Category Archives: New Media

Eyeballs

At the moment my eyeballs look like this. I’ve been working long into the nights building Mac and Windows versions of Sandoval. Moving between PC and Mac resolutions aggravated the whole front of my face.

Storyspace: Next Generation

Storyspace is, in my mind, the best conceived hypertext writing environment I know, and I know the system pretty well. As a connectivity metaphor, it’s brilliant and prescient. The numerous ways of building relations and seeing how they can be built and abstracted are the reasons I wanted to go to Manchester. I have a stake in the future of hypertext both as a writer and teacher. The weblog is okay as a means of delivering info to my students. But it’s really not all that I want.

I’d like to promote Storyspace’s next generation manifestation. Much of this thinking comes from playing around with Inform 7 (why, in my editor, can’t I just put [ ] around Inform 7 and create the link automatically in Firefox?), Mediawiki, Tinderbox, Hammer, Inspiration, WordPress, Spotlight, Spatterlight, video editing software, and Flash. It also comes from practical work problems that we’re beginning to solve, linking systems together not by binary but by ideas and necessity.

In a way, first and second gen code is like asphalt. I can drive from one state to the next as a matter of reality. Code and hardware take you places. Then again, it’s also not like asphalt. What follows is a list:

1. Storyspace as cross-platform tool. People love their computers. This is the txt file idea. If multi-platform persists, then so must a txt reader or other cross-plat file.

2. Storyspace as narrative browser. In one way of thinking, text spaces in SSP can be viewed as independent from the surface. I can take an html document and have any browser translate the code and I can rework the code in Dreamweaver, but I can’t share the translation of that code in Dreamweaver. Describing a work-flow might be interesting here. Let’s say I link a part of a narrative from an SSP text space to a wiki, where the narrative progresses, but, in doing so, never really leave the country of Storyspace, then I proceed to zblorb (Texas), type >open the casket at the command line, and then move to a bit of video contained in another SSP space. Let’s say I then click on the video surface and intertwingle with XanaduSpace, then I go back to SSP in some way, basically using Storyspace as a narrative browser/development tool.

In this conception, Storyspace doesn’t become a wiki; it maintains its identity as an environment that can reveal another narrative building block and so on and so forth, and, of course, vice versa. The notion here is not to publish a “manuscript” or CD, but to create routes from one performance space to the next. Inadvertently, in the discussion, John and I will ask: “but will it work with video” because sometimes video or background noise is called for. The question for the creator becomes when did I need this relation to perform in another way.

Mediated Fidelity

From Sharpebrains’ interview with Daniel Gopher via A Blog Around the Clock

What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations” are the most effective and efficient way to do so.

This is an important point, so let me emphasize it. What we have discovered is that a key factor for an effective transfer from training environment to reality is that the training program ensures “Cognitive Fidelity”, this is, it should faithfully represent the mental demands that happen in the real world. Traditional approaches focus instead on physical fidelity, which may seem more intuitive, but less effective and harder to achieve. They are also less efficient, given costs involved in creating expensive physical simulators that faithfully replicate, let’s say, a whole military helicopter or just a significant part of it.

Fidelity then goes to the issue of driving or controlling a horse with your thumb. You know, the console controller.

Hypertext 07 and Bubble Worlds

I’m really bummed about my inability to make it to Hypertext 07. Manchester looks gand in September. Fortunately, my novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, was able to make it in my stead, and I want to thank Jamie, Mark and others for its safe travel.

My first regret is that I can’t perform TLGS. My second is having not written and designed the work on a Mac. Unfortunately, it was built in Windows over the last five years and would take some effort to rebuild in the Mac version of Storyspace. However, I will soon be embarking on this, relocating images into my MBP. I made the switch to the Mac this summer and am only now beginning to realize how important it will be to provide two versions of the novel or, even better, to allow for new ideas to develop because of this other method of revising.

TLGS tested all my powers in spelling, semantics, organization, and rewriting. It takes time to understand that in Storyspace, editing is a non-linear process, where linking can take the place of idea moving. In Storyspace, the writer doesn’t move a paragraph, though this is possible to do, he or she simply relates it to something else via a link. In the flow of story development a link may proceed from the shape of a cloud, or a returning mood in memory, thus motioning the reader down a path based on image not necessarily by plot. This means one must unlearn the remediated spaces of the typewriter, on which I wrote my first novel back in 1986, and the word processor. I found editing in Storyspace a deep, rethinking process, one that is almost impossible to share or explain. In TLGS, there are many areas of the text the reader will never see because they are simply bypassed. They are a sort of idea-based archaeology, bits of broken pottery that over time, I found no use for in the paths of the novel, such as a stretch of action that appeared at one time to supply the answer to a quandary, but that become too burdensome to keep in the possible flow. Likewise, the end of the novel may prove another beginning or yet another plot point if I was successful at making things interesting enough to explore.

In hypertext, the novel can form a cluster of lives that, much like Heroes, can spin off into an ever expanding universe of possibility. One link could provoke an infinite cluster of new spaces and times: Jackie meets Ron. Ron remembers his grandmother. A new story begins at the next link 1,000 years in the future with Grandma’s extended relation Jose, secluded on some rock being towed toward another sun. For the writer, hypertext can contain bubble worlds.

I honestly cannot say whether The Life of Geronimo Sandoval is a decent work. But writing it was something I’ll never forget. One image by the Rio Grande started it all off. That image also ended my progress into it.

CommentPress Up and Running

Future of the Book has a Commentpress page. It looks interesting and serious.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.