Category Archives: Hypertext

Games and Art

Roger Ebert sparks more conversation about the subject of games and art in this listing. Mark Bernstein responds here.

Some of this reminds me of our experience with Shelly Jackson in Contemporary Fiction. Each student in the course has a different physical reading of what I would refer to as “the text,” much as with games where puzzles can be solved in different ways or different choices lead to different outcomes, an allure of Borges’ garden.

The question of what makes something art or high art is still up for grabs, even when the concept goes back to Mozart. With games, the question not be if they are art, but “when” something becomes art.

Design School

“Remember: good ideation creates the innovation potential that the rest of the Design Thinking process makes actionable,” writes Michael Tiemann at Open Source.

When people think of design (and this is of course a generalization) they probably think of finished article not the “process” behind or the ideas that generated it. Do people consider a poem something “designed” by the poet. We don’t have to think of a poem’s visual or semantic arrangements in terms of the language of design. Roads, for example, just are: there when we leave the house. Their design, is, therefore, hidden.

Considering how an object is placed in a rock garden can be a question of design, not just “placement.” The environmental features of hypertext brings design logic to the writing, as would writing in Flash, because the author can arrange not just the narrative but also a visual arrangement of the narrative parts onto the screen, like stones in a garden, a wonderful layer of complexity that I think needs more study.

Designers of massive or small public spaces can and should study epistemology.

Touch Screens and Fiction

Now that iPhone has potentially settled the issue of reading and navigating with a generous small screen via touch, it might be good to think about to how to write, design, and export Storyspace, Tinderbox, and other hypertext environment experiences to these and other devices. Peter Brantley reports, in a different context, on the popularity of short-form downloads onto mobiles in Japan, so we know the habit can grow.

I had the opportunity to play with the iPhone a few days ago and in manipulating images it suddenly struck me that the interaction surface of the device will be an amazing place for which to write and design alphabetic and icon-based material. The screen is rich and the size is deceivingly huge and like a book it has an intimate feel. And there have been rare times when I wanted to turn my laptop screen to get a better view of something. There much more to say here, perhaps even the context that Peter Brantley goes into in his piece on reading.

The screen starts with “The” . . .
The user turns the screen to landscape mode and “The” fades and the word “Abrasion” appears creating the potential for an interesting sequence of experiences. Stretch text comes with a separation of the fingers. Reading spaces are tailored for small screen manipulation and experience.

What about poetry? Scroll, tap a link or an arrow, turn the device. Shaking, Wii-like, could scatter or rearrange the stanzas, or not.

This is not a post about quality fiction or poetry, but it encourages serious approaches the reader/writer environment.

Just a Note: I never trusted a Harry Potter effect. I’m hearing a lot about that. Again. The key to less and less novel reading will be about abundance. There’s no scarcity of things to read nor a presumptive “value” to any one form. I always considered reading pretty tough work, anyway, not something associated with pleasure.

Complimenting the Learning

Just to follow on this post somewhat . . .

I was twiddling with Tinderbox in the office yesterday, beginning some notes on medieval literature, when Carolyn arrived and she asked a series of questions about the tool. This took us into some play with prototypes and adornments as a means of organizing materials.

Of course, when write ups come on educational tools, such as in the two posts below, the talk often attracts around web logs, wikis, social/collaboration tools, and courseware. I think Carolyn liked where the work went with the note tool as software for students to use in the classroom and afterwards as a means of study.

My students don’t think about this, but I monitor how they work and manage things. This past week many have lost out because they forgot, lost, or misplaced their evaluation sheets. I hand the sheets out and the students return the sheets with their papers so that I don’t have to print or otherwise produce more copies. If they don’t turn the sheet in, I wait for them to produce the sheet and then I evaluate. The point is, my students, or most of them, not all, are horrible organizers of their own learning narrative. IThis is a neglected aspect of Secondary schooling. don’t know what they do with all the things they take from the classroom, how they manipulate their materials, save to their harddrives, or tab their progress through reading and notes. They lose syllabi, ask for page numbers (really!), forget definitions, disremember dates, and neglect the relations between material and reality. They need, in three words, awareness of organization. Tools like Backpack are made for organizing, but my students typically don’t know about them and don’t think enough about digital tools for this self-service. The ability to search for an object is hard to do with a notebook, but if done well, and with some forethought, it can be an interesting journey. But self-evaluation with the use of tools is a key idea in learning (a quiz is just such a tool). Learning anything. “Where are the directions?”

Courseware can be used for ordering, but students must take the time to figure them out. (Here’s a note: we don’t really need courses to teach students how to use RSS. We need courses that teach people how to teach themselves and look for the potentiality of woodblock.) Library databases also offer means of keeping track of required items and services, such as topic/subject alerts, and even the browsers on their computers can serve track-keeping of the self in an instructional or life context. But this calls for an awareness and inquisitiveness on the part of the student into “how” and “why.”

Carolyn and I ran into a wall when we got to the adornment part of Tinderbox. I’ve subsequently figured the idea out and it is sort of neat. For British Literature, our oddly named course sequence for the learning of “English” Literature, I want to organize my thinking about the ideas I work with and the readings we cover in the course, creating associations, and keeping track of examples, because I feel that more is there to be had for myself. One of the ideas is Leadership, another Fealty, still another Christianity and Languages. Ideas is the adornment at the moment, although but could be abstracted even further, which may come soon enough. At the moment, the adornment Ideas, currently in color gray, is the region where notes on Leadership and Fealty are “stuck.” I’ve created containers for Beowulf and Marie at the moment and will be racking my own reading through Lanval and Beowulf, linking off to ideas and other text snippets as they come to me or are found.

It seems to me that students could also do this, working with their laptops, if they have them, in class and then reorganizing as they evaluate what they learn on their own time, (on laptops or desktops), generating their own systems of classification and application.

Why does Beowulf sail to the aide of his kinsmen? When a student thinks they’ve figured this out, in addition to wondering at the significance, any number of tools can be used to help develop the analysis and make it relevant to the relationship between Lear and Cordelia. The relationship can be a link away or somewhere buried in that notebook in the trunk of the car.

I’m tired of the “we can sell a lot of shit to Colleges and Universities because they really don’t know any better” attitude. Tinderbox sold itself.

Hypertext and Commitment

Jesse Ives adds to a post with this comment

The “Game” of life is a serious one, and goals can be important. Of course that’s one of the problems people are facing; a lack of goals. I’m guilty of it myself, but that’s neither here nor there. If a person chooses a path often they can’t go back, but sometimes it’s not worth going all the way along a certain path for one reason or another (perhaps another has opened, or some other aspect has shed light on an undesired result) they choose to adjust or switch to another.

Life is hypertextual.

One question I would ask is can a person commit without some sense of goal. One can have a goal, a mind for an outcome, and this establishes path (Gawain). One can proceed on a path (Buddha, Spiderman) and acquire a sense of outcome.

I don’t want top players. I want students like Jesse.

Hypertext and Editing

Susan Gibb wrestles with editing the hypertext:

The premise is simple, a couple who either did or didn’t stay together after a college relationship and summer cross-country trip; the stories relate in that they are different viewpoints and different paths–the what if’s we all wonder about. But where they intersect–the hyperlink–doesn’t completely make sense as I have it, based upon words alone. The reader may well wander about forever and not come to the end of the story. There’s also a flow that doesn’t always necessary represent a logical storyline when links are clicked.

On Doors that Don’t Open

I figure it would be simple to make an interior that doesn’t work, such as a room whose doors are all locked from the inside. That involves a little bit of planning though, and I’d imagine that when a button is pushed and a guy named Chisolhm opens the door, for a brief moment, he’ll wonder if anyone has been snooping inside.

But back to the space. We have a six-sided room, no doors at all. Chisolhm, no, just Ed. Ed has his chin in a loose hand and he’s watching the slab. It’s a concrete box. As a room it doesn’t work, but he’s got to be wondering what to do with it, who made it, or how it might look elsewhere, by the sea, for example. On a Montana hilltop.

What does this lead to? Where would you put the window? Or is a window meant at all? The next time you see Ed, ask him.

Studies

Hopefully and soon, Lourdes Navarro will be off for study abroad in England. She calls herself one of Caliban’s children. It’s an interesting metaphor. It’s been a long road.

Good luck to you.

Patterns

What a great time tonight with the Narratives Group. The subject was patterns in music, art, and hypertext. We started with some study of Coltrane and Monk’s Sweet and Lovely and Blue Monk off the Carnegie Hall CD and followed how the “narrative” of the songs progressed as variations on themes, the essential structure extending from incredible manipulations. Then we moved on to photographs of Tom Friedman’s sculpture. It was interesting to listen to the group’s responses to each in piece in display, especially Zak, who got somewhat discomforted, saying, “It just doesn’t look real.” Taking common objects and repositioning them in space, time, and playing with their “nature” was just fun to engage with. Luminosity, weightlessness, density turned to hollowness.

Next we moved to Deena Larsen’s Samplers, paying particular attention to Firewheel. In reading hypertext, attention has to be payed not just to the reading environment, which will fade as new reading habits form, but to words in their multidimensional context and suggested patterns as the reader moves through an experience, establishing the sense of the speaker’s “joining” to the fire.

Thanks everyone.

Hypertext and Carpentry

In his novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, which he’s now calling an essay in fiction, Professor Sandoval has another feature of things to deal with: the idea of edges.

He enterprizes:

I’m laying awake at night thinking about studcuts for a shed, let’s say. Let’s say I want to make a 7 foot cut (about 213 centimeters) and draw a line for cutting. On which side of the line am I to cut for perfect length? The answer is easy. But the I’ve made the wrong cut several times because as I cut I momentarily forget which side establishes length, and I often can’t see with a saw where a cut begins in relation to the line because of the width of the blade, say at 3/32 of an inch, and the starting angle of the cut (my friends tell me this is why I need a miter saw). But the problem is not the reality of the shed, but where the edge actually exists in reality on the stud. The line also has width, thus a cut on any board is board + line width – extraneous piece.

I’m working on a survey of names in a phone book, each a link to a real human being. The phone book, filled with strings of text, is a hypertext of edges, each name an impression or image, a border completing the form of a human body. A library full of books with repeating titles. It’s impossible to cut two studs to perfect length. It’s also hard to fall asleep under these conditions.