Mary Panttaja

I have been writing two books and have discovered a real need for a non-linear way of writing and presenting material, which of course is rather obviously something we understand in the digital medium. I am looking to both produce and present material as a “context” (instead of a linear flow) with overlapping and interweaving meta-structures. (Structures and attributes like time, sequence, themes, voicing, tempo, density, audience, multi-modal, etc.) We can improvise this with tagging and linked-lists, etc, but I can imagine a tool that supports the structures and illustrates how each unit of writing is woven into the weft of the material. I built a few kludgy tools to help me, but didn’t find the ability to manage as many of these threads as I would have liked.

I envision a tool in three parts:

• A visual, multi-structural context editor which allows you to identify media components (text, images, sound, video, whatever) with threads/identifiers/sequences and weave them into the context; ideally both the context data and the components are stored in a database;
• A flexible text editor with html/xml as basic targets and CSS applied according to the meta-structural definitions so that readers can “feel” the structures;
• A deployment module which delivers to a database, print, web, blog, wiki, or a hypermedia-context object (which includes a potentially infinite number of components) with all the links, sequences, and meta-structures as defined by the author.

I can hack a simple version of it with hypertext if I keep a complex diagram/map of the context, but without any support for the structures being built and the meaning of the links and threads. But, of course, modifying or restructuring anything, which is one of the important features of this medium, causes massive rework.

I can also see using the meta-structures to deliver the materials, allowing the reader to meander along paths, diverge, regroup, etc. making the intentional threads more obvious as navigational tools. (Also recording the paths taken.)

In short: I’m looking for a tool that allows the writer to create complex contexts instead of linear lines of development, but that includes a visual way to understand and manipulate the structures underlying the context.

It has been interesting to see these requirements arise in both my fiction and non-fiction writing . For the fiction, I was able to evolve a complex enough linear sequence to represent what I was getting at, but I don’t really see a way to properly sequence the other book—it really wants to be multi-structural. The concept of “writing contexts” (you can’t really call them books anymore) is an obvious application of the technology we have now—but I don’t really see a tool that covers what I envision.

So, the question is, are you aware of anyone who is working on such a model for both the writer/developer and the reader/consumer? Where the writer can define the complexity of the meta-structures within which he wants to compose and weave the context (with whatever constraints he wants to put on them); and the reader can explore the material within the meta-structural context with some access to the structures themselves.

I’m just thinking out loud. Sorry if I’m not quite making sense of it. I wanted to see if anyone knows someone working this direction before I start to think about tackling something like this myself.

Any suggestions?

(Some things I have looked into: Storyspace, Tinderbox (the closest thing I’ve found so far), hypertext editors; I’ve tapped into some of the research going on at UCLA and Vectors-A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular; also, publications by MIT Press in their Mediawork series.  And this morning I found a post over at Web Worker Daily with a lot of suggestions that I will be following up on.)

PPS. I meant to add that I realized that in many ways I’m looking for an object oriented component manager with multiple inheritance….a weird blend of my writing and software architect selves.