Print publications -- from newspaper articles to marketing brochures -- contain linear content that's often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use.In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition. On the Web, such content often feels like filler; it slows down users and stands in the way of their getting to the point.
For example, in print, discussing the tall-friendly rooms in the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas feels somewhat interesting. That's not the case online when a user is looking for tall-friendly rooms in Chicago (or wherever he or she is going next week).
Web content must be brief and get to the point quickly, because users are likely to be on a specific mission. In many cases, they've pulled up the page through search. Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.
Writing: June 2008 Archive Page
Writing Style for Print vs. Web
Collaborative Authorship Made Easy
The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it, wikis include tracking information so anyone can look at who makes changes to the texts and compare the different versions at different points in its creation. Try to do that with a collaborative paper written in Word.
Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper)
Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide... I wonder that this audience might include so many quantitative researchers that she might have spent a bit of time explaining more about ethnography. Again, I'm used to scholarship with a long discursive introduction, so I always feel out of place when presenters rush through their introduction. I'm generally far more intersted in the related research and the motiations for study than in the mechanics of the model, but that's a feature of my disciplinary training.
Ethnographic study of very personal connections in a small web network of Brazillian bloggers. Motives for blogging include creating personal identity, social interaction. Popularity is a strong draw; getting more comments, being the center of a network; a blog is a "publicity strategy"
Age range 15-50 years. Some 32 of [did she say 40 some?] bloggers in the community responded. Tracked "interaction memes" (everyone does it; publish the meme to belong) and "informational memes" (an opportunity to create authority and popularity by being the first to post a meme).
Interaction memes -- send a questionnaire or the equivalent of a chain letter, bond with your gorup by answering these questions creatively.
This is different from publishing information that there's a new online journal or YouTube link -- these kinds of links aren't repeated.
Interactional memes are connected to creating a personal space. Informational memes are connecting to creating authority and knowledge. What social capital does the blogger want?
Interactional memes -- visibility, interaction, social spupprt. (Relatively more emphais on maintaining new ties.) [This is about modding and mutating the meme, so that it maintains its novelty, not passing it along.]
Informational memes -- visibility, reputation, popularity, authority. Bridging (creating new ties) rather than maintaining and strengthening existing ones. [It's likely that bloggers who regularly come up with new ideas probably have at least some "long" connections with people who aren't tightly connected within their groups.]
Making Revisions Hyper-Visible (Short Paper)
David Kolb
14 years ago, published "Socrates in the Labyrinth." How do you revise a hypertext? Mentioned some philosophers who published retractions and revisions; scholars publish both versions. Notes that Auden and other poets revised their works when collecting them for many reasons, both internal and external.
Revising literary works and revising expository or argumentative works. Consider that Joyce revised "afternoon, a story" -- if you mark them they seem like part of the text. There are very few reasons to emphasize revisions in a literary hypertext. In an argumentative work, you might make those revisions and the reasons for them explicit.
Not just the revised text, but also the meta-comments about the work.
Print -- you have two volumes, with the later one footnoting the earlier one. The new version generally replaces the old version, since print operates on an economy of scarcity. Hypertext has an economy of abundance. Wikipedia and Word hide the revisions. In hypertext, you will link the old and new versions. You could leave the old structure and add notes. But a significant update would include new links; the revision will embrace the original (or large parts thereof) but add complexity.
Revision of an argumentative hypertext will lead to a new hypertext with an more elaborate link pattern. [I'm following this closely because I'm working on the development of the map to Colossal Cave Adventure, and all this talk about nodes and paths is sparking lots of ideas.]
Why revise hyper-visibly? Helps scholars clarify what was meant; helps readers identify the changes; helps readers judge whether the changes are useful; provides more chance for the author and reader to think together about the issues.
Audience comment: This is a subset of a more general problem -- we don't have rich enough object models in which the objects were all accessible in versions, this problem would go away. [I can't help but think again of the variable implementations of Douglas Adams' H2G2 -- TV show, radio play, IF game, movie...]
Audience comment: When we change words we often intend to change the whole work [but the example was poetry, rather than David's example of expository.]
We're All Stars Now:
Reality Television, Web 2.0, and Mediated Identities (Short Paper)
Michael A. Stefanone and Derek Lackaff
Derek began by echoing Raquel's paper. Why would someone post the cursed rabbit confessioal meme? What happens to identity when it gets mediated. Invoked the post-coporality promised by Turkle and others. [I'm reminded of My Tiny Life, where Dibbell notes that the best writers got the most virtual "action" -- while people were no longer limited by their bodies, the were, in a textual environment, defined by their ability to write. I think it was insightful for a writer like DIbbell to percive that a world that doles out rewards according to writing talent is really no more fair than a world that rewards looks or riches.]
Reality TV recently voted 2nd worst invention of all time, but it's very popuar. Rise of Web 2.0 represents ability of people to participate. [I note that "youtubing" has entered the lexicon... ]
Observational learning -- requires a model, a learnable behavior, and a context that conduces people to model behavior. [Reminds me of the Frontline video, "Merchants of Cool," that tracks trends through the various forces that combine to manage what the "mooks" and "midriffs" of the world think are cool.]
Hyphotheses -- Reality TV consumption related to time spent on social networking sites, breadth of networks including online only friends, and photos shared online. Asked participants to self-report.
People who watch TV news, fiction, documentaries has little effect on network size, connectness, or photo sharing; rate of watching Reality TV is significant.
Takeaway - we have empirical links between traditional media consumption (watching TV) and the "really cool things that are going on online." Definite change in the understanding of social space. People talking about the social networks that they're part of in new ways. Having an identity online is increasingly banal.
Look at specific media genres -- not TV as a whole, but what kind of TV being watched. [The reality TV genre really got its start during a writers strike in 1989. COPS, Americas Funniest Vidoes... also a resurgence of sitcoms based on figures who could provide their own content, such as Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen... probably building on the success of The Cosby Show.]
Future directions -- attention as power, validity of articulate network structures.
Audience comment: Note that professionals and academics put up lots of information about themselves; we do a different kind of self-promotion, but is it really different from youth social networking?
Response: The scale of social networking sites is greater... novel in the scope.
Mark noted that it could be social networking that gets people interested in reality TV.
The Revenge of the
Page (Long Paper)
David Kolb
The little paper on revision you heard a little while ago was the paper he had intended to write... the issue of complexity began as a footnote, then became an appendix. The dream was complexly linked hypertexts with long, complicated hyperlinks; patterns of links that demand rereading and demanding contemplation beyond the boundaries of the next link.
Quote from Mark B invoking the concept of complex linking... Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Complex literary effects to be achieved from this idea.
14 years later, "Let's face it, there aren't very many complex hypertexts like that."
Wikipedia's links are all single-step links, going from one self-contained mini-essay to another; links are "you want more information? Here's some more."
Reality: Google Analytics looks at Kolb's own example of a complex hypertext: Kolb's Sprawling Places. [I have got to follow up on this for my work on Colossal Cave.]
Kolb notes that Google Images is sending most of his visitors attracted by words in photo captions. Almost nobody visited a large number of pages. Most people navigate through the site by clicking the menu bars rather than the inline links.
Trivial number of people encountered his text in the way he hoped reading would develop. Does it make sense to continue to support the idea of expository and argumentative texts with complex linking patterns.
There are some assertions that can't be made well in a single page; understanding of some concepts requires complexity. [I would add that complex sites can also meet the needs of multiple users, giving newbies a way to explore unfamiliar terms, and advanced users more depth, generalists more breadth, etc.]
The page metaphor -- we expect a page to contain a little mini self-contained essay. We browse things we expect to be relatively self-sufficient. Web-writing tools are optimized for the creation of pages. The link becomes the link between pages rather than part of a chain of links.
But there's a deeper reason. Node and link hypertext itself is one node at a time. We expect one node to replace the other. Maybe we need to do more than we've done if we want complexity. Maybe hypertext is more than nodes and links.
Collage/montage? Make the individual pages more complex. You could use the collage effect of a page to create complexity within the page. Pages are becoming more than pages -- embedded rich media.
You might also make more than one node visible. You can have a web page spawn another window, but that's seldom done.
Replace complexity of linkage with complexity of spatial juxtaposition. [That's a return to the model of the highly annotated illuminated medieval manuscript.]
More sophistication in the relationship between tet and graphics. Images aren't simple illustration. [That's an interesting connection to the idea about links.. an image that merely illustrates is like a Wikipedia link that simply offers more information. A link can also offer an alternative opinion, provide context, refute opposition, etc.]
layertennis.com -- color commentary on two graphic artists competing with each other to generate images in the same file on different layers. The play of images and text is a way to bring complexity into web habits of reading.
Audience comment: Shocked that the invention of the web browser is a done deal and there's not much else to do with hypertext. The web browser chains hypertexts in the same way that the book when it was first invented was chained to the wall. [But hold on... the illuminated medieval manuscript was chained to the wall because the value of the labor and materials that went into the production of that book was probably higher than the value of the building to which the book was chained. How does the "browser as chained book" metaphor map to the present information economy? The pen that's chained to the desk in the bank isn't there to prevent people from writing, it's there so that people who are in the bank can count on having a pen there for them to use. I don't see the chianed book reference hanigng together beyond a surface analogy that the medum of the browser is like a chain, but the chained public book was chained so that more people could consult the book and not hide it in their private collection.]
Academics have long talked of the "academic conversation." Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?
Hypertext '08: Susan Gibb, The Hypertext Effect: the Transfiguration of Writing and the Writer
Susan presented us with the thinking behind the creation of a 300-node creative hypertext work in StorySpace.
Susan walked the audience through the process of a single "writing space" morphing into a story. As the writer moves in time, the character reveals her past through vignettes. Reflections (from the present looking back) and memory (more dramatic and lyrical than the present.)
Hypertext welcomes "those neat distracting ideas" that we have to squelch into order to develop an idea in a linear format.
[My question... what does this do to focus? Are 1000 story spaces, of which 300 are really good, better than a story with 300 good story spaces? Are 300 story spaces, of which 30 are phenomenal, preferable to a story with just 30 spaces? Moving from brainstorming and world-building to the narration of details can be tricky... Susan is very careful and meticulous about what she does, and while like Alan she's inspired by the openness of the medium, my mind jumps to how I can use this in a class full of students who are taking basic comp, and therefore haven't developed even the basic skills that contribute to a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent webtext. Susan's experience introducing multimedia to older people can build on the print literacy that a 75-year-old has developed over a lifetime of reading.]
Susan discusses the separation between the writer and character, and referred in passing to "One of the Annes," which I found interesting.
[I never think of the "you" in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel as having multiple personalities, but of course if the book were a "Develop-Your-Own-Consciousness" novel or "Interpret-Your-Own-Metaphors" book, then perhaps I'd need different language to describe the experience.]
Just after I wrote the above, Susan just mentioned the CYOA format...
Susan notes that a linear form needs a reason to go off on a side-track, but in hypertext you don't need a reason. [Again, does that limit the focus? I don't mean to suggest Susan is encouraging frivolous side-trips, since of course the reader can avoid sidestories. What implications does this have for "Murder your darlings" -- Quiller-Couch's advice for writers who cling too much to passages that just don't fit. "Marginalize your darlings"?]
Susan says she feels she hasn't mastered the hypertext form... she says she doesn't mind when the reader misses side stories, but she does have a "full" text in mind and she wants to make sure the reader experiences it all.
[Is this why she says she hasn't mastered the form? Would there be no difference between vital nodes and optional nodes if she had mastered the form, or if she masters the form will she be more confident in her ability to steer the reader, or if she masters the form will she embrace its differences and not worry it?]
Her narrative structure depends upon a loop, leaving the reader with uncertainty... suggests the image of macrame, with the threads forming a "complete story".
Susan noted that short sentences increase the pace in hypertext, but also the number of writing spaces. A short lexia forces the reader to stop and contemplate. [I'm puzzled... I would think that a long lexia would slow the reader down. I wonder how the use of bold keywords and bulleted lists would affect the reader's experience of a literary hypertext.]
Next example -- A Bottle of Beer -- a sample in Hypertextopia. Ended with a quote from Steve, emphasizing the value of even an incomplete sampling of a hypertext space. To "finish" a hypertext (as a reader) is less important than the value of contemplating the nodes one encounters.
In a question, Mark referred to "killing your children" and a "defense of hoop-de-doodle." "How do you decide what to cut and what to move to the margins?"
Susan noted that editing with each writing space means it's easier to trim the nodes.
Chris: 100 identical people each take different paths through a text, creating 100 different paths. To what degree, if you were to estimate the quality of the experience, would there be a few that are really great, some that are horrible, or would they be pretty much the same quality?
[Susan noted that she liked the slide presentation tool Keynote, a couple of times referred to "angry people" who followed a particular path through the text... ]
Marc from USC -- notes that Susan seems to value her work when the ideal reader meets the ideal story... value comes from sympathy between the experiences. Do we always have to write stories that look more like the new novel, and less like the discursive novel -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders.
How to get away from the concern about ensuring the reader get the "right" or "full" story?
Steve -- notes that we have not yet fully explored the aesthetic of linking. "It may be that every path in a hypertext is the only way to read it. Not the right way, or the wrong way."
Juan: If we have a message, the narrative piece created by the author, can be acquired by the reader... how closely does the reader's final perception of the work match the intention of the author? [Juan's point was about information, but the establishment of the author's intention is subjective, and the value of a work fluctuates in culture, just as the author's intention fluctuates over the life of the author, and our understanding of that intention fluctuates based on what kind of access we have to the author's notes, letters, etc.]
Mark notes that craft is important -- a work that's not communicating its message might have a technical imperfection.
In the introduction, Deemer notes that the audience in a play is passive, and conjures up the idea of a family Thanksgiving in which multiple groups interact in multiple rooms, with the audience inserted into the drama like ghosts who can follow different stories.
[My note: A ghost audience who can follow different characters is not a full participant, like the payng audience who performs dramas with professional 'ractors in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age... Each of Deemer's videos is a separate, linear narrative... we're still watching Bobby Meadows wait for his ride, in a scene that's doubtless providing various hooks into the other scenes in the corpus. The audience's attempts to put the story together is an active intellectual effort.
There's a trilogy of plays that are designed so that when a character exits in one play, he or she enters in another play. Can't recall the title of that trilogy...]
After watching Bobby's scene, Mark Bernstein asks the question -- is this scene a story? (We didn't have the chance to discuss his question before Steve started the next clip, but I think that's like asking wether an individual ant is an organism -- an individual worker ant can't reprotude, and the male ants don't even have jaws so they can't eat...)
Now we're watching Kate's story. Kate speaks directly to the camera (which I'm pretty sure is visible in the reflection of a window at one point). An intersting cinematographic detail -- during a confrontation between Kateand Dennis, both actors deliver their scene in an unbroken shot, with the shot of Dennis overlayed slightly over Kate's image (with the focus therefore on Kate).
After just watching two clips, and noting the ways the hooks in these two stories, begin to intersect, I'm intrigued by the complex authorial process necessary for creating an ensemble drama (like a soap opera or epic TV show, such as Babylon 5 or the last few seasons of Deep Space 9).
Chris Crawford stated that a story with seven choices -- "none of them informed" means the experience is not interactive.
In what manner is this presentation hypertextual? We see different sections of overlapping stories. Susan notes that the clips don't actually present one event -- some of the characters don't interact with each other. We spent some time dissecting individual shots, such as Bobby wiping his shoes, and noting the apparent separation between Kate and Bobby.
Mark -- differentiates between story and plot. The sequence we choose seems only to affect plot, but it's possible to affect he story -- it may be that putting the events in different sequence may communicate something different (but he's reserving judgment because we haven't seen enough of it). "If it's not interactive, it's certainly ergodic." (Good point.)
Marc from USC -- notes the significance of dramatic irony, and its powerful affect on the viewer's perceptioin of events.
We skipped ahead to "Nuts and Bolts," which describes Deemer's use of Storyspace. To produce the video, Deemer has to do a linear storyboard. Notes that live hyperdrama involves improv, since the timeline of the various threads has to line up. Video hyperdrama is easily manipulated so that timelines sync up. In fact, according to Deemer, for video, the script only appears after the separate filmed modules are assembled.
An interesting sequence defines a theater space for hyperdrama. (Reminds me of the rebellion against the proscenium arch which freed Expressionist playwrights from followig the conventions of the well-made play.)
Marc from USC challenges Demeer's statement that hyperdrama needs an address; also notes the connection to reality TV (with multiple cameras).
Somehow I worked a reference to Duck Amuck into a discussion of how instantenous scene changes affects the pace of drama.
Steven notes that he has offered to host Deemer to try to create the space for hyperdrama.
Saint EMC² is a more complete example, with text highlighted according to whether the link is an extension, opposition, or illustration of the linked text. That might be useful as a device to get students thinking about why they are linking.
Here's a thoughtful overview of Hypertextopia, from if:book.
High flatulent language
As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was "Highfalutin language is not enough." The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker's wordlist, but if it is written as two words, high falutin, then the second element of the compound can go unrecognized.
