, or real estate... and maybe how they relate to hypertext. And if I'm really lucky, the blogger has properly categorized their entries into a nifty index.

I don't want to add all of these blogs to textuality.org because this site has a sharp focus which I want to maintain; nevertheless, I think t.org needs a collection of the relevant categorical focii from them. So in this entry, the subtopics should end up in the Categories list rather than this entry itself, and each is the 'hypertext index' from a spiffy blog.

And yes, for the record, I hate the term 'blogosphere'. I want a term for 'the set of weblogs' that doesn't sound like a 1st Edition D&D monster.

The Great Lettuce Head on Hypertext

Steve Ersinghaus' Great Lettuce Head touches (as advertised) on: fiction, English Literature, New Media, Writing, and technology in education. And it has a hypertext category.

Something Different on Tinderbox and Blogging

Doug Miller doesn't have a hypertext category in his blog per se, but his Tinderbox, blogging, and education categories are all relevant to t.org's interests.

NoCategories on Hypertext

Dylan Kinnet's NoCategories' largest or second largest ... category ... is on hypertext.

Kottke on Web technology

Kottke.org doesn't have a category on hypertext exactly, but does have a section on web technology, and that seems to be where the hypertext issues that I'm interested in fall. I need to write about "hypertext" vs. "the web" since that's such an FAQ whenever I mention the term.

URLGREYHOT on Information work and Education

Michael Angeles confusingly lists URLGREYHOT's categories as separate blogs. Regardless, the content is interesting and the topics closest to the heart of t.org are the information work blog, Education, and the Education blog. Even if he is into homeschooling.

It looks like "Education" is separate from the "Education Blog" in that, like t.org, the site contains things which are outside the blog and exist in a broader hypertext.

Tinderbox is taking me over

I haven't been posting much here on t.org because my "hypertext time" has been spent on tasks other than readings... and t.org is supposed to be a log of my readings. However, Tinderbox has been making those distinctions --between reading and working, between working and hypertext study-- a bit fuzzier. This has happened in several ways.

Montage is a part of my work now

Montage is a part of my work, now. While I've been using palettes for some time in sophisticated applications like Photoshop, palettes serve a central window. It's a montage of a central text with auxiliary, modifier windows. Since Tinderbox Weekend, I don't tend to have a central window.

I've been using simultaneously open windows much more consistently. I keep an outline of my categories for this site open so that I can cross-reference new writing easily with links; definitions are open in another window all the time so that I can write a new one quickly when I realize I'm not being clear; since the references to further readings have been growing nearly geometrically, I've generally got a window open to my "pending readings" where I'm dropping URLs from the web.

None of these windows is particularly central. There used to be one privileged window in the center with an explorer view on the whole document, but since I've wanted to have more than one text window open at a time, that has fallen out of my routine. Now there are windows all over the place, and the connections between them are central.

This behavior has bounced back into the other applications I use now. I frequently have my mailboxes window open in Eudora now, and several different OmniOutliner documents visible at once for different areas of my work. This would have seemed crazy to me not long ago.

More like an organ than a piano

I've been using Tinderbox more like an organ than a piano. I've usually got several windows open, sometimes several documents, and I'm working in all of them. These URLs go over here, until I decide what to do with them, I've got a thought about that, which really deserves to be in map view over there, and so on. Sitting back and looking at it, I feel like I did watching my great-grandmother play an organ-- there are keys everywhere, buttons here, stops there, rows of keys where the hand most needs them, and then the pedals!

A major benefit for students working with hypertext (more on this in another post) is that it often forces you to self-consciousness about the structure of your thinking. It's been interesting to watch the structures that emerge as I work in Tinderbox. Which windows stay open? Where do I tend to put windows on the screen so that I can use them (or what's under them)? I've had several map views coalesce when I realized that I was starting to group some text windows near each other so that I could show them all at once and in a montage.

I've been using pianos, and now I'm making my own organ.

A rich if boxy sketchpad

Everything is going into Tinderbox, especially if I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Since I can write content and meta-content, put them side-by-side, and then have the meta-content never get exported, everything can go into Tinderbox. And it has.

In the last few weeks, I've started or used Tinderbox files for:

• a revision of my old gaming site
• this site
• the beginnings of a job search
• notes on an RPG that I'm in
• random thoughts on fairy tale retellings, which have been on my mind
• tutorials and templates I'm making for Tinderbox

Some of these will never leave Tinderbox, and others are for the sole purpose of making another (web-based) hypertext. The line between work and hypertext work is not so clear as it was.

New archiving system!

Inspired by Mark Bernstein's site, J. Nathan Mathias' Notebook of Sand, and others, I considered my archive system and realized that it wasn't going to scale.

Scalability Problems

• The "archive" note in Tinderbox was going to keep growing, leading to an archive.html that was both broken in its template usage and expanding with each entry
• I would have no easy way to make a calendar with month-by-month summary pages like those on the two blogs mentioned
• As the archive grew in my Tinderbox file, any time I opened it in outline view I would get the whole thing. To work with notes after the archive, I'd have to scroll past a list that is already longer than a screen.

Solution

So I set up a system like J. Nathan's, with year and month notes, and entries are children of the months. I'll just keep the latest month open, and since the years are children of the archive note (thus keeping descendedFrom(archive)=true), my agents still work. The challenges were twofold.

Legacy Links

Problem: Others have linked to existing entries. While Tinderbox easily accomodates this dramatic architectural shift, the static links of the web don't. I have to leave pointers from the old system.

Fixed: I made aliases of all the existing notes (not that many, really) and left them in the archive note. I exported the whole kit and kaboodle one more time. That created proper pages like I used to have. Then I tossed all the aliases in an unexported note. That keeps them around, their exported html is still hanging out in the export folder for the site, and if I ever forget and delete the legacy files I can pull the aliases back out again and re-export.

Cascading Actions

Problem: The old archive note had an action: publicationDate=today;hot=false; where publicationDate kept the note organized by blog publication date and hot marked entries which needed attention. But now I had a system which would expand with new year and month notes, and the months needed to have that action. Obviously I can't be bothered to remember to type that every month.

Fixed: I set up a few new prototypes. The prototype *year* has the action Prototype=*month*, and the prototype *month* has the action publicationDate=today;hot=false;. Now whenever I make a new month and drag it into a year, it becomes a *month* and gets the action. In point of fact I also gave the old archive note the action Prototype=*year* in case I forget to assign that, too. It took me a while at Tinderbox Weekend Boston to get my head around how to use cascading actions to enforce a data structurein that manner.

The Main Page

Problem: The main page is an agent that draws the first 7 children from the archive. After the change the children of the archive note are the years and months.

Fixed: This took a bit of kludge. I set up an agent called "pseudo-archive" with the following agent query:

1. descendedFrom(archive)&!(Prototype=*year*|Prototype=*month*|Prototype=*note*)

... got that? It's in the archive but it's not a year, month, or subtopic. None of those should be listed by themselves.

Then I changed the main page agent query from #first(archive,7) to #first(pseudo-archive,7). Naturally I left pseudo-archive not exporting its children and using textOnly.html as its template so that its presence on the site is masked.

Promiscuous Linking

As I've been getting further into textuality.org and writing more for the web (rather than for a journal, web-presented or no), I've developed a taste for 'promiscuous linking'. Linking thoroughly, linking anything that might be ambiguous and linking it to a page or site that is a good source of more information.

Doing this more often makes the web (and your writing) much richer and much more hypertextual. More words yield. More of what you write is in a context. Your thoughts are integrated more fully into a web of information.

Frequent and skilled bloggers seem to be good at this. There was some flak a while back about limiting the number of links you provide out of your site so that you don't lose a reader prematurely; I think that the problem was unsubtle linking rather than linking at all, and that advice of that sort was aimed at inflexible business sites anyway.

Ironically, this post was inspired by one particular entry from among my blogroll, but it's the only link I have time to put in this entry right now as I start in on a busy day at work.

ETA, 3/15/05: I guess 'promiscuous' is inextricable from its negative connotations outside the field of biology. I've heard it used value-neutrally in biology to indicate extensive interconnection even outside a sexual context. That use seems appropriate here, but I think I may need to find a less loaded term. Suggestions?

Visual Link Typing in Tinderbox

I'm back from the hiatus after Tinderbox Weekend Boston. I told a few folks that I'd send them this trick that I'm starting to spread across t.org. I found a neat way to visually display the type of a link when it is exported to html. I got it from wikipedia, where they use it for external links. An example is at the bottom of almost every wikipedia page.

The idea is to use css to define classes of the tag. You'll give it some extra space to the right of the content (say, 10 pixels) and then set a graphic as the background of the tag. Meanwhile in Tinderbox you're setting a class for each link so that Tinderbox exports the links with the right class from your stylesheet.

That's the idea. The practicalities aren't much more than that. Take or make a graphic for each kind of link. This wikipedia example is for an external link, and indicates that the link is leaving (your) site:

(external.png)

Then, in your stylesheet, set up a class for the link. Use the style to get extra space after the content on the right and the image as background:

a.external { background: url(external.png) center right no-repeat; padding-right: 13px; }

Then, in each link, specify the class:

You're set. When your link is exported, it will come out in the html as:

       <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org" class=external>link</a>

and it will look like:

       link

Note that this will only work for links where you have specified the class. If you've already made a lot of links without a class, you will have to go back and specify the class (or make separate styles for each class you've specified). And, somewhat frustratingly, there is no way in Tinderbox to act on links en masse with stamps or like you can with notes.

Hiatus

As you may have noticed, t.org is on a hiatus. I'm on vacation and won't be reading much hypertext for a while. I expect to be updating on a semi-regular basis by the end of January. And I definitely want to be back in the groove for Tinderbox Weekend Boston!

In the meantime, I just figured out that the "class" field at the bottom of Tinderbox's link-construction window means that I could be putting CSS classes in for my links and making them display where they're going, like wikipedia does. Now, how do I go back and fix all my existing links without a bunch of grep-based find/replaces in BBEdit?

Is Usability really opposed to productive confusability?

There is a fine line to walk between the seemingly opposed philosophies of usability and narrative-oriented freedom. Usability urges simplicity and clarity of design and structure; explorers of the web's new narrative possibilities point to the power and effect of intentional misdirection, ambiguity, and freedom. I think that the line is there, but is far wider and fuzzier than either camp tends to describe.

Different audiences

Both are presenting absolutes in hopes that their readers will understand the extreme statements and at least work toward them. I also think that the two camps are also simply arguing against what they fear the other side is saying:

• The usability folks are largely speaking to people designing commercial websites for inexperienced users. They are seeking to bring new readers into the medium by making the web less frightening and confusing. For their designer audience, user confusion means lost sales.
• The narrative folks are speaking to writers creating new fiction and narratives. Their readers' audience is more likely to be seeking unknown territory, and has more patience for diversion, exploration, and novelty. They may even be seeking to be lost or frightened.

Patron saints of different tasks

The two camps do speak to each other occaisionally, but by and large, they are patron saints of different tasks. And despite their different roles, the two are also integral to each other: narrative is in everything we do, whether we intend it or no; and if a site is utterly random or confusing, no matter how beautiful it is, you cannot get to anything of interest without learning a new language.

Another way to look at this line is as the border between:

• making it so easy for readers to find what they're looking for on your site that they see *nothng* but what they are looking for, and
• helping your readers to see things that they didn't know they were looking for, but might want, including surprising story elements.

I've got more to say about this, I think.

Tinderbox isn't yet groupware

Tinderbox is designed as a single-user application, and the awkwardness of trying to make it work as groupware is extremely frustrating considering the potential of the completely imaginary Tinderbox Server (which I will call Tinderboxen). I am amazed at many aspects of Tinderbox (and will be posting on them), but this frustrated me-- because I want it to be better still, not because it is broken.

Tinderbox would need a lot of work to facilitate sharing and groupwork. There's no client/server architecture available for it such as you find with FileMaker. There's no way to work with Tinderbox data except through Tinderbox, such as the clients-and-webform model of LiveJournal that makes groupwork across networks or platforms possible. There would need to be more integrated wizards that would help get users to where they wanted to go in the UI or data

There's also the more abstract issue of how to provide users other than the creator with easy entries into a Tinderbox file. With data that can be seen geographically, in outline form, as html, as text, or as a hierarchical chart, how do you communicate to a new user the structure of your particular file? There are rudimentary techniques for this such as "readme" notes and adornments, but these are cumbersome for trying to communicate an entire way of thinking-- and Tinderbox is flexible enough to accomodate extremely divergent tasks and ways of thinking.

At the same time, Tinderbox is almost there, and that proximity is agonizing. It stores data as xml, so the data structures are clean and accessible without proprietary closed-source markup. Other applications could work with the data. Tinderbox is great for seamlessly accomodating both live and static (archived) work, and has features built for workflow management. Recent versions of Tinderbox accomodate interactive wizards that could be the solution to the issue of paradigm-introduction. If I could share it, it would rock! (harder, that is)

An example of why it's so frustrating comes from a conversation with my girlfriend the other day. Her company is considering a production site for the show she's working on. Tinderbox could be great for this-- it would be part production blog, part static site, with FAQs and write-ins and enough other stuff that the organization and simplicity of Tinderbox would be an asset. The various staff members that might contribute wouldn't have to learn HTML or the structure of the site to provide content. The content would be abstracted and separated from the visual style (which the studio would likely want to have a say in) so that the design and copywriting for the project could proceed in parallel. It would accomodate funky HTML for those who want to use it, but would make the coding transparent to those who don't.

But to do this, they would have to get copies of Tinderbox for everyone who might contribute, or tie the project down to a single editing station. Tinderbox isn't very expensive as software goes, but it's really expensive if you might not use it. And then even if they got 15 copies they'd still have to pull a time-share on the data. If they could serve Tinderbox and have keyed licenses or the like, it would be the perfect tool. But, for now, sharing is a dealbreaker.

HCI and the hypertext community: style only?

I had a neat discussion with friend!Josh tonight about his "outsider" observations on the field of hypertext and where the work is in it right now. Some of the discussion circled things that surprised us by how they are not being addressed by the community. I jotted down some notes about things that caught my interest.

HC and hypertext communities aren't talking ... ?

It seems like there should be a lot more communication between the Human-Computer Interaction community and the hypertext community. Right now, most of the work between those two areas seems to be largely aesthetic: how do you design a web page so that people can navigate it, and what features do you put into your site to allow readers to do what they're trying to (or, perhaps, find things they weren't expecting)?

But there's so much more that could be going on! People don't only Interact with computers, they think with computers. One reason that hypertext is such a powerful tool is because it offers the potential for people to work with their information in ways that are more loyal to the way they think. Good hypertext tools usually solicit pages of raves by new users who are amazed to finally find a tool that facilitates they way they really work.

So who is:

1. applying the research on hypertext to the ways that people actually read it?

2. taking the research on how people browse websites (probably the largest dataset on how people read hypertext)

3. applying that to the ways that we design hypertexts to be readable?

4. taking the knowledge of the way that people work with computers and applying it to hypertext tools?

This stuff must be out there, but it's hard to find examples of people combining the study of how people interact with computers with the study of how people work with hypertext. "Hypertext" ought to be smack in the middle of people-and-computers. I think that Eastgate Systems has hit #4 with Tinderbox, but the prohibitive learning curve indicates that they've got a ways to go in terms of UI. I think that Dynamic Diagrams is a good example of some of the other points.

no one is looking at their hypertexts in terms of projections

Many companies right now not only have external websites but have internal websites, or documentation libraries, or both. And these libraries are typically organized and accessed around some sort of hierarchical index that you burrow down into or expand into lexia. They might allow plain-text or keyword searches. Or maybe both.

Looked at broadly, those libraries are hypertexts, and the readers of those hypertexts are very often coming in from some specialized angle that has nothing to do with the "official" hierarchy the index imposes. What is needed is specialized projections of that hypertext: indexes arranged along more of an FAQ model, or searches that give hierarchies and paths (structures) as a result. Multiple simultaneous hierarchies or paths. There's no reason not to except that the site designers aren't used to thinking of documentation as a hypertext like that, or not thinking about their site as a hypertext in the aggregate.

There's been some interesting thought about the role of narrative in business sites, and many good sites research the paths that visitors take through their sites, but few seem to be thinking (or talking) about giving readers structures for their personalized visits like customized site maps or multiple simultaneous indices.

The example we discussed was the documentation site for MySQL. What about a page that shows the site in terms of "how MySQL is SQL", or "trying to get MySQL to work with other platforms". These topics are worth more than a page, more than a lexia-- they've got their own hierarchies and paths of relevant information from sources all over the existing documentation.

napkin-sketch business model: Hypertext Projection consulting

So maybe there's a professional opportunity for a consultant or consulting company to come to a company and do just that: "We'll come in, take your site or your documentation, and organize it. In sixteen ways simultaneously. We'll talk to people about how you need to use it, how to set the new system up to grow with you, etc. And you'll have the site back at the end, plus some."

Afterward, the company will be aware of their sites or libraries as a text that readers interact with, build paths through and into. They'll have tools to continue applying that awareness to new material. Readers will have features that acknowledge and facilitate the process of building a productive or interesting narrative out of using the site.

This does depend on companies embracing that as a philosophy (internal documentation is worth the investment, or documentation will help people be productive), and that might be a tough sell. It might also require specific software or substantial redesigns of existing content, both of which might be frightening to clients.

related sites

Without getting too far into the various related fields of information-visualization or information architecture, here are some sites that seem particularly relevant. Maybe I should see if they have job openings. ^ _

Ben Fry went through MIT doing information visualization. The anemone tool shows realtime visualization of site structure, traffic, and exploration.

Dynamic Diagrams is a group I've had my eye on for some time as the work they do seems really interesting and impressive. I wonder how they work, and how their clients see them. Their case studies are fascinating and to my inexperienced eye seem to be a survey of practice in information architecture.

Document Strategies does some work in this field, billing it as "providing systems and services for converting paper documents to computer-based information and then accessing and managing that information."

It all comes back to LJs

The best English teacher that I had in high school used to assign Literary Journals, journals where we would write brief (two-page) responses to many things we read. She'd assign LJ entries for chapters in books we were reading, on sections of The New Yorker magazine, on poems, and on articles that other students had clipped out of the newspaper that related to our class topics. What I got from LJs: everything is readable, and sometimes it's worth writing out your thoughts to everyday readings.

I feel like textuality.org (t.org) is a direct descendant of Ms. Hepburn's LJs. It doesn't matter that every entry is a great work of art; it doesn't even matter that they all cohere as a greater work; what matters is that I'm forcing myself to organize and articulate my thoughts (and to have thoughts) on what goes past my eyes on a regular basis.

Hypertext structure and annotation

As I've been working on textuality.org I've come across a productive reason to work in hypertext. Annotation and citation is less ambiguous when there are anchors within the text to use for point-by-point discussion, and it is easier to discuss the structure of the work when that structure is made more explicit.

Annotating marked up vs. monolithic work

For example, when discussing a printed paper, or one which is monolithic in its marked-up structure, I must work to explain to my reader what part of the work I am referring to. I can do this by quoting, which then requires the reader to find the source of my quotation in the original work. I can paraphrase, or point to a section, as with "when the author says x, y, and z, I say: For shame!"; that then requires a clear reference on my part and a familiarity with the work on the reader's part.

An example is my review of the Eastgate article Lindsay's Story: Hypertext and Liberation in High School. The article is monolithic, so I need to paraphrase to connect my thoughts to the author's. A counterexample is my discussion of the hypertext Chasing Our Tails. That work's short lexia make for small thought-grains to point to. Each page is an idea, so when I discuss the work, I can point very closely to the idea that I'm referring to.

A print analogy would be a paper written in response to another (monolithic work) vs. notes written in the margins of a page (hypertext annotation). When you can write in the margins, you can show where in the work you're pointing so that your comments are in the right context.

Anchors make for good annotation

This isn't strictly an issue for the hypertext tools that we know now-- html, Tinderbox, etc. It's really more a matter of markup and structure. Even in a linear printed document, if you have headings for chapters, topics or subtopics, or even page numbers, then an annotator writing even in a separate work can point more accurately to the location in your work that they are discussing. It's better to have a meta-structure (something which reveals the structure of your thought) like chapter headings than an arbitrary markup like page numbers, but either way you have anchors for annotation.

That structure is almost built into hypertext. Unless the author is working hard not to make their lexia correspond to discrete thoughts, then a hypertext has some sort of anchor structure to hook into for annotation. The granularity is smaller than "the entire work" if you break the work down into lexia or if you use anchors or headings to give the work some sort of structure. I say almost because it's easy to build a web page that doesn't have anchors, or headings in proper HTML. Many works on the web divide works depending on the length of the text, or how many advertisements they need to fit into the reading. This isn't entirely the fault of the authors-- most web tools make it far too easy to produce pretty documents with no meta-structure. They focus on presentation to the extent of making it possible to make a document look marked up ( for headings) without being marked up in a hypertextual way ( or even

).

Still, if the tools are built well, and are used moderately correctly, then the lexia, pages, sections, or chapters will not only correspond to thoughts, but those thoughts will be more easily referenced... and visible.

Why Swarthmore?

I'm really curious about the preponderance of Swarthmore people in the field of hypertext. There's Ted Nelson '59, who coined the term and helped invent the field. Andries van Dam '60. Mark Bernstein '77. Justin Hall '98, who probably invented the weblog as we know it, did so in Willets dorm in 1994. And that's not to mention more recent alumni who are as yet small fish in the pond. Is it, as one of the biographies of Ted Nelson suggests, because people who go to Swarthmore (and end up in computing) are too scattered for anything more linear or structured to contain their daydreamings?

Textuality is officially adolescent

T.org is officially adolescent. I say this because:

• It is going through growth spurts (new categories, issues)

• Its voice keeps changing

• It's about to look very different

• While it's going through all this, it hasn't been doing much but changing (few actual posts)

• I've been arguing with its code a lot (specifically cross-browser css).

T.org is in the process of finding itself. It's not quite a normal blog, and it's not just an archive of resources and reviews. Mark Bernstein calls blogs like this Fagerjordian (Tinderbox News 21 Oct 2003), after Anders Fagerjord's surftrail. Fagerjordian blogs are more deeply hypertextual... the blog is clearly one projection, one path, of a richer hypertext and the blog uses that richer structure to enrich the reading experience. I bought into that scheme for t.org before I'd heard the term, so I hope it's a positive development.

So, yes... for another week or so my t.org worktime is going into css and Tinderbox rather than reviews. Hope I don't lose all three of you that are reading this!