It’s Thursday, and it looks like I’m back with another tech-related whine.

I’m a quicksilver user, and I have to say that I adore this program more than just about any other on my computer, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m always so insistent about using my computer: it’s downright unsettling to use a computer that doesn’t have QS on it.

What’s quicksilver? It’s a nifty little application launcher that lets you interact with your computer via text inputs. Do a google search and you’ll learn way more than I could really hope to tell you here. Anyway it’s awesome, and it’s free. If you use a mac, get it now. If you don’t there are some things that are close in some of the functionality, but the truth is that so much of what makes QS so good, is the fact that it draws on all kinds of unity that already exists in the mac, and makes all that connectedness appear at your finger tips without having to futz through menus and folders and so forth.

So this got me thinking: modern computing (ie. the last 20 years) has been centered around the GUI (graphical user interface) that represents file structures via pretty pictures. So most people are used to interacting with their computers via pictures and what not. (You UNIX nerds, be quiet!) And this is really good for letting people intuitively figure out how to make a computer work. It’s the reason that most people don’t have a real problem moving between Macs and PCs these days. The down side: it’s really fracking slow for a good deal of what we do.

There are a couple other pieces of this mind puzzle that I really don’t remember the source for, and I’m sorry for that, but they added to the mileux of this whine.

The first is that I saw an article that noted how in the hands of a skilled user the address bar of Firefox can function like a rather smart command line: If you type in a collection of words, depending on your settings Firefox will take you to the first google search result (which is often what you wanted) or it will take you to the google search result for those terms. You can augment this by adding extra codes in the settings, so that prefacing a string of terms/search operators with a key (like wiki for wikipedia) will perform a certain kind of search. It’s pretty nifty, and to be honest I think it was an article in a blog that I glazed over because I’m not using firefox these days (it’s all about Camino for me!)

The second thought was that someone mentioned, again in a blog or podcast, that if you watch “power” users even if they’re not working in a command line environment don’t tend to use the mouse very much. It’s inefficient, it takes too long, it can be hard on your wrists, and it’s a lot easier to hit control/comannd+C, control/comand+V to copy and paste than it is to interact with the edit menu. The truth is that most of the commonly used features have associated commands and by just studying this, you can use the mouse a lot less frequently.

I don’t want to give up all GUI features, and go back to olde school command lines, mind you, as there are some things that just work better with mouse actions: Web browsing. Document Preparation. Graphics manipulation. Sound Editing (sometimes). And so forth. But file manipulation? Task switching? Text editing? Command lines are way better for that.

Do I have a solution? Of course not. I think something a lot like quicksilver but that had the permanency of the menu-bar in OS X would be ideal¹. I think the real challenge though is finding a way to make this kind of human-computer interaction seem as intuitive as pointing and clicking. I think with some smart technology it could be done.

do you have a whine about technology? send it in or leave a comment. I’ve written this for two weeks in a row, and I didn’t quite intend this to be another series, so if you like it, it might be up to you to continue…

best, tycho

So now that you know how to knit neck openings, this time I’m going to talk about a few neck and collar related tricks and ideas that I’ve come across in my knitting that you might find inspiring.

Norwegian Neck Styles

So after all that talk about how many stitches to set aside, and where, not to mention the rate of decreases. There’s another option. Knit straight to shoulders, and ignore any kind of shaping. Using tailor’s chalk (or some kind of water soluble marker) and sketch out the shape and placement of the neck opening on your sweater. Using a flexible tension and very small stitches. stitch two rows around this opening. Cut on the inside of the neck portion, and there’s you’re opening. This requires little preparation or forethought, and you can directly control the shape of the neck. On the downside, once it’s done, it’s done.

My classification of this method as “Norwegian” is perhaps not entirely accurate. I’ve seen a number of knitting techniques (including a really nifty purling method) classified as “Norwegian,” when in fact there is little evidence (to my mind) that these techniques are in any way representative of Norwegian methods. One thing’s for sure, patterns for contemporary Norwegian knitting tend to involve steeks that are knitted with no preparation (as they are in the “Fair Isle” style,) as this technique is similar, I suppose the classification is fair. I should also point out the obvious, given that it requires a sewing machine, there’s a very limited extent to which we can consider this “traditional,” but that’s really just a minor quibble.

Collars: The Scarf Principal

Once you have a neck opening, no matter how you obtained it, you still have to knit some kind of collar. The basic specification for knitting a collar is that you pick up stitches around the neck opening, and then knit some sort of border/hem stitch around t he opening for a little while and then bind off. Frequently borders/hems stitches are some variety of ribbing, but other possibilities include turned hems, seed/moss stitch, rolled collars, garter stitch, and just about anything that mixes knit and purl stitches. It’s all up to you, and its important to find something that matches the spirt of your garment.

The scarf principal, is quite simply that while you need a little bit of a collar, you don’t need much. If you’re neck is cold, you can always wear a scarf, but if you’re necks too warm it’s sometimes too hard to take off a sweater. Thus I knit collars, pretty much without variation, that are an inch and a half, and since I’ve started doing this I’ve found my self much more happy with the way sweaters fit. Just a friendly warning to be mindful.

Hard Collar Lessons

These are fairly straightforward I suspect, because I think collars are such a crucial part of a sweater, here are my general concerns regarding collars:

• I always err a little bit on the side of a little too big, rather than a little too small. Indeed this is a good rule of thumb for sweater knitting in general.
• Shorter is better than taller, and this can often be the difference between a sweater that’s just right, and a sweater that’s too itchy/warm/uncomforatable.
• Consider what kind of shirt you plan on wearing under a sweater when you’re knitting the collar. It matters.
• Make sure the collar is stretchy enough so that your head can fit, but the last thing you want is probably flaring.
• Exercise extreme caution when sewing down hemmed collars.
• Always make sure the collar is centered.

I’m, of course, welcome to additional collar related tips and tricks.

Three Needle Bindoffs

The three needle bind-off is one of those brilliant pieces of knitting genius that I think most knitters should know about. Rather than binding off, and then sewing two pieces of knitting together, this procedure allows you to join and bind off two pieces of knitting all in one fluid motion. To create an invisible seem turn the work inside out and holding the live stitches that you want to bind together parallel to each-other, take a third needle and knit one stitch from front needle together with one stitch from the back needle, and then repeat this, and bind off the stitches you have on the third needle as you go. Here are some better instructions with pictures.

Here’s the cool part. If you knit in the round, and do back neck shaping, and have steeks, you can bind off using the 3 needle method blithely across the back of the sweater, lo and behold, it all comes out even, and you’re left with a single neck steek to cut. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel smart about my knitting.

That’s all I have for you know. Stay tuned, and please feel free to leave comments with your own musings on collars. I’d love to hear them.

Cheers, tycho(ish)

Hello everyone!

I hope this week finds you well. It’s been a slow week in the Station Keeping world. I did send out an email to a list of possible contributers, but the replies are still trickling in. I have to keep up this correspondence, and with luck we’ll get a team (more) established soon. That continues to be my project for the near future.

The other project that I’ve worked on this week is to sketch out and develop the story. I’ve sketched out a few more installments, and I’m pretty pleased with those installments, although I have yet to put them on the wiki. I think I have enough of that done by now, so as I work on building the team, I’m going to see if I can write an installment, so that I have an example (and a begining!) for how these might work out. The first two installments, I know I’m going to write myself so those will be on my list, after that they’re all up for grabs.

I’ve been thinking about the parallels between what I’m trying to accomplish, and something that we’re more familiar with, such as television, or the newspaper serial. They’re both imperfect, but I think we can understand what I’m aiming for more clearly by thinking about both of these models.

Television shows are generally written by a group of writers, and they tell a single story in multiple parts. They have “seasons” or “series” (depending on where you are in the english speaking world) and individual installments have varying levels of interconnectivity with each other. They are also performances, produced like films, written as scripts, and require substantial budgets. I don’t think it’s particularly productive to comment on the shift from “traditional” to “reality” television models, but it seems like the reality show very much affects the way that we think about story telling in television--but that’s beside the point. Lets try to think about a “traditional” drama/science fiction television show.

The other form that we’re working from is a newspaper serial. To be honest, these are a format that I can only imagine. Mostly. I keep thinking of Armisted Maupin’s `Tales of the City <http://www.amazon.com/Tales-City-Novel-Armistead-Maupin/dp/0061358304/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/102-6534450-1034522?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176668201&sr=8-3>`_, which were published daily--which is way more than I can ever imagine, although he was getting paid in a way that I can only imagine. Anyway, Maupin published a column of about 800 words daily that explored the lives and situations of characters living in the city (San Francisco). I loved the books that were produced of the collected columns, and I think they’ve been a great influence on me. The feeling I got from reading it as a book was not the sense of a story in the same way, because each “chapter” was largely self contained--a scene or two, a little corner of a characters life, a spot of action--but there was definitely a sense of a larger story, but I enjoyed how the story functioned under these conditions.

I think that both of these forms, while not ideal, provide some remarkably powerful forms that Station Keeping might well benefit from. I also feel that with the idealization of the “novel” form for fiction writing, providing with another structure and alternative means of story telling is always a worthwhile project. While I think there are ways that SK, is like neither of these previous forms, there are ways that SK could be a lot like both the television show and the newspaper serial, and I think both kinds of story telling have influenced the way that I’m thinking of SK right now. I also hope that you could contribute to the way that SK is actualized.

I’ll be back in a week with more thoughts and updates as things progress. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, tycho

ps. After I wrote this, but before I was able to get it posted, I had a conversation with one of the other writers about some of the plot development issues, and I thought it was really productive, so I’ve chosen to post in our writers group, and I’ll try and get it up on the wiki in a little while.

How do you publish hypertext? Get a website and an FTP client. Simple questions beget simple answers after all.

While I think that simplicity should rule supperme I’ve been looking through a bunch of hypertext fiction projects on the internet (for an upcoming list for the series) and I can see why this media hasn’t taken off in the way that we might have expected: most hypertext fiction looks dated from a design perspective, and although I think the writing is often quite good it’s too gimmicky, which impedes the reading experience. At some point we’ll have to make room for a rant about genre’s and literary experimentalism, but for now I’ll stick to two themes that are really important to the way I might think about hypertext publishing. The first is a separation of form and content (a la css and xml), and the second has to do with the way that the publishing model works in a digital age.

Form and Content

One of the biggest problems with early web ventures, let call it Web .5 (before blogs) and Web 1.0 (after blogs but until lets say, the advent of gmail; my demarkations are my own and fairly arbitrary), was the way that designs were hard coded into the same pages that held the content. While arguments can be made regarding authorial control, the problem with design/content merging is standardization. It’s hard to update a website/hypertext product’s presentation (or content) when you have to sift through a lot of irrelevant content, in every page in the document for every edit. With the advent of dynamic content (SSI/shtml theoretically, but really PHP), and CSS (style sheets,) this process is much simplified and centralized. Basically style sheets allow you to, in a single place, define a color for XYZ objects rather than defining the color of every XYZ object as red, every time. Dynamic page generation requires the server to do a little work, but basically allow the user to rather than quote something, reference another file (what, I think Theodor Holm Nelson refers to as transculsuion). Again these techniques allow us to produce hypertext that easier to edit, adapt to new settings, and manage.

These tools much more standard these days than they were even 4 years ago, and make it posssible, I hope to allow hypertext products to endure longer-term, and make it possible for these texts to develop and change, with out subjecting their authors to incredible daunting revamping processes. Why does this matter for publishers? It seems that hypertext displays are hindered by unclear design standards or convention. We know how to read books, we don’t have the same sort of intitutive backgrounds for hypertext, and this is something that needs to be addressed in some sort of meaningful way. Also, some sort of standardized design, would, I hope allow a hypertext to be published not just on your website, but in a number of different hypertext environments, like portable devices, kiosk/console setups, multiple websites, and as offline bundles, which would be roughly analogous to paperback, hardback, (and etc.) editions in the dead tree world.

Publishers without Presses

In a lot of ways I don’t think that drawing analogies between new and old media is the most productive method in the world. For instance, while blogs are a lot like news paper columns (particularly at TealArt), there’s a way in which a blog is nothing like a newspaper column. The same with pod-casts and radio. Similar in some basic fundamental ways (audio, format), but compleatly different in terms of other features like distribution, monitization models, and production frameworks. So having said that, I’d like to think about the role of the “publisher” in the hypertext context.

Publishers, by my eye perform a number of important roles: they undertake some of the (financial) risk of publication, they organize editorial production (copy editing, technical editing, layout/typsetting, etc.), they organize the promotion and advertising, and they help grant legitimacy.

These are all things that an aspiring creator/writer can of course do, and we’ve seen all sorts of levels of self-publishing from Thomas Paine, to Edgar Rice Burrows, to the hordes of ‘Zine makers, to god only knows. The problem with this is that there are only so many hours in the day and you can spend your time publishing your books or writing them. Also, its incredibly difficult to grant yourself legitimacy (though some self-published authors can pull it off, they generally have a name for themselves through other means) and promotion is hard to maintain on the same level.

So while self-publishing has become much easier, particularly in digital/hypertext formats, some sort of publisher model, might still be really beneficial. I might tend toward a more self-publishing co-op model, but it’s along the same lines.

In order for hypertext to be successful, it needs to both be readable, and read, and while authors/creators have some measure over the latter, doing something to replace/fill the publishers role, in this “new” media, is something that I think would probably help promote consumption and consumability.

‘till next time, tycho

I’ve thought for a while, that we should try and have some level of geek content on TealArt, because while I’m no where near as articulate as I’d like to be and there are a lot of geek things that I either don’t have a clue or care very much about. In that direction, while I hope that we have a series of geek wines at TealArt, it is my hope that I’m not the one writing them. I had time today, and what you read below is just a short snippet of a train of thought. Enjoy, and as always, if you have a whine that you’d like to share, just get in touch!

I have a confession to make: I thought about trying GTD again. With the release of iGTD, which I think is superb software and really has all the features that anyone would want in a productivity app, I was tempted to give the whole bandwagon another spin. Thankfully it was short lived. I have to say that this program is mighty pretty, but my attempt fell flat really quickly: I still don’t have contexts, and most of the “brain dump” and “processing” methods that Allen pontificates about I basically already do.

My latest productivity arrangement is to have a working text file that’s hooked up to a quicksilver trigger and to maintain a to-do list there, and then to do more project-level planning in the little black book that I carry around with me. I also use the book to take notes in meetings and other situations where it doesn’t make sense to pull the computer out of my bag.

This is the thing about being a one-computer, power-mobile computer user: the computer is (basically) always with you, and (basically) everything you do is on the computer. There exceptions, like the paper-books I read, but they also tend to live in my book-bag. I clearly can’t keep a (digital or paper) library with me, but in day to day practice, it works pretty well.

I’ve occasionally thought about adding another computer to the workflow, because I don’t think that in a day to day sort of setting I need any more power or space, but there are a number of (growing) “special” projects that I could benefit from a little extra push. Video re-encoding, iTunes synching, data analysis, image editing, and document creation (so like formating papers and what not). Everything else I do is in a collection of plain standard format files, which neither take up that much room or use processing power.

Because I really am only using one computer, though, it means that I can keep everything working on this computer without needing to worry about synching it to anything, because its always already there. While this means that taking part in the nifty web 2.0 is pointless because I’m more likely to be without a connection to the internet than I am to be without this computer, it works for me.

So GTD remains a bust, and I like the mobility option…

Anyway, I think that’s enough for today. I’m certainly feeling better, I hope that you are too. Be in touch!

--tycho 12 April 2007 Wisconsin

The neckline in a sweater is the location of one of my perpetual anxieties about knitting. I suppose this could be resolved to knitting objects that don’t have necks, like socks, or mittens, but I’m not sure that would be incredibly healthy, and besides, whats knitting without a little challenge. The one nice thing about neck lines, is that there are a handful of different approaches, and once you find a neck line that you like, it’s a fairly short order to transplant this neckline from one garment to another. You’ll probably still need to learn a few different kinds of collars/necklines but then you’re basically set. In this part of our series, I’ll cover three basic neck lines that are among my favorites, and (in a special bonus part) a few of the hard lessons that I’ve learned from knitting sweaters.

Collar Basics

We’ll assume for a moment that these collars will be constructed in the round around steeks, and thus descriptions of neck shaping will assume that the back and both sides of the front (of the neck) will be shaped at the same time. If you don’t want use steeks, it should be easy to translate these directions to “flat knitting.

The basic principal of neck opening design is that, as you near the shoulders of your sweater, you put a percentage of stitches in the middle of the front of the sweater on hold and then knit around decreasing on either side of the opening at some speed to shape the neck opening. The length of the shaping, the number of stitches placed on hold, and rate of decreases control the shape of the neck line. Here are some basics:

V-Neck This one’s simple. If the front of your sweater has an odd number, put the middle stitch on a thread, and cast on for the steek (conversely if the number of stitches is even, just cast on steek at the middle of the front.) Decrease at a regular rate until the end of the shoulders. Generally neck openings represent a touch more than one third of the total diameter of the body, and in a V-Neck the decreases need to be calculated such that the proper number of stitches can be decreased on each side of the steek/neck or opening at a regular interval over in the length of the neck opening.

I suspect that a short, but standard v-neck is likely to take about 2/5ths (call it 4 inches for most adults) of the length of the yoke section (that is, the top of the sweater that the sleeves attach to). But V-necks can be much deeper as well. There’s a lot of versatility in this.

Crew Neck What I think of as a crew neck, is just a basic “T-shirt” or “rounded” neck opening. I think I picked up my version by backwards engineering and modifying a pattern I knit from a rather famous Scottish designer. I use this or derivations on this formula for almost all of my sweaters these days:

Set aside (on a holder) the middle 1/6th of the total number of stitches on the front of the sweater 3 inches from the shoulders (or 2/3s of the way to the end of the sweater). Decrease one stitch on either side of the steek/opening every round for an inch and a half. Then, decrease one stitch on either side of the opening/steek every other round for the remaining inch and a half. All things being equal, you should, have decrased away a few more than 1/3rd of the stitches between the stitches on the holder and the stitch that you decreased. You may have to slow the decreases a few rounds earlier, or decrease quickly for an extra row or two, depending on gauge, but this generally works.

“Sport” Neck My favorite neck, by far, is what I call a sport neck. This isn’t exactly traditional, but I find it flattering, and it’s not entirely inconstant with some traditions. This neck is just like a crew neck, except the front of the yoke is slit open and plackets are knitted on each side of the opening. The process is quite simple, though there are variations that you can explore.

My initial exploration involved setting aside the 1/6th 3.5-4 inches earlier than I would have other wise, and then knitting around plainly until the crew neck would have usually started, and then shaping the crew neck as if all was “normal.” When I went to knit the neck, I would knit plackets perpendicular to the “straight side of the neck opening, and then knitted the collar with rounded corners on either side of the opening.

More recently, I’ve taken to only setting aside a few stitches at the base of the neck, and the setting aside the “normal number of crew neck stitches at the normal time. In this case, I knit the collar normally, and knit a short hem along the sides of the “open neck,” creating more square corners.

Either option works fine, and is quite fetching. There are of course other possibilities and variations on this style of neck.

The Back of the Neck Until this point I’ve been mum as to what happens on the back of the neck. It’s perfectly acceptable to do absolutely nothing. and simply set aside a number equivalent to the number of stitches you decreased/set aside at the front in the middle of the back when you bind off (so that the shoulders line up.) I’ve more recently taken to doing some back of the neck shaping, this is more simple than it sounds:

About an inch and a half away from the shoulders, set aside the number of stitches that you’ve decreased from the front at this point (this is why I like to work in the round) on a thread at the back of the neck. For the remaining portion of the sweater, decrease on either side of the back neck steek/opening at the same rate that you are decreasing from the front. This works with every kind of neck that I can think of, and is one of those things that gives a sweater an extra little edge.

But wait there’s more I’m sure you still want to hear about cool neck shaping tricks, knitting collars on these neck openings and more. I think that I’ve given you all enough to chew on for a while. I’ll be back in a few days for a bonus episode in this series to cover more collar related issues.

Until then, be warm and I’ll see you all soon.

Cheers, tycho

Note: I tried to pre-post this last night, but it does seem to have failed. Alas. Here’s something that I hope will interest you. Tell me what you think!

One of the things I started doing during our unexpected hiatus, was to think about what was important to me about TealArt, and what I was most interested in doing in the future on the site. Server “mishaps” can do that to a fellow.

I think if the server had fouled up a year ago or even as many as six months ago, I would have just called it quits: the site wasn’t that active, I didn’t have plans/dreams for the future of the site, and with the addiction of LiveJournal and other semi-blogging outlets, I might have felt that it just wasn’t worth the effort. However, because it happened this year, I was faced with a very different feeling. I had ongoing projects that depended on TealArt, the Tumble-log and twitter was important to me, and I had a dream of a rather new TealArt project that I was excited about.

That project, called Station Keeping, is located in it’s own special corner of TealArt, but as always the posts will be part of the main TealArt blog. You can read more about Station Keeping on the site or on the accompanying Writer’s Wiki of course, but I’d like to tell you a bit about what I hope SK will become.

Station Keeping is an exploration of a couple of ideas and themes. It is a series much like the Hyper(digital)text Series, or the Teaching/Learning Knitting Series, but unlike these projects, it’s a work of fiction. The aim is not to discuss an issue of mild personal interest, but to tell a story. SK is also to be written collaboratively: while the hope is to have a unified and ongoing story--which I suspect we will, thanks to the editorial process--installments and episodes will be written by members of a writing team who will be responsible for the content and management of the series. I will participate, certainly, and even direct/cordinate for a while, until the writing team/community gets a sense of itself, but I envision the writing and the reading of this project as a community effort.

In terms of the story, SK is Science Fiction. No matter how much I run away from it, I find my self perpetually enthralled by the possibilities of the genre. One of my guides for TealArt is that it must be fun to work on, and I see no reason to fight the genre I love so much. Not surprisingly, Station Keeping is set on a brand new space station called Hanm Centre in the distant future, in orbit of a colony world not surprisingly known as “Hanm.” The station is the focal point of a lot of geo-political (spatial-political?) debate about the future of Humans' organization and residence in the galaxy, but mostly it’s just a port of call, a job, and a home to an eclectic group of folk. There are no aliens, ghosts, and humans of the future haven’t quite managed to “break” relativity. Station Keeping is in a lot of ways a fluffy space opera, but I would submit that fluffy space operas are fun, engaging, and fascinating: after all TealArt is supposed to be fun and engaging, so it all works out.

Having said that, I’m busy finishing up school for this semester, graduating, getting ready for grad school next year, and preparing to apply again next year; to mention nothing of the other TealArt projects that I’m already working on. Station Keeping won’t start it’s regular run for a few weeks, and possibly a month or so. So go ahead, you can call it vapor blogging, but in the mean time, I’d like to use Monday mornings (the time when I expect we’ll post SK installments, once we start), to post short updates about our progress in development, and our process. Once SK starts for real, the meta will become a more occasional feature, but I hope that you’ll enjoy this discussion.

If you’re interested in learning more about this project, I’d enjoy hearing from you, otherwise I hope you enjoy this discussion and the story/stories once it debuts.

cheers, tycho

I realized that my schpeal last time on reading hypertext sounded more like a complaint than an endorsement of a way of writing, but I don’t mean to come off like that. While I think it’s true that the advancement of technology: better portable text display, better design practices and standards, better fonts, better industry adoption, and so forth, would help digital text, I don’t don’t think we can blame it all on the technology.

I should also say, as a disclaimer that I’m not particularly interested in the artistic implications of hypertext. This isn’t to say that they aren’t there, more that, I don’t have any particular expertise or experience aside from, of course, the ongoing experiment of TealArt.com, and my own experience as a writer in several different contexts. Actually I think it’s more complicated than that, but I think that would need to be unpacked a bit more in a different context. What drew me to this topic, is more the prospect of paperless publishing and communicating, in concern with discussions about OpenAccess, a nagging interest in ergonomics, and not “oh cool, look at this new way to be creative.” Just so you know.

As I’ve been thinking about it, the discussion of “writing” or producing hypertext is so very closely tied to the publishing of digital, and the discussion is further muddied by

One of the things that people like a great deal about dead tree versions is the the fixty of type on a page. I’ve learned to remember passages in books by location on the page, and while the ability to search ameliorates this slightly, this cognitive ability is something that I think hypertexters would be wise to work with. While there are ways to break up text: images, column(s) and width, generally I suspect that people will engage the most with your text if they can absorb it in chunks that are about 500-750 words. This works out to be 3-4 good paragraphs, and all the usual edicts and suggestions regarding white-space remain relevant.

I’m also concerned with the issue of citation digital text. Not only is it hard to give precise citations for digital text, but footnotes and what not are equally difficult to produce in an authentic and appropriate format. I think we might be inclined to trace this at least in part to the development of the web (and more importantly) mark up languages (HTML/XML/etc) by people in the sciences where close textual referencing is not particularly common. Amongst bloggers, citation is achieved through linking, often to wikipedia (another debate for another day), and while this model increases the interconnectivity of the ‘blog community, but forces curious readers to jump through more hoops than perhaps is necessary, and is downright inconvenient if you’re citing/linking to a longer page. I suspect the next version of Markdown, will have some sort of allowance for footnotes, but I think there’s still a lot of room to think about how the practice of citing others’ work gets translated into digital formats. I like the MultiMarkdown, solution, but have ended up using the PHP Markdown Extra Format and some sort of XML format probably the solution. I’m starting to realize that so many of my problems could be solved with a much greater larger understanding of XML and some basic Perl or Python abilities.

But that’s a diversion, and I’ll bring us back around to the question of the week: How do we, as digital text creators, produce text (words etc.) that “work” best digitally. I definitely think manageable chunks are the way to go, and the weblog framework definitely pushes us towards a natural serialization, but thats as much cultural as anything. My second series of thoughts relates to an idea of genres. The kinds of things that seem to be the most succesful in digital formats are non-fiction things (manuals, essays on blogs, scientific/academic articles, correspondence etc.) and even though I think blogs might lend themselves particularly well to fiction, there isn’t a large community that I’m aware of, though I’d love to be corrected. I think length plays a role here, as does the general reticence to “curl up with a computer” for pleasure reading, but I think there’s something larger here. Part of it is without a doubt the fact that there’s something about the way we think of novels (ie. the structure and story telling technique) that is very tied to the book, and I also think that in a way the boundary between truth and fiction is somewhat blurry online, because of the way we tend to represent ourselves. Not that the same issues aren’t present in non-digital formats, but that we’re more sensitive to them in digital formats.

I hope this these fairly random thoughts can provide some inspiration. I’d like to be more coherent, and more focused with regards to some of the other subjects on my list to cover. I know that there are folks out there reading this, and I also know that I’m just a guy with a domain, and an overactive sense of opinion, so I’d love to hear what you think about these ideas/subjects.