Hypercompendia

Of possible interest, I’m passing on this information from SIGWEB:

New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 2009(3) / 2010 (1)
Deadline for paper submission 7th September 2009

We invite papers for forthcoming issues of NRHM on the following topics and related issues:
– Conceptual basis of hypertext systems
cognitive aspects,
design strategies

– Intelligent and adaptive hypermedia
personalisation, adaptation,
knowledge organisation systems / services, semantic web, Web 2.0

– Multimedia issues
time and synchronisation,
link dynamics, link metrics,
multimedia authoring,
content-based retrieval

– Interaction
navigation and browsing; search systems,
studies of information seeking and navigation behaviour, testing and evaluation
user interfaces, experience design, multi-modal interaction

– Tools for hypermedia
(automatic) authoring systems

– Applications
literary and creative hypermedia, social networking,
physical hypermedia, virtual environments,
applications in commerce, digital libraries, e-learning, e-Government, the professions, etc.

The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) is published by Taylor & Francis and appears in both print and digital formats. For more details and indicative topics, see the journal website: <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nrhm>

Submissions may take the form of research papers or shorter technical notes and should be submitted electronically at the Journal’s Manuscript Central site <http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham>

Informal enquiries may be sent to the Editors:
Editor: Doug Tudhope (<dstudhope@glam.ac.uk>)
Associate Editor: Daniel Cunliffe (<djcunlif@glam.ac.uk>)
Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan, UK

Alan Bigelow has a new addition to Webyarns, a piece called “Higher Math” that offers: “God created the integers, all else is the work of man.”

I particularly related to the Multiplication section; my roomate back in the early days was Carol Wojciechowski.

For some reason my MacBook doesn’t like the site and within seconds turns on the fan and protests loudly. I shoulda got the MacBook Pro I guess. But I can switch to the pc with all the hoity-toity memory and space easily enough.

Learning for me has always been easiest in the doing. Instructions are held aside and come into play when a need arises that can’t be figured out by clicking buttons, turning screws, guessing, or the real motive of comprehension as to how something would logically work. But I’m also hampered by a stubborn resistance to change.

That said, when I fell in love with Storyspace as a means to write hypertext story, it was a pita to relearn and rewrite into Tinderbox even though the two are very similar in many ways in the processing and theory of linking. Tinderbox offers a world more of capabilities and the visuals of mapping and layout are more open and yet precise in the graphics. I’ve been fiddling around with several projects in Tinderbox, starting from placing a few short hypertext stories into a project space and from there transferring a much larger Storyspace piece into the medium, and progressing to a new project for a longer novel to make use of the research and note-making spaces that would act as an outline or rough plotting structure for the narrative. Even though I don’t know if this is going to in fact be a hypertext work, the concept of having it take shape in a more cohesive manner than pages of scribbled notes (I’ve never been an outline person, except to make the required one for teachers’ purposes after a story or essay was finished) is something that at this stage of my life offers invaluable assistance in saving time alone.

What’s nice about technology and the tools that software offers is that even with manuals and thick text of instructions, a user can always maneuver within the simplest form that suits his own needs, knowing that should more arenas of possibility open up, the field is there.

I’ve decided to drop out of this summer project as far as doing a daily hypertext but as always, cheer on and support the Tunxis folks who will be involved in what promises to be a fun and creative endeavor.  It begins on May 22nd and you can follow their progress here: 100 Days Projects

While focusing what brain power I had available in the last two weeks on linear story in another attempt to meet deadlines of lit journals, I’ve done little in the hypertext department except to put a story or two into the Tinderbox environment to compare it to the way I’ve done the same with Storyspace. I have found a funner way to work in Tinderbox, by using the colored box changes as a visual allure. Something I’ve always liked about Storyspace–particularly the Mac version–is the crisp graphics of the screens that you write into. It inspires by enhancing the tone. Tinderbox can work similarly, though I’ve not yet found the connection between Notes besides as they might contain a single story within and those Notes connected as lexias in typical hypertext narrative form. The individual stories themselves right now do not seem to have a connection but I can easily see how Tinderbox would be the more useful program in which to both make the connections, and yet provide the containers to separate them into their individual selves.

Twiddling a little with it then, but won’t be able to put more time into it until the lit journals have closed for the summer and I’ve no rational excuse to put it off.