The bound galleys of Reading Hypertext are here, ready to pack for the launch party in Torino. They look great.

OK: typo on the cover. Six words, one wrong. Bright side, it keeps the galleys from wandering into bookstores. And of course they’ll be collectors items someday.

Tinderbox 4.7 is out. New dashboard support, smart adornments, better charts, better maps, and 60 other improvements.

Steve Ersinghaus has a quick and easy way to track progress of writing projects in Tinderbox.

Suppose you were writing a screenplay about a guy. He’s the governor of South Carolina. Don’t worry about the details; it’s that kind of movie.

Anyway, the producer comes into your office and says,

We’ve got to shoot the third act in Buenos Aires. Or Paris. Either one.

You demur. “He’s the governor of South Carolina. How are we going to get him to Argentina?"

We can’t afford to shoot this in California. And Max says he’ll only go to Argentina. So, we gotta get him down under.

"How?"

A junket. Trade delegation!

"We did that last year, with Sarah Palin."

A girl. He can be in love.

"But we’ve already established…"

Madly in love. Crazy.

"But he’s the governor of South Carolina. Max pops down to South America on a whim, everyone thinks he’s on a bender. I pop down to South America for a couple of days, who's gonna notice. You think they won’t notice that the governor isn’t governing? Or there?"

"He’s a politician. He’s spent his entire life being a politician. People talk about him as president. Who is going to elect a president that vanishes? And you think he doesn’t know? Sure, all the sexes from Maine to Texas have never known such love before, but who is going to give nukes to a guy who throws his entire life away for five days in Buenos Aires."

At Tinderbox Weekend London, J. Nathan Matias took a close look at using version control tools to help workgroups collaborate on Tinderbox. He’s just blogged a nice summary.

The very short answer:

• It should be easy!
• It’s actually quite tricky, because off-the-rack version control tools care about the order of things to which XML is indifferent.
• There aren’t great solution for version control of XML files.

The catch is that XML doesn’t care — in fact is required not to care — about the order of XML attributes: <item Name="..." ID="..."> is equivalent to code><itemID="..." Name="..." >. If you code by hand, the sequence doesn’t change, and version control works fine; if you’re generating the XML from a program, the program is free to use any order it likes and you get the same results.

The good news: starting with Tinderbox 4.7.0, Tinderbox files will be saved with consistent attribute ordering, and so now version control will work the way you’d want it to. The post is the first in an exciting series that will discuss how teams can share one Tinderbox file across the office or across the world.

Susan Gibb is writing a short hypertext every day, through the summer. Yesterday’s piece was Idle Conversation, a short sketch in dialogue form. Here’s the introduction; click the map to read the story.

Map of Idle Conversation

I sense real opportunities in small dramatic hypertexts composed entirely, or primarily, of dialogue. (Indeed, I think “Idle Conversation” would start stronger if it omitted “she said” and “he said.”) On the one hand, I’m thinking of short dramatic sketches like Mamet’s The Duck Variations. On the other hand, think of Frost’s wonderful setpieces, “Death of the Hired Man” and “Four Hundred Collars”. There’s lots you could do — opening into interior dialogue is just one of the moves you might make.

Imagine, for example, a variation on “Idle Conversation” where one of the characters withholds some crucial information from the other. “She” is actually the governor of a region of Argentina. “He” is married. Or “She” has just learned that she has Parkinson’s, or HIV. Or “He” is transgendered but — for reasons we can’t talk about right now — is wearing clothes from her former life. We could quickly be anywhere from “Casino Royale” to “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”.

One of my hopes for Reading Hypertext is to advance discussion of craft, and to promote real criticism of real hypertexts. I think a session — or maybe a track — of Tinderbox Weekend SF this fall (November 21-22) ought to be devoted to writerly topics. Ideas? Email me.

Congratulations to weblog scholar Lilia Efimova on the occasion of her successful defense for the PhD.

She'll be presenting her paper on "Weblog as a Personal Thinking Space", an experiment in auto-ethnography, next week at Hypertext 2009.

The Internet’s Payload, an important manifesto from Tim Bray:

• Words are more valuable than pictures.
• Text is more valuable than audio or video.
• Twitter is more valuable than FriendFeed.

Bray talks about “the serious part of the net.” That’s a nice turn of phrase.

Loryn Jenkins has been exploring extensions to Tinderbox for analyzing legal and literary texts. It’s an interesting area; much can be done with today’s tools, and of course more can be imagined with tomorrow’s. At IVICA, Neal Audenaert discussed CritSpace, a spatial hypertext system designed for this domain, and that work has generated more discussion from Jenkins and in a promising Tinderbox forum thread.

I’ve been nosing around TalentTrove, an online community for writers, musicians, comics, and other creatives.

On the one hand, community can help a lot: one thing that’s clear from reading Pictures at a Revolution is that everyone knew everyone. Even the people who weren’t successful: Dustin Hoffman was just about out of the theater, sleeping on his friend’s floor. Rod Steiger was going nowhere, Robert Benton (who co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde) was a magazine writer infatuated with Truffaut, trying his hand at writing an American nouvelle vague and occasionally playing jazz with a stand-up comic named Woody Allen.

But, on the other hand, they wrote and acted and made deals and got stuff done. And, to listen to Harris, most of them spent their time working, or hanging out with people who were working.

Building an artistic community of artists — not simply people who want to be with artists, or people who want to act the part — is a challenge.

Preview of Hypertext 2009: here’s a preprint of my talk, “On Hypertext Narrative” (pdf). (Thanks, ACM!)

(I’ll post the slides for the talk, which I think some of you will also enjoy, after the lecture, which is first thing on June 30.)

Abstract: Annals and chronicles may be the foundation of accounting, but writers of stories and histories have long known that they seldom render a satisfactory account of complex events. In place of a simple chronological list, narrative instead organizes our account in new sequences in order to illuminate the interplay of actors and events. We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print; though we may occasionally use links to introduce variation in presentation or in story; it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot. After discussing the ways in which plot may be varied, I describe the use of stretchtext as a reaction against the perceived incoherence of classic hypertext narrative, demonstrate the limitations that conventional stretchtext necessarily imposes on hypertext narrative, and describe an implemented generalization of stretchtext that matches the expressive and formal capabilities of classical hypertext systems while appearing to be a mere stretchtext and while running within the confines of a Web browser.

The network experts and social media enthusiasts and (oy veh) the internet libertarians kept telling us how the internet would route around the damage caused by a government crackdown on information.

Hasn't worked in China.

Didn't work in Iran. (Yeah, twitter has been working occasionally, but my impression is that its role is mostly publishing to that part of the outside world that deigns to listen.)

Speculation: they’ll keep telling us it can’t happen here, until it does. Maybe they’ll keep saying it can’t happen hear, after it does.

Diane Greco and I are putting the finishing touches on an anthology of key papers on Reading Hypertext.

It will be out August 15. You can preorder here.

Storied (or at least known-out-of-town) home of fancy barbeque. I sat at the bar (good show, and one of the waitstaff actually said “lime me!”) and had a charcuterie plate and the brisket.

I should’ve known better: things in Texas really are supersized. The hotel coffee mugs are huge. The afternoon break offered cookies, and fruit, and quesadillas. One professor of library science complained that the forks were oversized. So was the charcuterie plate. But: the salami was excellent, the country paté was terrific, and lomo was smoky and stiff and paper thin and by far the best I’ve had. (Do they eat a lot of lomo in Texas? Just wondering.) And the foie gras pot de creme, of which I was very skeptical, was absolutely delicious.

The brisket was good, and the sauces (bbq and mustard) even better. It was very lean brisket, which seems a bit against the grain. Surprisingly — especially considering the chilli jacked pickles and olives that accompanied the charcuterie — the coffee and brown sugar rub was a bit less prominent than I’d have liked.

Slides from today’s IVICA workshop on interactive visual information collections, at the University of Texas Austin, are here (huge pdf).

Diane Greco and I are putting the finishing touches on an anthology of key papers on Reading Hypertext.

Today, we all read on the screen, and we find what to read by following links. The Web is continuing to transform the world, artistically, commercially, technically, and politically. But the Web is not print, and it’s certainly not television. What makes new media new? The link: the most important new punctuation mark since the comma.

How do we write for a medium when we can’t predict what the reader might click? How do we read well, when we cannot read exhaustively?

Over the past twenty years, many brilliant scholars and writers have worked to understand how links operate, and to learn how to use them effectively. Many of these papers will be familiar to experts, some will be surprises, and others are completely new.

Publication date will be August 15, and Eastgate is now accepting pre-orders.

• INTO THE WEEDS (Mark Bernstein)
• WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING LIKE THIS? (Diane Greco)
• LA MAISON HYPERTEXT (Charles A. Perfetti)
• PIECING TOGETHER AND TEARING APART: FINDING THE STORY IN AFTERNOON (Jill Walker)
• A COGNITIVE MODEL (N. J. Lowe)
• “HOW DO I STOP THIS THING?” CLOSURE AND INDETERMINACY IN INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES (J. Yellowlees Douglas)
• RECONFIGURING WRITING (George P. Landow)
• THE LYRICAL QUALITY OF LINKS (Susana Pajares Tosca)
• A PRAGMATICS OF LINKS (Susana Pajares Tosca)
• STITCHING TOGETHER NARRATIVE, SEXUALITY, SELF: SHELLEY JACKSON'S PATCHWORK GIRL (George P. Landow)
• THESE WAVES OF BUGS (Anja Rau)
• CINEMATIC PARADIGMS FOR HYPERTEXT (Adrian Miles)
• NONCE UPON SOME TIMES: REREADING HYPERTEXT FICTION (Michael Joyce)
• RETURNING IN TWILIGHT: JOYCE'S TWILIGHT, A SYMPHONY (Dave Ciccoricco)
• HYPERTEXT STRUCTURE UNDER PRESSURE (David Kolb)
• READING SPATIAL HYPERTEXT (Catherine C. Marshall)
• HYPERTEXT TEACHING (Adrian Miles)
• HYPERTEXT WITH CONSEQUENCES: RECOVERING A POLITICS OF HYPERTEXT ( Diane Greco)
• WHAT THE GEEKS KNOW: HYPERTEXT AND THE PROBLEM OF LITERACY (Stuart Moulthrop)

A nice note on Tinderbox 4.6 from Clifford Wulfman, Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton.

I want to commend you once again for producing a superior tool. I'm an old-fashioned man in many ways: I like my vintage hypertexts; I like my vintage development environments (emacs, please, and spare me your Eclipses); and over the years I've become an open-source supporter, if not exactly an evangelist.

But Tinderbox is a piece of software I've never regretted buying. I've just spent a most productive day working through some design problems, and the way Tinderbox has allowed me to move seamlessly between visual and textual expression is simply unmatched. I've fallen out of the blogosphere and haven't done anything with exports and agents for a long time, but it looks like all that apparatus has been improved extensively, and I'm looking forward to playing with it soon.

A strength of spatial hypertext tools like the Tinderbox map is that they carry lots of meaning without much formal overhead; you can express that relationships exist without knowing every detail of the relationship.

But a drawback of our current tools for everything from “mind maps” to “information architecture” is that we’ve become tightly focused on boxes and arrows. Boxes are fundamental: you can draw a box around everything. And boxes, used juduciously, avoid chartjunk, the temptation to load up your visualization with lots of symbolic, sentimental clipart.

One weakness of boxes and arrows is their seeming precision: those straight lines tempt us to read meaning into every pixel, and so we wind up tweaking our layouts to get pixel-level alignment and spacing just right. This is literally unnatural: the natural world isn’t like that. An organization is nothing like an org chart, and all those identical neat boxes in the site map tempt us to make each page equivalent when each page could also be precisely what it needs to be in its specific role.

Louis A. Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament

We have few tools that work with this sort of textured, layered, organic vocabulary of forms. I think that’s going to be a fruitful direction for research, especially now that we understand spatial parsers and are getting accustomed (as in OpenType fonts) to working with forms that depend on context.

In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh offers a terrific and thoughtful overview of recent enthusiasms for care, craftsmanship, and artisanal work: Out Of The Office. A sensible response to Matthew B. Crawford’s much-twittered New York Times Magazine defense of The Case for Working With Your Hands.

Sanneh observes that parallels have been drawn to open source development, but I think that’s probably the wrong end of NeoVictorian Computing from which to launch this argument. I predict that we’ll learn more by looking at artisans and applications than at Linux, and in the end what we learn will inform the vast platform projects as well. In this connection, it’s worth looking at John Gruber’s WWDC wrapup which observes that a lot of people are moving into the development space — many of them iPhone developers migrating to Macintosh, rather than vice versa. (Note how the iPhone Apps store is probably the first real success for micropayments — something we’ve been trying forever.)