Archive for November, 2004

A site whose author is “teaching a small course in media aesthetics next term, “Jerz’s Literacy Weblog has posted a link to a very interesting article by George Landow, who is one of the key thinkers in the field of hypertext theory.

What is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about hypertext? What qualities does hypertext have in addition to those possessed by non-hypertextual forms of writing, which at their best can boast clarity, energy, rhythm, force, complexity, and nuance? What qualities, in other words, derive from a form of writing that is defined to a large extent by electronic linking. What good things, what desirable qualities, come with linking, since the link is the defining characteristic of hypertext?

The article is entitled, simply, Is this hypertext any good?
Evaluating quality in hypermedia

Speaking of J. Nathan Matias, I should take a moment to point his newest hypertext, Philadelphia Fullerene. The author describes the work as a:

geodesic narrative montage showing people, events, and themes of ethnic life in mid-19th century Philadelphia. [...] A multidisciplinary project, it pulls together skills in art, engineering, history, writing, performance, and recording.

Nathan was kind enough to mention my work in his description of the piece, so I won’t argue with him, but I would like to point something out in response to one of his paragraphs:

I may be wrong, but I believe that Philadelphia Fullerine is the first (let’s hope of many) hypertext sculptures. Because it’s a hypertext, it encourages readers to explore the history and connections for themselves, in whatever order or manner they choose.

What about quilts? A quilt is not exactly a sculpture, which leaves plenty of room for Nathan’s to be the first of its kind (my dad the art professor might argue more thatn I would). It seems like things like quilts, and like this geodesic hypertext, they have something in common…

YugoP has launched a new version! Here’s an introduction from the site.

Yugo Nakamura is a creative director, designer and engineer exploring various forms of interactive system in digital and networked environment.

Yugo has exhibited and lectured in Asia, U.S.A and Europe. Some artworks from his personal website have recenly been shown at Center Pompidou (Paris), Kunstlerhaus (Vienna), Design Museum (London). His commercial works have received many international awards including Cannes Lions, OneShow, Clio Award, and NY ADC.

Google has created a new search engine! Its called Google Scholar, and its purpose:

to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Of course, this isn’t all that very revolutionary, as one reader of my source (GrandTextAuto) has noted:

This seems to be just an impoverished version of CiteSeer, which has been an invaluable research tool for many years. The only advantage I see is that it is backed by the Google web-crawler, which is probably more extensive than CiteSeer’s. This could prove to be significant, but CiteSeer is still more featureful, including abstracts, bibtex entries, backwards and forwards linkage of citations and a host of other things.

There is a more in-depth review available.

So, there you have it folks. The next time you need a high-fleutin’ research tool try Google Scholar or CiteSeer.

According to MoorishGirl, there are new developments in computer generated text. As has been humorously pointed out, perhaps this is no good for fiction, but who knows, maybe we’ll put lawyers out of a job?

Randa sends a link to this essay by Daniel Akst, where he wonders whether current advances in technology might not allow computers to write fiction in the near future. Two programs are cited (Brutus 1 and StoryBook) and though the passages they’ve written aren’t earth-shaking, they’re still pretty decent.

I know that some of my readers are people who, like myself, are interested in hypertext theory, literature, etc. Those readers might be wondering if there is anything out there to do with such an interest. There is.

According to the recent newsletter from Eastgate, they’re interested in internships. This is an opportunity for anyone who is interested in hypertext, new media, and that sort of thing. I was an intern at Eastgate Systems last summer, and I loved it. If anyone out there is interested in the idea, or curious about it, I would be happy to offer any first-hand observations of the experience.

From time to time, Eastgate is happy to offer internships to talented students and new media artists. These positions give you a chance to participate in all facets of operations — editorial, marketing, fulfillment — while pursuing a central project in your area of primary interest.

Intern positions normally require an 8-week commitment, and carry a small stipend. Please send a resume and letter to

Interns
Eastgate Systems, Inc
134 Main St
Watertown MA 02472 USA