"His general stance on email is off — understandably so. Who could ever have predicted our email culture? He is, for example, very up for doing email on weekends because “I’d rather answer email on Sunday and be in my pyjamas on Monday”. Unless the “Monday pyjamas” refers to working from home (which isn’t mentioned anywhere), this reads like a naive assumption that an hour tackling unending email on the weekend corresponds to going in late on Monday. Which, you know, it should. But it doesn’t.
Also, this gem: ”One of the enormous attractions of email is that it is not interruptive like a telephone.” This should be true, and is for some people, but I know that I and others struggle to restrain email checking to once or twice a day. Also, check this: ”You can process [email] at your leisure, and for this reason you may reply to messages that would not stand a chance in hell of getting through the secretarial defences of corporate, telephonic life.” I think not!"

""

""

""

"the possibilities of storytelling on the iPad""The key opportunity that authors overlook when thinking about new narrative technologies is how these interactions will make the reader feel, and how that emotion relates to the story world. Interactivity (particularly the haptic interactivity allowed by touch screens) can create a deeper connection with the protagonist/avatar than traditional print literature. We shouldn’t be striving for a sense of wonder and marvel at the new technology itself, for that will fade as soon as this type of writing becomes the mainstream. We should instead be trying to use the new technology to access deeper emotions in the reader: frustration, accomplishment, doubt, fear, pride, loyalty, and so forth. Games are already doing this very well. Perhaps it’s time for interactive writing to take a lesson."

""

""

See especially slide 21

""

via http://htlit.com/archives/June2011/Pottermore.html

"there’s a lot of interest in computers and narrative (whatever we’re calling it). Several groups need to be talking to each other but are only peripherally aware of the others’ existence. People want to make things happen but aren’t sure where to start. Over two weeks I heard murmurs of no fewer than 4 ideas for future meet-ups, unconferences, workshops, etc. that would focus more on discourse and collective creation than presentation. People want more discussion.
Blogs and Twitter will never replace a conversation over a coffee or glass of wine, but we, as a community could be doing more to foster discussion in online environments. I’m not talking about building another directory or repository for work. Even just linking to each other, discussing each other’s ideas, and using the familiar hashtags to have better conversations would be a start."

""

see also http://www.markbernstein.org/websci11/

Slide 26. There seems also to be some poetry here!

See also http://www.markbernstein.org/websci11/websci11bernstein.pdf

""

See also http://www.sjfc.edu/academics/arts-science/departments/english/fac-staff-detail.dot?id=733854

Interesting:

“(Mis)Uses of Argument: The Toulmin Model of Argumentation in Contemporary Composition Textbooks.” Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, & Letters, Oakland University, Rochester, March 2006.

“It's Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes.” (with Rachel Azima, Scot Barnett, and Brad Hughes) Ongoing Education Session, Writing Center, UW-Madison, May, 2007.

via http://htlit.com/archives/April2011/ToftsInterviewsTedNelson.html "This distracted absorption continues for the 50-minute duration of our interview, as I converse with a man in constant conversation with himself, working the arcane rules of a filing system of thought that has become second nature to him over many years. I’m not surprised, then, when he tells me that he prefers the “simplicity” of cassette tapes to the digital recording device I have brought with me for the interview. With its reassuring analogue loop of rewind-able data, it signifies a form of reliable and repetitive recall that Nelson has been yearning for throughout his life.""In the process of asking me if I am familiar with Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), he discourses on the correct Japanese pronunciation, placing heavy upward emphasis on the second syllable. He had clearly been corrected on the inflection in Japan and has made it his business to pass the lesson on. He describes the famous plot of how the “same” events are narrated differently by four witnesses in a linear fashion, one after the other, in diegetic time. Picking up on his notion of “sideways” to describe how simultaneous, linkable documents relate to each other in Xanadu, I take the plunge. If we can imagine Rashomon not being told in linear time but simultaneously, in four dimensions, could that be an analogy, or way of imaging the structure of Xanadu. He agrees enthusiastically, with the qualification that it is not an analogy, but the exact image of its structure."

"many of the things being pro­posed as utopian pos­si­bil­i­ties in, say, the early 1990s, when I started teach­ing, have sim­ply come true."

""

""

""

"Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . . ""The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.""I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."" Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. The Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that was perhaps intricate; that circumstance could have suggested to the heirs a physical labyrinth. Ts'ui Pên died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the maze."" In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses-- simultaneously--all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages.""In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."

""

"sustained exposure to the Internet is changing the way many readers process the written word. Texts are shorter and more flagrantly interconnected, with all kinds of secret passageways running into and out of one another. This has already changed the way we produce, read, share and digest our writing. Inevitably, it will also redefine what it means to practice book criticism, at least for those of us who aspire to write for something like a general audience.""Martin Amis, one of my reviewing heroes, made an apt comment once about the special nature of book criticism: he said that art critics, when they review art shows, don’t paint pictures about those shows, film critics don’t review movies by making movies about them and music critics don’t review concerts by composing symphonies. “But,” he said, “when you review a prose-narrative, then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative.” This is the magic, and the opportunity, of the form. In reviewing a book, we respond artfully to a work of art in its own medium. We write words about words — and then, as the conversation progresses, we write words about words about words about words. Our work is a kind of ground zero of textuality, in which one text converges on another text to create a third, hybrid, ultratext. This self-reflexiveness doesn’t make critical writing secondary or parasitic, as critics of the critics have said for centuries: it makes it complex and fascinating and exponentially exciting. It reminds me of Aristotle’s description of the mind of God, an apparatus so divinely perfect it can think only of itself: “Its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”"

"does this reaction arise from o the words changing over time, or from the experience of approaching a new form of art?"

via http://htlit.com/archives/December2010/Layers.html

""

via http://htlit.com/archives/December2010/OneorMore.html

"GNU, SourceForge, Wikipedia are among the greatest achievements of human civilization. No shit.

These creations depend on the same techno-commercial practices that enable hedge funds, outsourcing, and the multinational corporation.

Liu: "we work here, but we're cool."

But how cool is that?""Wikipedia. It shouldn't work, but it does, and its effectiveness depends far more on human behavior than technology.

This is not technical, but rather social determinism.""As a practice of socialized inquiry, ergodics probably does belong to the project of education.

But if it is to be served in our schools, we must alter some basic assumptions about the humanities:

End the Two-Cultures divide that segregates literature from mathematics and other formal sciences;

Shift emphasis from simple transmission (writing) to the literacy of potentiality (writing-forward, or pro-gramming).

Grasp the profound difference between CONTENT (withholding) and DATA (giving out);

Inculcate and support collaborative work -- e.g., by demoting the monograph to secondary importance."

""

""

""

"Is there a way for only text to be interactive without forcing choices?"

"Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue is one of my favorite hypertext pieces, and I try to share it with as many people as I can (read it if you haven’t). But often I’m told that such a sparse interface looks dated by today’s standards. Certainly there is a very valid argument to be made for the preservation of digital art in its original design, but I can’t help wondering if the lay person might be more drawn to the story if the interface were updated with sexy javascripted text nodes and a more Web 2.0 sidebar design. Sadly, my suspicion is that it would indeed draw more respect from readers without changing a word of the already glistening prose.
Then again, audio visuals distract us from the anxiety of making choices and closing doors. Do we really want branching narratives? Moreover, do we want those choices to be so conspicuous?
There is much to think about indeed."

""

"The digital convergence of media and convergence of forms and convention have not yet been matched by convergence of study in education.”

"He splits this narrative into “seven distinct stages in the life cycle of a technology”:

precursor
invention
development
maturity
false pretenders
obsolescence
antiquity""His discussion about the future demise of the book rests, like almost all discussions of this nature, on the way he chooses to define “book.” Physicality. Not functionality. Nothing wrong with that, it just limits the power of his reflection to actually participate in the books future; instead choosing to mourn it. It deserves a good mourning. Kurzweil’s model defines the book as a physical form, rather than as a functionally-defined object. Here, I’m setting up a binary of sorts between the physicality of books and their function. I suppose that is dangerous but I’ll have to see where it goes. Kurzweil focuses on the paper, ink, thread, binding, cover, etc. For him, these characteristics constitute books. But there’s a functionally-defined alternative available. The question really is: what do books do? What cultural role do they fulfill? Books did not pre-exist their function. Their function co-emerged with the technological possibilities which constitute them. Certain technologies allow books to be portable, durable, reproducible; the impulse for portability, durability, and reproducibility can only be reasonably conceptualized within relative proximity to existing or emerging technologies.

In these terms, papyrus were forms of books. And eBooks are forms of books. Books were never born, and they aren’t going to die. The only way to make that argument really is to argue that the functions that the core functions books performed, the the underlying cultural needs that books addressed, are going away. That’s a tough sell. The major weakness of Kurzweil’s prognostication is that he conflates the cultural function of “the book” with the physical form of “the codex.” Another way of making this distinction is to say that “the book” is a technology, while “the codex” is a tool. To extend this train of thought, there’s a huge difference between the idea of the lever and the idea of leverage. Wait. Maybe that’s not quite it. Hmmm. That’s sort of it. But the lever is entirely a physical tool to perform physical tasks. And the book is a physical tool to perform physical tasks (portability, durability…), but it also performs cultural (think tenure; think status, think entertainment) as well as epistemological (think libraries of all different sorts) and political (Audacity of …). I think that the book’s paper-physicality is an important part of all of these types of functions, but only in determining the way this work gets done and how that work is experienced (not just by readers, but by authors, publishers, booksellers, and academic officials).

For instance, part of what made books the powerful technology they became is their portability, not their paper. The reason the printing press was such a historical bombshell (delayed time bomb, really) is because it fostered affordable textual reproduction and consumerism, not because typesetting can be beautiful. The reason the codex stabilized the form of the book was not because it fostered solid-feeling bindings and pretty covers, but because pages turned the book into something that was navigable, rather than linear.

When the book is conceptualized (for the sake of historicizing) as a technology, rather than a tool, it becomes much more difficult to argue that books are dead, or that they soon will be. They are tied too closely to too many various and divergent cultural contexts. Those contexts will have to change significantly in order for the-book-as-function to obsolesce. As new technologies emerge, it is possible for new functions and practices to be imagined. As they are imagined, they in-turn push those technologies toward reinvention. And so on. The tools and technologies inform each other. They co-evolve. In most cases it makes very little sense to have pages in digital documents. And it makes no sense to have page numbers. Look backward. Writing on walls. Not very portable. Clay was portable, but fostered the stylus. The stylus fostered ink. Ink fostered paper. Paper fostered folding. Folding fostered binding. Binding fostered page numbers. Page numbers fostered indexes. Indexes, by making text intra-navigable, fostered hypertext. And although it’s a parallel development, there’s a relationship (via a jump) to databases, which not only are intra-navigable, but open books to reconceptualizing in terms of their content-production and authorship and physical stability. Again, I’m over-simplifying and reducing an incredibly complex technology and the infinitely more complex context out of which (and along with which) it has evolved. But I’m merely trying to suggest (gesturally demonstrate) that the book won’t change just because technology is changing. The contexts have to change right along with the technology. So it’s the social that’s the governor in this model."

""

"A world of newspaper and magazine sites are chopping their writing into short snippets in order to garner more ad views. But do they take advantage of the opportunity? No: they are all threaded in an endlessly inconvenient necklace of “next page” links."

""

"Part of what we have learned over the last two decades is that genre forms are highly embedded in the cognition of communities. It is plausible to consider the emergence of new digital genres but we are witnessing to a greater degree is the shaping of communicative practices across media to the demands of our own architecture, with its preference for patterns and order." "Thus, although associative linking has its place, printed text has its own logic that we have designed to support our cognitive processes. There are, of course, echoes of the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate here; I think the Nature side of the argument has a stronger case."

" In 1989-90, a system was created called Aquanet which is a collaborative hypert4ext tool for creating, storing, editing and browsing graphical knowledge structures. Aquanet replaces links with complex relations, are we headed in the right direction? By Hypertext 1994, there was hypertext without explicit links. VIKI was a spatial hypertext system in 1994, we still want linkiness but want it to be less formal, want to have implied relationships. In 1997, Cathy gave a keynote on the Smith System for defensive driving and applied it to hypertext. So looking back to look forward, links make us stupid, linkiness anxiety disorder has brought us to the world of App Islands, VB's motivation for links was to address the Balkanization of the scientific literature, we need to rethink links not getting rid of them. ""Vannevar Bush's article in 1945 wasn't new, it was written in 1939. Engelbart and Nelson both acknowledge the influence of Bush. Also, Bush's vision of Memex wasn't new, it was built by IBM 10 years earlier by Emmanuel Goldberg. Engelbart was inventing with singularity. Why are we not citing H.G. Wells instead of Bush? Bush was a safe and respectable ancestor, and was useful in ways goldberg, H.G. Wells, and Leinster and others were not. A question that was asked in the audience is why hypertext relies on studying its past history compared to other disciplines that don't do as much. As hypertext researchers, is relying on our past hampering us moving forward? Hypertext panelists say not, it is actually helping us reflect. Another question is about what in the vision of Bush is still not realized in hypertext today? Frank Tompa responds about how it is not easy to find other ideas that are related to ideas that I have. According to Cathy Marshall, we still want to have the stumbling (in human terms) and not have search engines be perfect. "

"The reason we seek to construct and derive models is to predict and explain what might be happening in social computing systems. For social media, we seek to understand how these systems evolve over time. Constructing these models should also enable us to generate new ideas and systems."

"is reflections and speculations range from the historical impact of supermarket wire racks, to differences between binding conventions (hardcover/softcover) in the US and the UK, to reading habits related to plot structure. Stross overtly and explicitly reminds his readers that his entry is only intended to apply directly to fantasy and/or sci-fi fiction. Here’s a quotation that represents the entry pretty well:

The mass market for paperbacks prior to 1991 was dominated by wholesalers who supplied retail stores — not bookshops, but local supermarkets with wire-mesh book racks. The wholesalers knew their markets intimately, and would match mass-market titles to the supermarket customers on the basis of their clientelle — SF/F was popular near technical schools, for example. When the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s forced publishers to raise their cover prices, the distributors pushed back and demanded that if the product cost more, it had to be bigger — not taller or wider, else it wouldn’t fit the racks, but fatter.""But as I read it, I kept wondering how his piece might inform my own understanding about the length of scholarly texts. I’m specifically thinking about journal articles, edited collections, and scholarly monographs in the humanities (most interested in Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship, though). Why do scholarly articles in CCC or College English or JAC tend to run to about 17-25 pages? Is it attention span? Is it a certain number of rhetorical moves necessary (minimally, anyway) to make an argument in our discipline? At first, the possibilities are really wide open to speculation.

One thing I don’t think is a major factor is the cost of printing. This is likely a huge factor when it comes to edited collections and monographs, but it seems less important to article length. For instance, if a journal issue is going to run to 175 pages, and there’s room, in theory, for an article of 150 pages, or two articles of seventy and eighty pages. Or seven of twenty pages each. So where does the 20-25 page number come from? I don’t have an answer. (Do I ever?) But I would like to introduce a relatively non-material concept into this reflection.""Length is a measurement relating to a linear text. One of the huge advantages of digital texts over print texts, though, is that digital tools make possible non-linear arguments in ways that that print can’t possibly offer."

"The other point I want to make is about the nature of the links that Mark Pesce puts so much emphasis on. As I said, he talked about a tendency for some commercial publishers to resist linking. Later on he talks about the way links distract and how this means that fewer long texts are being consumed. Coincidentally, the same morning there was a post on the O’Reilly radar blog: Ebook annotations, links and notes: Must-haves or distractions? – O’Reilly Radar (it’s short so you can afford to go and read it). This looked at the same issue – the author’s conclusion is that our reading tools should allow us to turn links, annotations, footnotes, marginalia etc on and off so we can be distracted, and drift with the links or not as we choose. I agree – sounds like it must become part of our reading experience."

"Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else."

"This unusual use of the book's architecture leaves the reader, rather than the writer, to cull and combine these scattered fragments of text through multimodal acts of association; thus the reader — Mallarmé prefers the word "operator," etymologically linked to "work," oeuvre, from the Latin opus1Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003): 242. — becomes an (inter)active participant in the poem's construction."

"Though the work raises the much-debated questions of authorship—does the reader really have as much authoring power as she’s lead to believe through the implications of “Your Text” and “You” placed next to Trettien’s name?—the recombinatory practice employed by this work was of particular interest. It has become modern practice to serialize, remix, link, tear apart, and piece together. This thesis views 17th-century poetry through the lens of a culture accustomed to this way of thinking."

"The iPad has a read–tap asymmetry, where text big enough to read is too small to touch. Thus, we definitely recommend large touch zones on any Web page hoping to attract many iPad users.""The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.

It's the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.""In contrast, long-standing GUI design guidelines for desktop user designs dictate that buttons look raised (and thus pressable) and that scrollbars and other interactive elements are visually distinct from the content.

The traditional GUI separation between "church and state" — that is, between content and features or commands — has carried over to modern Web design. Those 1993-style image maps are long gone from any site that hopes to do business on the Internet.""n different apps, touching a picture could produce any of the following 5 results:

* Nothing happens
* Enlarging the picture
* Hyperlinking to a more detailed page about that item
* Flipping the image to reveal additional pictures in the same place (metaphorically, these new pictures are "on the back side" of the original picture)
* Popping up a set of navigation choices" "Similarly, to continue reading once you hit the bottom of the screen might require any of 3 different gestures:

* Scrolling down within a text field, while staying within the same page
o For this gesture to work, you have to touch within the text field. However, text fields aren't demarcated on the screen, so you have to guess what text is scrollable.
* Swiping left (which can sometimes take you to the next article instead of showing more of the current article)
o This gesture doesn't work, however, if you happen to swipe within an area covered by an advertisement in The New York Times app
* Swiping up

iPad UIs suffer under a triple threat that causes significant user confusion:

* Low discoverability: The UI is mostly hidden within the etched-glass aesthetic without perceived affordances.
* Low memorability: Gestures are inherently ephemeral and difficult to learn when they're not employed consistently across apps; wider reliance on generic commands would help.
* Accidental activation: This occurs when users touch things by mistake or make a gesture that unexpectedly initiates a feature. ""there's no consistent undo feature to provide an escape hatch like the Web's Back button.""In electronic media, the linear concept of "next article" makes little sense. People would rather choose for themselves where to go, selecting from a menu of related offerings.

A strategic issue for iPad user experience design is whether to emphasize user empowerment or author authority.""UI pioneer Jef Raskin once used the terms card sharks vs. holy scrollers to distinguish between two fundamentally different hypertext models:

* Cards have a fixed-size presentation canvas. You can position your information within this two-dimensional space to your heart's content (allowing for beautiful layouts), but you can't make it any bigger. Users have to jump to a new card to get more info than will fit on a single card. HyperCard was the most famous example of this model.
* Scrolls provide room for as much information as you want because the canvas can extend as far down as you please. Users have to jump less, but at the cost of less-fancy layout because the designer can't control what users are seeing at any given time.""Even our limited initial user studies provide directions for making iPad designs more usable:

* Add dimensionality and better define individual interactive areas to increase discoverability through perceived affordances of what users can do where.
* To achieve these interactive benefits, loosen up the etched-glass aesthetic. Going beyond the flatland of iPad's first-generation apps might create slightly less attractive screens, but designers can retain most of the good looks by making the GUI cues more subtle than the heavy-handed visuals used in the Macintosh-to-Windows-7 progression of GUI styles.
* Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness. Better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on your content instead of wondering how to get it.
* Support standard navigation, including a Back feature, search, clickable headlines, and a homepage for most apps."

"After pondering this conflict between of choice versus guidance, it occurs to me that digital narrative has been striving for the artifice of choice, knowing fully well that this artifice exists. It is not possible to give choice completely to the reader, a fact which has been discussed at length in the eLit community.<br />
<br />
Technical constraint, artfully masked as narrative constraints, offer comfort and guidance to readers. The dungeon master exists for a reason, though the ideal story seems to require his infrequent, invisible guidance."

"Why can't I put folders into my hypertext documents? Why can't I write on the desk? Folders should be just another sort of document. My home page could be one, or it could be a hypertext document. The concepts of "folder" and "document" could be extended until they were the same, but I don't think that that would be necessarily a good idea. It's OK to have differet forms of object for distinctly different uses. "

""

"I’m interested in tangles and multi-actor histories, and how you tell stories in them. Books are for the linearisable. Hypertext is for hyperhistories. I’m curious about how simple patterns in behaviours or social relationships somehow persist, complexify and grow over decades and hundreds of thousands of people, and somehow don’t die away."

"Unless you’re a hardcore geek who loves to build and customize your own applications, Tinderbox may prove to be more software than you need."

"The iPad hardware may not change much in the advancement of literature, but the fact that it represents a device that can store a portable library of interactive literature is a step in the right direction."

"If real UIs must be usable, and FUIs must imply things without needing to be usable, the UIs in electronic literature must lie somewhere in the middle."

This and
http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/artworks/The_Purpling/Stop_reading.html
are my favorite parts of this poem

"Celui-ci vient

s'associer au livre pendant la lecture

et fournit des informations

complémentaires au récit telles que

des images, des sons, des vidéos

et des textes de référence. "

"This dissertation defines the Roland corpus and electronically traces the themes, motifs and imagery common to its constituent works. The result is a semantically-encoded hypertext written in XML and ported to HTML. In it, passages drawn from corpus objects are interlinked and navigable through a web browser. The semantic encoding allows for indexing, semantic searching, and the creation of visualization tools for the corpus."

"direct, immediate conflict between the demands of story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game.""Precisely because the author has less control over how the reader encounters his story, he cannot structure the story for maximum effectiveness.""Reading hypertext fiction, unlike playing a game, is purposeless exploration and does not produce the same sense of desire, of compulsion to "play." In other words, hypertext fiction is an unhappy compromise between traditional story and game.""story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure within which the player has freedom of action.""Play is how we learn; stories are how we integrate what we've learned, and how we teach others the things we've learned ourselves through play. But play comes first. "

Controlled vocabulary for citation types (for links). Directional...

"I might recast it as “What if we stopped cataloging the same old stuff?” "What we have called cataloging, when it is not done for the first time, is these days for the most part consigned to staff who may not be catalogers, bought from vendors, or automatically claimed from larger databases to populate ours. Insofar as we have used these more efficient, more automated strategies, we have indeed “stopped cataloging.” What we haven’t done is modified our missions and our budgets to take more responsibility for these other often unique things that we have neglected, and as such we have been the instruments of our own demise."

"We present a randomized algorithm, which combines the popularity of the webpages, the website structure, and for the first time to the best authors’ knowledge, the similarity of context between pages in order to suggest the placement of suitable hotlinks. We verify experimentally that users need less page transitions to reach expected information..."

"The fact that the Voyager books can be read only with the Macintosh and the Sony books only with the Discman presages the turf wars -- remember Betamax vs. VHS? -- that could erupt over setting standards for electronic books. Next year Adobe Inc., the largest maker of software for desktop publishing systems, plans to introduce Carousel, which it hopes will pave the way toward a single format for electronic books. When stored as a Carousel document, a book or magazine could be read on Macintosh and I.B.M.-compatible computers, or on a special book viewer, like Bookmark, designed for electronic document retrieval. Adobe hopes the new software will be the first step toward the long-awaited paperless office, in which documents will be stored in electronic file cabinets and printed on paper only when someone wants to carry them around."