On writing together

Earlier this month the New York Times reviewed Aquamind's NoteShare. Fallows does a good job pinpointing the crux of the difficulty of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) -- simple interface usually means limited functionality while robustness usually means the need for an entire IT department. NoteShare sounds like a comfy balance. Looking forward to the PC version later this year. I'm getting tired of emailing documents and creating Yahoo groups for every conference panel proposal I'm on.

While asynchronous collaboration certainly works for most academic work, there are often times early in the process (identifying the unifying theme of several projects) and late in the process (close-editing of collaboratively-written documents) when synchronous collaboration would be nice.

I seldom sit down at a computer with another person, but in co-authoring an article with Jason Swarts when I was in Raleigh last year, we'd meet in a coffee shop with a laptop and pass it back and forth. Extreme writing, as it were. I found the process extremely rewarding. One of my main concerns about teaching composition is that by having students writing in isolation all the time, they can develop bad habits or at least never see other ways of writing that they themselves might benefit from. They develop a mere knack when learning a craft is the goal.

Strikethrough Text as Paralipsis

I’ve recently noticed the trend of using strikethrough text as a humorous device, as seen in this example from Stephen Bainbridge’s recent post about blogging during faculty meetings.

What started out as a useful way to update a document while leaving evidence of its original and new form became a device for ironic “correction”. Stephen Baker at Businessweek seems to think this is new, but as with most concepts and dramatic plots, the ancient Greeks came up with it first. It’s called paralipsis, meaning “to leave to one side”. Carolyn Miller once told me it was her favorite rhetorical trope, and I can see why. When used overtly, it can be wry. More often, it’s sneaky (as in, “I won’t be dragged in to discussing my opponent’s drinking problem.”).

But there’s precedence for print-based paralipsis too. The Hacker’s Dictionary describes pre-strikethrough “writing under erasure” thus:

There is also an accepted convention for ‘writing under erasure’; the text>

Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.

reads roughly as “Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...”, with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string ‘^H’. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text). Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style

I also see similarity to a comedic technique I’ve seen two other places: Kevin Nealon’s SNL character Mr. Subliminal, who would make a statement and quickly interject its (usually politically incorrect) translation, sotto voce. Today, we can see the same effect on Comedy Central’s new Colbert Report in my favorite segment “The Word”, in which the politically incorrect translation appears beside Colbert. [Edit: On re-reading, I think this technique is merely similar to paralipsis... I might have to coin a new trope!]

Mostly, I see print-paralipsis as yet another clever playfulness with language that seems typical of hackers specifically and technophiles more generally. Clever word-play and retoolings of language and use is in their nature.

Leapfrog Fly Pen/Computer: Friend or Foe?

One of the most-touted kid-gifts this holiday season is Leapfrog’s FLY Pentop Computer (warning: slow, flash-heavy, chatty, youth-oriented website). In short, it’s a pen-based PDA with standard functionality (music, calendar, calculator, notepad, etc.), geared toward tweens, as opposed to Logitech’s io2 Digital Writing System (designtechnica review).

The FLY pen allows you to interact with your writing… you can draw a calculator, drum pad, date & time, etc. on special paper and interact with it. Actually, the concept is pretty cool – being able to draw a calculator and then use it – but I’m not convinced how useful it is to have to draw one’s tools every time one wants to use them.

Fly’s functionality is well described in this article from BusinessWeek Online. And it’s been featured in The New York Times [subscription required] and Gizmodo (twice). But the most interesting critique has come from Kristen Kidder of Bitch Magazine (“feminist response to pop culture” and a damn good read) about a functionality I’m particularly interested in: computerized interlocutor as aid to invention. To prompt journal-writing, the pen has pre-recorded questions it can ask. In theory, this is an excellent idea. Conversation (even in the form of leading questions) is a good way to prompt writing. It’s why all grade-school reading is followed by “discussion questions”. But the questions that are posed and how they are phrased can speak volumes, as Kidder reveals:

LeapFrog Enterprises, leading U.S, manufacturer of educational toys and longtime enthusiast of gender stereotypes, is poised to extend their reign this fall with the launch of Fly... Fly's accessories fall sharply along the boy/girl divide. The most notable program is the female-oriented Dear Me Diary (recently renamed the Fly journal), an interactive notebook full of more than 600 writing prompts designed to excite girls about writing and self-expression. The concept is simple: With just a touch of the pen, preteens suffering from writer's block can trigger questions designed to stimulate their creative impulses. A good idea, no? Sure, but there's a catch: A good portion of the topic suggestions reinforce the misconception that all middle-¬school-age female friendships are cemented through the sharing of petty gossip. “Ooh—dish alert! What's going on?” and “What are you so jealous about?” are just two examples of the questions designed to get Fly girls thinking.

I'm all for promoting female self-expression (and what writer doesn’t need a little inspiration from time to time?). I just wish LeapFrog was able to deliver it without aggressively channeling their inner mean girl. – Kristen Kidder
[“Poison Pen” November, p. 21]

I’ve come to see that one potential benefit of technology is using it to prompt social interaction. For example, what if, when creating a resume in MS Word, the task pane included a link, “Chat about this document with a buddy”? As a writing teacher, I’d be pleased as punch if technology suggested social interaction that should happen to improve the document or writing process, but when enacted in the social-norming ways Kidder describes, maybe those girls would be better off with traditional paper and pen and a real friend.

[Image from NY Times]

When not to automate

One value of IT is that it can automate the more mundane, operational-level tasks of textual coordination. Where would I be without Copy/Paste? But there are occasions when it is beneficial to do things “by hand”.

Case in point -- this anecdote from today's 43 Folders post, “Productivity for the Practicing Musician”.

Personally, I don’t like automatic syncing between devices — it’s brain-dead. Manually transferring the information at least once allows it to tickle my brain a bit and stimulate new ideas. It’s sync with a built-in review.

Not only do I like the pithy descriptor “brain dead” but the awareness the writer has for the effect of the choice of processes on the activity. This is what I hope to teach my students.

Transparent Aluminium & Scotty @ 120 WPM

A funny ciritique of technology use in film from a good friend...

From : john helsabeck
Sent : Tuesday, October 18, 2005 4:04 PM
To : Shaun Slattery
Subject : Transparent Aluminium!?

Remember the part in that God-Awful Star Trek movie - the one where they go back in time to save the whales - where Scotty reveals the molecular make up of transparent aluminium in return for a small batch of the stuff because it is needed to construct a holding tank for a soon-to-be-saved whale?

At first, Scotty tried talking to the computer. "Computer? Hello, Computer?" Then, when someone pointed to the mouse, he picked it up and spoke into it, "Computer?" Finally, realizing that he was going to have to use a keyboard, he proceeds to FLY over the keyboard, typing and switching between windows at alarming speed, until he finally reveals a picture of a transparent aluminium molecule.

What's up with that? If dude has never had to type before because, in his time, you can just talk to computers, why the hell would he be proficient with QWERTY? And why the hell would he know any of the programs they use?

Mr. Nimoy, you disappointed me.

Oh yeah, about that transparent aluminium.... Apparently it is time to move it to the 'Science Fact' category:
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123012131

Tracking your own changes

I'm fascinated by people's writing processes and how they strategically mediate those processes. Here's a wonderful anecdote from Jenny's comment to Jason Swarts' interesting post on particle vs. stream views of text:

I even use Track Changes myself when writing a paper. I like to have the original draft embedded in even my sixth or seventh draft, since it is in essence the same document, just with lots of different colors.

In a sense, using Track Changes enables me to develop my thoughts more thoroughly and clearly. And days later, when I'm reading and re-working the paper again, I don't have to wonder where a thought was coming from. My entire thought process is right there embedded in the text. It doesn't seem static to me because I can see how things developed from my initial ideas.

[via: Coherent Fragments]

Taking Notes

Taking Notes
Originally uploaded by philgyford.

This blog serves as a sort of zoo where I can collect specimines of writing phenomena related to my research. Today's exhibit is a wonderful example of textual co-location and remediation found in the wild.

Phil Gyford has posted this Flickr image of his life-hack/notetaking system. He's got a carfully managed process of taking Post-It notes while reading, then transposing them to the web so that he (and others!) might use them.

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.

Text Coord 1.3

Cutting and pasting to co-locate text for coordination -- the way Lincoln used to do it. (From the Library of Congress page on Lincoln's First Inaugural Address.)

The original cut and paste.

Textual Coordination 1.2

Here's a rather famous case of annotation -- the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. For a long time, we've found this process useful:

1. Create draft (text 1)
2. Annotate (text 2) to guide...
3. future revision (text 3)
4. repeat as needed

Rough draft of the Declaration of Independence

This image comes from the Library of Congress website. Check out the images of the correction flap in the up and down position. Annotation = textual co-location.

(Notice there are far fewer revisions to the draft of the Gettysburg Address. It's so much harder to write by committee!)

Textual Coordination 1.0

One way we coordinate texts, especially ones produced at different times, is to place them physically near each other. This image from a site about producing the Lonseome Dove movie shows two different modes of annotation that are very familiar.


Annotation: 1 kind of coordination

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.

Workspace 1.0

One mediated writing practice I'm keenly interested in is staging -- how and where we place the texts we think we'll need later or are placing around us in order to use at the moment.

Think about it; we've all got idiosyncratic practices of storing texts. There's the "Mad Filer" who saves everything on and off screen in hundreds of carefully labeled files. There's the "Chaos Theorist" who works best with papers scattered all around her and icons littering her screen. We might also characterize the "Mad Piler," "Post-It Note Boy," and "The Librarian" -- a book-based creature who can't possibly have read all those books that make his office seem so small (think your college English teacher).

No one has thought more about the role of the structure of one's workspace that Johndan Johnson-Eilola, now at Clarkson University. (Check out his site: http://www.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/)

Here are a few images from his own efforts to structure his information space:

• The Virtual, several screens: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndan/1221383/ (looks like he could use one of these)
• The Real, several walls: http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/other/wall.html

Here's his own post "Computer Screens: More is More" in which contextualizes and points to those images: http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/archives/001136.html

(Oh, and here's Thomas Jefferson arguing for an arrangement of his information space.)