Hypercompendia

A black bear chasing children, a phone call, a death.

Last night’s production is a bit more than I want to handle this morning.

(Oops!  clicked the wrong link–meant to put this in the Creative Writing weblog. On second thought, I’ll leave it here–as the nature of the dream suits the hypertext form and if a story develops despite my resistance, here is where it belongs.)

At Planet Interactive, a good post on the topic of games, narrative and character by Emily Short that expands the Hypertext 08 workshop discussion.

Missed a lot of the conference yesterday since while I can certainly appreciate the creative concepts of the web and of linking structure in its complicated intricacies, it’s just not something I’m going to be dedicated to learning beyond what I need to do what I want to do.  I was amazed at the posters, mostly by young students who appear to be coming up with some great visuals of an elaborate technical system and I can only say that if their current interest extends beyond academic learning, we’re in for some minds that will move the future.

Instead I’ve been enjoying the city. Walking around, finding Market Square (though the "culture and art" exhibits were not quite there or up to their marketing.  Today between ht08 sessions I’ll hang a right off Wood Street and check instead the red outlined "culture district" to see if it’s more prevalent as its more stationary than the ongoing Arts Festival in town.

Though there are events I’ll likely drift into, I’d suggest once again reading Dennis Jerz’s excellent ongoing reporting of the conference at Jerz’s Literacy Weblog for updates on the conference sessions.

Likely the only down side in the Creating out of the Machine Workshop was that no one won the Hawaiian Vacation–all expense paid trip for two–as no one pointed out the five-sided cube in my presentation.

Sorry guys.  And, Aloha!

I’ve been having fun working on resolving a problem that involves some maneuvering and changing of the Keynote presentation on hypertext I put together so that I can make it available here in the easiest way (at least for the reader/viewer!). One method was to place it into Quicktime and toss it on YouTube or try to embed it here, so this is that attempt:  Hypertext: The Transfiguration of Writing and The Writer

But there’s always good things to learn along the way:  1) there are quite a few videos on hypertext (not all quite hypertext, but just use the search term and look through them; one in particular is Battle of Hypertext I believe. 2) that you can’t have a 7:30 timed movie clip without sound.  It came out so long because without the ability of manual advancement of the slides, I had to leave 15 seconds per slide to allow some reading. In some cases you’ll be bored out of your mind; in others, you’ll have to speed read.  Okay, so that doesn’t work well, but it’s a step in the process, and this weblog is a log of all my adventures in new media stuff, the great discoveries along with the dopey.

So here’s the dopey:  You gotta have audio.  So unless I put my munchkin voiceover which nobody will enjoy, I tried to think fast of a song that lasts that long.  What came to mind first?  MacArthur Park of course!

Back to the drawing board.

Let’s give a big round of applause for Dennis Jerz who has been faithfully on-scene reporting (now why’s he so good at that?) on the workshops and now on the conference itself.  I’ve given up since there seems to be a special talent and skill for the quickthinking accuracy that Professor Jerz is giving us.

Haven’t had a chance yet to replace the Windows version of Paths and need to work on that today–if possible without the Dell laptop here since I’ve only brought the Mac.

I have the Powerpoint version of the Keynote presentation I made and will upload that one shortly and add it to the previous post and the sidebar.  PPT is fine, though you won’t get all the same neat transition effects that Keynote provided.

Then I’m going to be conferencing, Pittsburghing, and reading and writing the day away.

Though without the accompanying commentary (believe me, you’re all the better for it), I think I’ve been able to upload and direct you to the Keynote presentation made at Hypertext 2008 –

Hypertext:  The Transfiguration of Writing and the Writer

Oops–I think what you’ll get is the whole program view instead of just the presentation in ready to play format–I’ll have to rework this…

I am a writer.  I can rewrite the rather lengthy post the hotel hookup just lost on me but I am a woman and get cranky too.

Right now the woman in me wins.

Later.

Designers of Literatronica (website listed in sidebar) these gentleman gave a background of the beginning of Literatronica. 

Empower the computer to become a part of the literary exchange to join the writer and reader.

Mathematical approach. Lexigraphic Hyptertext (just notes here–I’m trying to listen closely.

Adaptive  Fiction:  Event and options

Temporal Development of the plot: Intro -climax – resolution (or #of pages read)

Narrative distance between spaces in continuous story. Shortest paths, hypertextual friction, hypertextual attractors.

I’m letting Dennis Jerz and Mark Bernstein get some of this down and paying closer attention.

Maximize reader interest/minimize hypertext friction.

Juan then gave a brief demo of the underpinnings of stories created in Literatronica and how they are put together  and the lexias calculated by probability, what has been read, and shortest distance. Changing the offering to the reader gives him different readings.

The computer crunches the numbers to work with the work by balancing out what has been read and what is available–and this is under author control.

Chris Marino touched on the problems voiced in reading hypertext: getting lost, not knowing where you are within the story, and repetition of reading. Chris touched on his work, A Show of Hands, and gave us some of the feedback he’s gotten on the piece which led him to label the threads to give readers some sense of choice (color coding works along with titling works for this as well).  Chris showed a method of using time as a method of plotting.

A Show of Hands has a carefully planned structure of where the reader will be going. He has assigned a numerical value on distance to ensure that the reader–while maintaining choice–will be guided by the computer to the next most likely (closest) choice.

Good stuff.  Gonna finish reading what I started there and consider the theory behind the calculations as it might apply to Storyspace for example.