Imagine a world where every word of every online article leads you directly to everything you did and didn't want to know about that word. That is the plan at liquidinformation.org, whose welcome mat is a movie of a foaming, roiling ocean, followed by the ominous question, "What happens when you unleash text?" The creator, Frode Hegland, a researcher at the University College London Interaction Center, working with Mikhail Seliverstov, a programmer in Russia, wants to turn every word of every online text into a hyperword, a word you can click on to get, well, more words. Anytime you hover over a word, you are invited to Google it or use a dictionary.
A Trail Leads to a Tangent of a Tangent, of a Tangent The NY Times, February 10, 2005
Machines As Authors
"The road to grandmother's house led through the dark forest, but Little Red Riding Hood was not afraid and she went on as happy as a lark. The birds sang her their sweetest songs while the squirrels ran up and down the tall trees. Now and then, a rabbit would cross her path."
What you just read is the work of StoryBook, "an end-to-end narrative prose generation system that utilizes narrative planning, sentence planning, a discourse history, lexical choice, revision, a full-scale lexicon and the well-known Fuf/Surge surface realizer." Believe it or not, that description was written not by a computer but by the humans who created StoryBook, Charles B. Callaway and James C. Lester, who are computer scientists.
Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite! The NY Times, November 22, 2004
Computer Games are 'Story Engines'
Museum exhibitions, academic conferences and university curriculums have examined games as art. A 2004 conference at Stanford University called "Story Engines" looked at game play as a way of creating narratives, at a time when the audiences for established story vehicles like books, newspapers, movies and network television are in decline. In a $10 billion industry, the stakes are high. Like the television set before it, the game console is now colonizing American living rooms and the lives therein. Americans spend more money on video games and consoles than on movies; nearly half the country plays. Thirty-three years after Pong, video games have become "the major cultural activity of the generation 30 or 35 and below, the way movies and literature were for earlier generations," said James Paul Gee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy."
Even among children who don't grasp the lessons taught in their schools, Professor Gee said, they "can all discuss the stories in video games at a very sophisticated level."
The Gamer as Artiste The NY Times, December 4, 2005
Cellphone Novels
"Out of the Fortress," showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday. It is the text-message novel, a new literary genre for the harried masses in a society that seems to be redefining what it means to be harried.
Weighing in at a mere 4,200 characters, "Out of the Fortress" is like a marriage of haiku and Hemingway, and will be published for its audience of cellphone readers at a bite-size, 70 characters at a time - including spaces and punctuation marks - in two daily installments.
The Novel's Latest Version Pops Onto China's Cellphones The NY Times, September 11, 2004
Everybody Is A News Reporter
Wikinews (http://www.wikinews.org/) is an experiment in collaborative news gathering and reporting, and the latest in a collection of Wikis (pronounced WIK-eez or WEEK-eez) under the umbrella of Wikimedia, which cultivates free and open information resources written by its users. The system's primary check is its transparency. Inspired, in part, by the success of open source software development, the writing process is completely public. Anyone at any time can compose a new Wikinews article, edit an existing one and see an inventory of all prior changes. For Wikinews proponents, the evolution of content is one of the system's strengths, and one of its challenges. The larger and more mature Wikipedia project is often cited by Wiki users as an example of how consensus can evolve into truth. But Wikinews articles do not enjoy the same luxury of time.
The Unassociated Press The NY Times, February 10, 2005
A Literary Environment of Constant Distractions
But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging. Ben Bederson, who builds computer interfaces at the University of Maryland, said his design goal is to generate a minimum of distraction for the user. "We're trying to come up with simple ideas of how computer interfaces get in the way of being able to concentrate," said Dr. Bederson, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the university.
You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention The NY Times, February 10, 2005
The Curse of E-Mail
But now that it has become an essential form of communication — with traffic exploding from 5.1 billion messages a day in 2000 to 135.6 billion messages daily in 2005, according to the Radicati Group, a technology and market research firm in Palo Alto, Calif. — e-mail is causing as much distress as delight. And it's driving an increasing number of employers, bosses and workers to find ways to control or curtail the load. The rampant office practice of "cc-ing" colleagues and bosses (carbon copying, to use the term of the ancients) has also heightened anxieties by forcing an ever-widening circle of people to respond immediately. Dealing with e-mail - filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it - has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning.
Got 2 Extra Hours for Your E-Mail? The NY Times, November 10, 2005
Give Away Books Free
Mr. Adler has published 27 novels. But did he follow the tried-and-true conventional print route for "Death of a Washington Madame," his 28th? No. He's self-publishing that one electronically, and e-mailing it free, a chapter at a time, to anyone who asks. Fogies (like this reporter) who still want the feel of pages "can always print the chapter out," he said. "The main thing is, give readers a new book for free, and they might go back and buy some of the former books." The Internet, with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want. Nothing can guarantee a sale, but, Mr. Adler said, for as little as $295 - plus a fee for each book sold - self-publishing services will register a copyright and put a book into an electronic format that can be sold as an e-book or printed out. Up the price to $1,000 or so, and the services will send out news releases, contact reviewers and offer the book to stores and online vendors like Amazon.com.
Steal This Book. Or at Least Download It Free. The NY Times, August 21, 2005
Language Simplification
If I'm not at my computer when you need to reach me, you can always text me. Yes, "text" is a verb these days: "He texts, she texts, whatever the pretext." The message has to be pretty short - 160 characters, max. That's part of the fun. Partly because of that length limitation, and partly because it's hard to type out words on the phone's number keys, we use shorthand constantly. BCNU means "Be seeing you," PCM means "please call me," L8R is "later," 2MORO is "tomorrow," WAN2 is "want to," and so on. Most of it you can figure out just by saying the letters and numbers out loud, like these: NE1, RUOK, B4, OIC.
RUOK? A Tutorial for Parents The NY Times, August 19, 2004
Speed-read Religion
The SMS Bible, a text-messaging version by the Bible Society in Australia, translates Genesis 1:1 thusly: "In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth"
The Bible, Chapter and Every Other Verse The NY Times, November 6, 2005
Scholarly Journals Moves Online
arXiv.org e-Print archive
The first database, hep-th (for High Energy Physics -- Theory), was started in August of '91 and was intended for usage by a small subcommunity of less than 200 physicists, then working on a so-called "matrix model" approach to studying string theory and two dimensional gravity. Within a few months, the original hep-th had quickly expanded in its scope to over 1000 users, and after little more than three years now has over 3600 users. More significantly, there are numerous other physics databases now in operation that currently serve over 25,000 physicists and typically process more than 40,000 electronic transactions per day (i.e. as of 10/94).
To summarize, to date we've learned:
- The exponential increase in electronic networking usage has
opened new possibilities for formal and informal communication
of research information.
- For some fields of physics, the on-line electronic archives
immediately became the primary means of communicating ongoing
research information, with conventional journals entirely
supplanted in this role. Researchers will voluntarily subscribe
and make aggressive use of these systems which will continue to
grow rapidly. The current levels of technology and network
connectivity are adequate to support these systems, and continue
to improve.
- For some fields of physics, open (i.e. unrefereed) distribution
of research can work well and has advantages for researchers
both in developed and undeveloped-countries
Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village by Paul Ginsparg, 1996
Mr. Adler has published 27 novels. But did he follow the tried-and-true conventional print route for "Death of a Washington Madame," his 28th? No. He's self-publishing that one electronically, and e-mailing it free, a chapter at a time, to anyone who asks. Fogies (like this reporter) who still want the feel of pages "can always print the chapter out," he said. "The main thing is, give readers a new book for free, and they might go back and buy some of the former books." The Internet, with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want. Nothing can guarantee a sale, but, Mr. Adler said, for as little as $295 - plus a fee for each book sold - self-publishing services will register a copyright and put a book into an electronic format that can be sold as an e-book or printed out. Up the price to $1,000 or so, and the services will send out news releases, contact reviewers and offer the book to stores and online vendors like Amazon.com.
