As promised, though somewhat later than I had initially intended I am here to provide you with a list of links for things about hypertext that I think you might be interested in. Kind of a “further reading” section, if you will. Some of these pieces I have thoughts about and i’ll include notes regarding this, but for the most part I just have some resources that I found helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy!

  • Steam Punk Magazine

  • This, ironically, is what started the series. I really like what SPM has done, and their publication is really quite good looking. It’s all PDF and not “digital” except under the strictest of technicalities. This isn’t a bad thing, but when reading it I thought, “if this is the best digital production around these days and it’s not really digital, what does this say about the possibility for digital production?” And I continue to think that this is an important question to ask.

  • Cory Doctorow Writes About digital Reading

  • Cory Doctorow, is I think working from the very front of a lot of the questions about digital media consumption and production. Most of his work, at least what he is known for, is all about digital intellectual property, but this article about reading from computer screens is quite good.

  • Persistent.info

  • This is just another blog, written by a Google employee, and I include it here because I like the way that the blog posts arrange themselves in columns if the window width gets to be too big. The CSS wouldn’t work if the text were much longer than it is in the posts for this site, but it’s a nifty idea, none the less.

  • Textual Instruments

  • A site that has a couple of nifty looking hypertexts, worth checking out. I haven’t actually had time to read them yet, unfortunately.

  • Fiction Markup Language

  • This is an example of an XML-based langauge for fiction writing, and it has classes and items for characters, settings, as well as book/chapter level organization. While I really like the idea here, I fear that it could be really constraining in terms of form, and structure. At the same time, the strength of these sorts of things is in the parser, and I haven’t seen one yet, so who knows. It might be a good format option for editing software like Scrivener or other software intended for fiction-like writing.

  • Hypertext Community

  • Swooter, books via twitter

  • Swooter is a script that will regularly serialize, via twitter, any plain text file. Someone’s using it to serialize James Joyce, but the implications and possibilities here are pretty nifty. It’s like the “read classics via email” project, but I think the aspiring hypertext author could do some rather nifty things with this tool.

  • institute for the future of the book blog

  • if:book is a project out of the Annenberg Center that explores and works on the future of the book (I love good naming schemes), and their blog is really top notch.

  • Company Therapist Hypertext

  • Academic Hack Open Access

  • Academic Hack talks about open access, which I think could frame the academic discussion regarding academic publishing in a productive way. In a lot of ways, I’ve come to believe that however the academic publishing “problem” resolves itself will have important implications for how the mainstream market reforms in the future, and I’m pretty cofident that academic publishing will see reform before the mainstream. But you can argue that, if you want.

  • Savage Minds: Open Access your Diss

  • I think the idea of making dissertations open access is a wonderful idea. There is so much research that gets done as part of people’s doctoral programs that never sees the light of day. While I think a lot of people would cringe at the thought (and frankly I can’t go back more than a semester without cringing), it seems that getting the information out there is worthwhile. If a dissertation is supposed to form the basis of your first book/series of articles, then, indeed the instinct is to clamp down on the diss text; but having said that I think having dissertations available might make it easier for people to more productivly move beyond that text, and that could be a good thing.

  • Making MediaCommons

  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, one of the creators and driving force behind MediaCommons, an interesting and very forward thinking model for academic publishing. At the present time, it’s a Media Studies project, which makes a great deal of sense, but the model can and likely will be ported to other disciplines, and I look forward to that with great anticipation.

  • Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

  • Allin Cottrell explains/explores the ways that the word-processor model is ineffective for constructing text in digital communication, and I think that a lot of these general themes can be extrapolated to a discussion of writing.

    Ok, that’s all I have for this time. If you have other hypertext/digital (textual) media sources, I’d love to read what you have to offer. This entry also marks the end of the regular hypertext series here, I’ll post a round up next Wednesday, but there’ll be the intro to the new series next week.

Thanks for Reading, tycho