Textual Coordination 1.5: Splitscreen

Recently, while writing the document pictured below, I needed to simultaneously view the introduction (which contained several academic citations) with the works cited list, to recall who was arguing what. I'd forgotten about this functionality in Word, but you can split the screen to view two portions of the document simultaneously -- formerly impossible with digital documents and a major affordance of print over on-screen reading.

But I'd been using Excel a lot recently, and I remembered that split screen was available in Word too. So here's an image of splitscreen textual coordination in action.


Coordinating on-screen texts with splitscreen funtionality

By the way, to do this, you grab a little tiny bar over on the scroll bar and drag it to where you want to create the split. You can then scroll each part of the document independently. Nifty!


How to split zee screen -- grab and drag.

Finally, I found myself wanting to do the exact same thing in Adobe Acrobat while reading a .pdf. No such luck. The functionality hasn't migrated beyond MS programs to my knowledge.

Presence of text for social change

While studying how tech writers created new texts by carefully staging and incorporating existing texts into the target document, I began to try to think of the texts that *weren't* being staged. For example, in writing the document, the writer never consulted a text about ethics . So I've begun ruminating on staging texts as an intervention. I think this quote (from CultureCat's 100 Things list revisited) is an example of someone attempting to do just that:

#57: One of the "How to be more productive" self-help books I'm reading advises its readers to have a "mind like water," which means a mind that reacts in exact proportion to the situation. When you throw a pebble into a lake, there's a ripple effect that corresponds to the weight of the pebble. The water never underreacts or overreacts. I found the principle so helpful that I now have a post-it on my desk that says "Mind like water".

[Update: She's not alone.]

Prototype for expanded screen view

Ran into a display limitation while coding my dissertation data -- needed to see my data, timescale, column entries, AND coding scheme at the same time. But I overcame that with a little-a T.C. (textual coordination). See, I told you Excel bites.


Ran outta screen room!

Research -- Snow Crash Style

Just read the coolest passage from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. In best cyber-punk fashion, Stephenson describes "goggling in" to the Metaverse, a VR/avatar-based version of the Internet. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (heh), wanders into the Library and stumbles upon a friend's research project:

The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards [think document avatar], hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a high-speed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the hypercards are placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos left it. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is about as high as Lagos's avatar could reach.

This is how I would like to organize my dissertation data.
Excel bites.

Staging 1.0

Just read someone's 100 Things list. What got me was, "Twenty-five. I have notebooks full of useless html that I haven't used yet."

See what I mean? We keep text for future use.

Oh, and "Thirty-two. I use post-it notes all the time. My wall beside my computer has about 10-15 post-its up there right now." People are strangely, almost fetishistically, aware of their habits of mediation.