Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Not all of them, of course. Birds are so much a part of our environment that we barely notice them. I’ve said the same about weblogs. Monetized and platformized and app-ified, the basic functions of blogging live on — a reverse-sorted stream of posts, a mechanism to engage with visitors to…
An interesting piece. Easy-to-learn hypertext authoring tools like Twine and TextureWriter have encouraged many of my students to give this kind of storytelling a try. As longtime experimenters and scholars in interactive narrative who are now building a new academic discipline we call “computational media,” we are working to create new forms of interactive storytelling,…
In school, we expect our professors to answer our questions, to return our emails, to invite us in for a consultation, to pay attention what we say and read carefully what we write. One of the important lessons of being a student journalist is learning how to deal with the unexpected. Unfair things happen in…
A hypertext choose-your-own adventure narrative set at a board meeting at a game development company. You are the lead writer on a game that is going straight to hell. And guess who has to fix it? I clicked through out of curiosity and kept clicking. Very enjoyable.The Writer Will Do Something by Matthew S. Burns.
EL231 “Digital Storytelling” (Dec 18-Jan 22) Unit 1 (Dec 18-22) mostly experiencing digital stories (reading, watching, listening, playing, whatever), and reading articles & discussing them online. (We take a break Dec 23-Jan 1: no classes, no homework.) Unit 2 (Jan 2-7) trying out 4-5 tools for creating digital stories, and learning two in a little…
Jerz > Writing > E-Text Are you almost ready to publish a web site for the first time? If so, follow this checklist, and you’ll avoid many of the common writing and navigation problems that might prevent your visitors from accessing or fully appreciating your content. Have you tested your site on someone else’s computer? Do all your links…
Jerz -> E-Text How many times has it happened to you? You click on a promising link, and you get a 404 “File not found” error message, or an otherwise unhelpful page that offers no useful clues about where you should go next. If you’re not ready to give up, what do you do? Hack…
As a plucky new faculty member I wrote a critique of an early design for the online journal Kairos. My article was snarky in form (I invoked Mystery Science Theater 3000) but serious in intent (“The overdesigned Kairos site perpetuates the myth that online rhetoric is necessarily complex and arcane,” with the earnest bold text in the original). They hypertext…
Cloak of Darkness Project The “Cloak of Darkness” specification is a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. My own contributions include: Iffy Cloak of Darkness (Inform 7, via Parchment) Scratchy Cloak of Darkness (Scratch 2.0) Linky Cloak of Darkness (Hypertext, via WordPress)
Jerz > What is Interactive Fiction? Interactive fiction (IF) is computer-mediated narrative, resembling a very finely-grained “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. The interactor reads a short textual description (“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.”), and types instructions to the computer (“enter building”). The plot can change based on what the interactor types.…
Jerz > Writing > Technical > Short Reports [ 1 | 2 | 3 ] Begin a short technical report by giving away — as quickly as possible — whatever your reader needs. You’ll probably have to write the introduction last, after you have sorted and organized all the pieces, and after you have figured out what, exactly, is the most important thing you have to…
In the past few days, I’ve read a few of those head-shaking “you won’t believe how poorly college students write” essays, which always make me uncomfortable. They typically quote student “mistakes” out of context — maybe the assignment was to brainstorm or take risks, rather than produce polished gems; maybe the student is not a…
Jerz > Writing > If the purpose of your web site is to amuse or alienate, be as unconventional as a modernist poet or a jazz musician. But if the purpose of your web site is to inform, follow these top 5 conventions of web pages. Lead with Your Best Stuff Inform with Meaningful Links Employ Consistent Navigation Prefer…
My undergraduates are working their way through N. Katherine Hayle’s My Mother Was a Computer. They told me that they benefitted from the notes I wrote the other day, so I’m continuing the effort. In Chapter 3, Hayles reminds us that the “worldviews of speech, writing, and code” are not merely theories, they are…
I’m preparing to teach this foundational work of hypertext theory. On the surface, this short story is a spy thriller, in which a subversive protagonist relies on intellect to match wits with a worthy, authority-wielding foe. Originally published in Spanish in 1941, this story takes the form of a conventional narrative, but its plot features…
It’s tempting to leave the story there, and to let the hypernovel, or whatever you want to call it, become part of the technological imagination of the past, like the flying car. But I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now. On the one hand, e-books…
Required Books Recommended: buy Amazon’s Kindle versions, available via the iPad Kindle App. (You are, however, free to purchase a paper version instead, and if you want an ebook but prefer a different ebook reader, you are welcome to seek out other editions.) The AISN is for Amazon’s Kindle edition; the ISBN will help you…
Jerz > Theater RUR [ Intro & Summary | Image Archive | Review ] R.U.R. was written in 1920, premiered in Prague early in 1921, was performed in New York in 1922, and published in English translation in 1923. The following year, G. B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton were among those in London participating in a…
Jerz > Writing > Job Materials Technical Genres Related Links Resumes | Top 5 Problems Cover Letters E-Mail | Reports | Oral Mechanisms | Processes Memos | Instructions What is Tech. Writing? Prototypes | Usability Writing Webpages Titles for Web Pages: In Context and Out of Context Blurbs: How to write them for web pages Navigation: An often neglected component…
Jerz > Writing > If the purpose of your web site is to amuse or alienate, be as unconventional as a modernist poet or a jazz musician. But if the purpose of your web site is to inform, follow these top 5 conventions of effective web pages. Lead with Your Best Stuff Inform with Meaningful Links Employ Consistent…