new webStuff ( updated 12 July 2006, 10:12am )
| current | faxx | haxx | newNews | 2d/3d | words |
| current | faxx | haxx | newNews | 2d/3d | words |
When the tools of writing change how does the writer's job change? Given that the last sea change in word writing technology hit Europe 500 some years ago history is not likely to offer concise, specific answers. The impact of the moveable type printing press on the social track of history is hard to overstate. Religion, the political map, science, and the arts were profoundly changed as the work product of press integrated into these institutions. Profound change, like a meteor crashing into the dinosaurs' planet.
The rapid growth and reach of Internet-based writing is tribute to the net's remarkable talent for making and managing connections. With the cost of reproduction pegged at near zero, with free global distribution at light speed, the traditional print media industry has two excellent reasons to fear the upstart technology.
But so far the writer's task has changed little. With the important exception of hyper-linking, web-based text reads just like print-based text. Redirect the web page output to the system printer and it is print-based text. Important writerly skills—word choice, punctuation, and spelling—work the same in either media, as important tools in service to the essential writer talent that maps thought to readable word.
The web production suite hands the writer new tools. CSS, a protocol of text display specification, grants the writer fine control over the document's appearance. Typography, page layout, and color, tools traditionally in other hands, are selectable parameters of webDoc publishing, simple choices. Image reproduction is a trivial webDoc exercise making pictures and image manipulation freely available for illustration and mood. And a computer programming language is part of the standard web document, a tool for communication that has no precedent in the genome of word media.
Thus far, not surprisingly, web-based writing looks just like print-based writing. Writing is usually regarded as a discipline unto itself, a standalone skill slow in the acquisition. The satellite processes that convert manuscript to published document are handled by artisans, an industrial process organized around economic efficiencies and based on a couple centuries of practical experience. In contrast, computer programming is generally regarded as a collection of disciplines traditionally taught as math or science, distinct from the art of writing.
new webStuff offers a close look at some individual possibilities. Each of the webDocs presented here is an experiment to uncover / discover some of the potential and capability of this new medium. Most contain some degree of computer programming challenge. Few are finished in the sense that the volume in a bookstore window is a finished product. Many rest at a point where the computer programming challenge is met, the proof of concept, leaving undone the words and format that complete a connection to the reader. Of course, the conventions that commission and underwrite this kind of work and judge its product don't exist yet. So it is difficult to measure just how incomplete they are.
It is an open question whether stories devoted to facts are more boring in the reading or the writing. Regardless, avoiding fact courts opinion and opinion is boring in ways facts can't begin to touch.
One problem with stories devoted to matters of fact — there is a spectrum of reader interest. For most, a quick summary is all the exposure needed or wanted. For others, a single and specific fact is their reason for reading. For a motivated few, all facts about the story are too few. webDocs offer means of satisfying all three of the these reader types.
(more about facts, the abilities of webDocs to de-borify facts. the manner of display determines the content communicated.)
There is no feature or structure of traditional print media that compares to JavaScript, the programming language of web documents. The act of programming a computer is usually called "writing", though it is more liking writing a piece of music than composing words in a natural language. (explore, experiment, try & err.)
Haxx set out to combine word writing and computer program writing in tandem. The subjects presented here share an element of complexity that natural language doesn't cover well. Lotteries work with numbers beyond our ken. Prime numbers appear at unpredictable intervals. A game of Chess can be completely described in very little space but remains a outside the grasp of calculation because of the enormous number of possibilities rising out of most positions.
Each of the subjects, lottery, prime numbers, and chess, is offered twice. Some of the difference between the later and earlier versions is experience, the lessons of error. None of the offerings is a finished product. ( as mentioned before … In each example the programming is stable, the display and word elements left at varying stages of 'in progress'.)
(collaborative journalism, citizen journalism, interactive journalism …)
(art in the sense of museums.)
(besides the calculating skills of the computer … other tricks include selectively revealing of text, communicating complex stories by revealing the elements as a series of simpler elements, understanding the whole by metabolizing small pieces. rsh is a fairly straight print-type response to the hyper-linked net.)