The first sequence of chapters of Dreaming Methods’ latest digital fiction project is now online to experience – with future chapters to follow. Told through a series of semi-interactive scenes and video sequences where narrative fragments have to be “found” in order to progress through the story, Consensus Trance begins with a protagonist who has just returned from a school reunion where strangely none of his old friends remember the same things he does.
All posts tagged Hypertext
Relationship Between Print and Meaning
I came across an interesting distinction between “writing” and “word processing”.
Writing is getting the words right. Word processing is… processing. It’s taking what you’ve written and doing stuff with it. Either bolding this or italicizing that or centering the headline or inserting a table or tweaking the margins or changing the font and sizes or adding color or… That’s word processing or page layout. … The keyboard and the return key is all you need. That’s writing. Once you’ve got the words right you can take that text and process it in a word processor or page layout program later. … When you’re about to write that’s all you should be ready to do: write. Leave the rest for another day. There are words to get right.
I like this distinction between writing and processing.
What about emphasis? Sure, the italics, or whatever, that display that emphasis are “processed”, but the emphasis itself is written. How can I indicate emphasis — how can I write emphasis, when someone else has determined for me, in advance, that emphasis must “come later”. It doesn’t come later. Later, I might forget. Emphasis is not processed. It is written.
On a similar note, I wonder: what about links? Are they written, or are they processed?
Super Mario’s Crisis
Artkrush, the online arts magazine, published a new issue today, about digital art. I find myself asking… is this art? The magazine’s editorial tone seems painfully aware of that question:
While the phrase “digital art” used to evoke thoughts of cheesy Photoshopped dreamscapes and clunky animated GIF graphics, it now applies to an ever-expanding, sophisticated field of interactive web projects, mutated video games, and hacktivist interventions.
Confounding critics who have sounded the death knell throughout its development, Net art has continued to thrive as a conceptual medium for artists and arts organizations.
I decided to side with my personaly interest (bias?), to ignore these “confounded critics” and look for myself, to see whether I liked any of this art.
What do you think? Continue Reading
Weblog Discourse
The Reading Experience has a recent post that poses some interesting ideas about “this point in the development of the weblog as a forum for serious discourseâ€:
- What exactly can be done in a blog post?
- Blogging about blogging can become just another variation on navel-gazing.
- Certainly blog posts can be casual or superficial, but I see nothing in the nature of the form that requires they be so.
- Plenty of literary weblogs are focused on longer posts that are frequently part of cross-blog debates that at their best have a seminar-like feel without being pompous.
And so on…
Close Reading New Media
Leonardo Digital published a review of a book of hypertext theory entitled, “ Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Media” The book applies a method of close analysis to new media. The review describes the book.
The book is actually a collection of nine essays divided into three sections––Hypertext, Internet Text, and Cybertext––with each section containing three essays. And so, in the first section, one finds analyses of Strickland’s True North, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, and M. D. Coverley’s Califia. Section two offers essays on Geoff Ryman’s 253 and Rick Pryll’s Lies, Raymond Federman and Anne Burdick’s Eating Books, and another on Ryman’s 253. The final section focuses on Darren Aronofsky’s website for his film, Requiem for a Dream; the interface for ebr (electronic book review); and the theoretical views underlying Grammatron by its author Mark Amerika.
Leonardo is yet another wonderful publication by the MIT Press. Leonardo is a magazine about “work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology”. That’s not all! These folks publish all kinds of stuff (all published by The MIT Press):
- the art, science and technology journal Leonardo;
- the Leonardo Music Journal;
- the Leonardo Book Series;
- the electronic journal,
- Leonardo Electronic Almanac;
- and our World Wide Web Site, Leonardo On-Line
Books in the Future
From the New York Times Books Section’s article, Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules:
“an experiment of how books might be in the future.” That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web’s ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.
Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions
Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions by Thomas Swiss, has interesting things to say about the role of collaborative creativity, and something he calls “hybridity”. Swiss emphasizes the act of writing, over the scholarly or public reaction to it: art over theory.
To hear the critics tell it, one problem with emergent digital literary and art forms is that they don’t yet have established stars. Where’s our Shakespeare of the Screen? Our Pixel Picasso? How long before we have a Digital DeMille? The assumption is that we’ll have them eventually — undisputed geniuses working in what is now generally called “New Media.†But behind this assumption is another assumption, one with a long, sometimes thorny history – that the “best†or “most important†art is created by an individual, a single pair of hands in the study or studio.
I Have a Humble Announcement to Make
I’ve finished a draft of my story. I call it “A House Without Walls“. It was submitted, in the typical last-minute way, for inclusion in the first annual Electronic Literature Collection, sponsored by The Electronic Literature Organization. If it is chosen, it will join other works in a volume that readers can download or borrow from a library. Cross your fingers for me?
If you read my last hypertext story, “To Win, Simply Play.”, you might recognize some of the same material, a small part of that older story. I hope my revision has improved the way the story flows.
Should I give you some long winded, writerly and obtuse introduction to it, its themes, and its reasons for being? Maybe, but only if you’re interested.
It is good to feel so finished with this story, after so long (even though I do have another version in mind, but that’s more of a technical representation than a rewriting).
Notes on Non Linear Writing
I’ve spent the day rewriting my hypertext. Probably because of the amount of time I’ve already spent with it – it might also be that it has been a while and so I’m coming to the process with a fresh perspective and a renewed intentions – it seems easier this time around. I found a way to go about it. I thought I would post some notes about it, for others to see, and discuss.
From the beginning, I took down the things I wanted to say, from a previous draft, and wrote to fill in any gaps. When I felt I had expressed a complete idea, I stopped. I reread what I had written, looking for “words that yield“, or anything that suggests a next point in the story. I found a couple of options, marked them to become links, and returned to my previous draft. I found the parts of the text that suited me for the “next” idea. Right after the section I had just written, I took down the things I wanted to say, and wrote to fill in any gaps, and so on . . .
A Swift Kick in the Pants
There’s nothing like adventure like a deadline, the delivery of that swift kick in the pants… sweet sweet motivation!
I’ve got just the deadline I need, too. Four days from now. At the end of January, submissions will close for The Electronic Literature Collection. What’s that, you ask?
an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution.
Its time to get around to it, and do something with the electronic novella I wrote. I’ll be much closer to my goals for it if I edit it, with an eye on the criteria for this colllection.
Literary quality will be the chief criterion for selection of works. Other aspects considered will include innovative use of electronic techniques, quality and navigability of interface, and adequate representation of the diverse forms of electronic literature in the collection as a whole.
Born Digital
The Institute for the Future of the Book announces the winners of their “Born Digital” competition.
The competition called for works that address the changing structure of the “page” and the manner in which text and illustration work together in the digital environment. We chose three winners: Anne Frances Wysocki for her poem “Leaved Life;” Juliet Davis for a game-based narrative called, “Pieces of Herself;” Kevin Henry and Rick Pawela for their design textbook, “Rapid Ideation Sketching.” Please read more about our winners below and visit their work online.
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Bike Race
My bike-courier roomies are planning a bike race. The interesting thing, to me, about this bike race is that it is a “choose your own adventure” race. Racers will arrive at predetermined checkpoints, where they will discover a new chapter in the story of their adventure through baltimore. The object of the game is to stay alive!
Of course, the reason this is all so interesting to me, in addition to the fun factor, is my interest in non-linear narrative. Journaling this event might be an interesting challenge.
Check out the Shock Trauma Bike Race Event Page if you’d like to participate. Stay tuned for more details…
The Future of the Book
Every so often, some pundit tells the world that the death of print is on its way. Allusions to Gutenberg are all around. The relationship between technology is podered, etc. Robert McCrum adds to this discussion with a recent article in The Guardian entitled “E-read all about it” (source: Grumpy Old Bookman)
It’ll be ten years or more until a viable electronic book is produced? Why! Can’t they just tweak the iPod a bit?
Freedom of the Press is Limited to Those Who Own One
Jakob Nielsen is a noted expert on the subject of internet usability, a subject commonly known as “user-friendliness”. Nielsen’s October 17th article, Weblog Usability, has been linked to and discussed all over the place.
I’ll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon, by taking issue with something in that article. The overall premise of the article is a good one, that web logs should be informative, easy to navigate, and that they should contain certain key elements: author biographies, main ideas, etc. Here is the part that bugs me: Issue Number 10.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a “usability issue”, it bothers me that this is true, and it is true. I’ll admit to personally looking down upon those MySpace blogs, because they’re so ugly, unfriendly, and lacking features, but is that fair? Is it appropriate to prejudice something published online, because its author chose to use a free service to publish it? Is it fair to presuppose that the blogs provided by blogger, or friendster, etc. are somehow lacking in the level of technological sophistication compared to other blog software. They are not any more or less sophisticated. Most of the free internet publishing systems out there are actually quite good. What’s especially good about them is that they are generally usable even if you are an AOL user, naïve when it comes to computers. They assume a certain level of inability with or disregard for maintaining those “usability issues”, on the part of their users, and so they take care of those things, only providing templates that work for example. Yes, the free services are limited, and many of them contain advertising, but I don’t see that as a valid reason to judge their content to be any less deserving of attention. You have to read more than the address bar to make a decision like that.
A.J. Liebling once said that “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Why shouldn’t everyone be able to have, and to use, a free press, free-of-charge?
Categories and Structure
It has always bothered me that I have a website called “No Categories” and yet its contents are still arranged categorically. It seems I’m not alone in this.
Michael Heilemann, the video game guru, has given a new structure to his beautiful website, Binary Bonsai. He explains…
Political Blogging
In DC after the firewords today, I noticed an article in the Metro section of the Washington Post. Politicians Deal With Newcomer, The Blog: Va. Candidates Find Help, Lies on Web
First came this posting on the site virginia2005.blogspot.com: “David isn’t the only Englin with designs on public office. . . . There’s going to be an Englin running for Congress in 2006, but not the one you think. I know for a fact that Shayna has already been getting pledges for money for her race.”
Then a slightly more disturbing note appeared on the same Web site: “Driving home tonight, guess what I saw on the Englins’ front lawn??? Democrat Greg Werkheiser. I walked back to try to listen into the conversation but couldn’t hear much without being obvious.”
Writing Tools
In addition to the writing about strong language mentioned in the previous post, incisive offers reviews of writing tools: software that helps writers. The list isn’t very long, but it’s a great idea. So far, only Macintosh software has been reviewed. Unfortunately, Tinderbox hasn’t made it on the list yet.
Not all the “writing tools” out there are software. ScribblingWoman provides a link to Writing Tools, little tips like this one:
“Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.”
There could be more writing tools out there. Some questions come to mind:
- What’s out there, other than Microsoft Word?
- Are there better spell/grammar/style checkers?
- Is there an html (standards?) friendly word processor?
Content is King
A recent theme among the people who make websites seems to be that there is not enough emphasis on the content of a website. Their battle call is “Content is King” People who make websites seem preoccupied with visual presentation, and they do not seem to be concerned as much with the substance of the presentation.
Zeldman says, to communicate visually one must first have something to communicate about.
Recent discussion has produced a small handful of tools or strategies that emphasize content during the web-building process. Still, the vast majority of resources out there are centered around presentation more than content.
A list Apart, a respected web magazine for people who make websites, gives roughly half the number of articles about content as there are articles about design . Many of the “content” articles are about little bits of code, more than they are about content.
There are three very good articles about content.
- 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, by Mark Bernstein will “help you keep the good words (and readers) coming.
- How to Write a Better Weblog, by Dennis A. Mahoney shares “tips to enhance the writing on your personal site, blog, journal, etc.”
- Reading Design is a good article for the design-minded to read in order to reconsider the reading experience.
Writing for a Schema
for the ever-ongoing revision of “To Win, Simply Play” a friend of mine has helped me work out an xml schema. I don’t really write xml but basically it works like this: Each node can contain annotations in addition to links. The annotations are text that appears depending on whether the reader is interested in it or not. that appearance is determined, in part, according to what has been read previous to arrival at that node. There are also links, of course. the xml can spit its content into either a flash interface or a text interface.
My question is, how should I write/edit/arrange the copy so that I don’t go insane, and so that it can be easily input into the schema?