NOTES ON WORK IN PROGRESS: ANNINGAN
This one started like all the others do: with the basic idea of
making an interactive poetic environment. In this case, the
original vision was to create a sonnet via user interaction: one
would be presented with three game interfaces (a fill-in-the-
blank interaction, a drag-and-drop matching interaction, and a
fake chat interaction). Every user response, particularly those
captured during the chat, would be fed into an array; I would
then take slices from each array member to construct the sonnet,
which I would have printed from an invisible frame in the
document...
As time went on, though, I became more interested in the
chat interaction. What if I made the piece like a fake chatroom,
wherein the work "spoke" to the user, and the user's responses to
this determined what the piece said back to the user? So I
deleted all of the work I'd done on the previous interfaces and
began in earnest to concentrate on the chat portion of the piece.
And then the ghost of ye olde hypertext chimed in: "Hey,
dillweed, what if this were a hypertext fictive poetic piece?
Say, one in which the user's responses determined the flow of the
work, as opposed to using ye olde hypertext reference link?"
Thus the piece was born. Or the idea, the skeleton, was
scaffolded over the previous version.
Not too long ago, my beautiful girlfriend took a proficiency
test online. Part of this test was essay-based...and then the
application graded her essay RIGHT THERE ONLINE! This puzzled me,
as my understanding of computers and language was that the
machine couldn't REALLY read user-input text; it couldn't, for
example, understand a sentence you typed into a form; it could
only store that sentence in a variable for future use. So, when
she told me that this had happened, I started digging for methods
that would simulate reading. Ultimately, what the essay-grader
did was search for keywords in certain places in the document.
Once I figured out how to do this in actionscript, I knew that it
was possible to truly simulate interaction with the user. The
user's responses would be scanned for certain keywords; the
piece's output would vary depending on the presence or absence of
these keywords...
In this way, it became possible to write a hypertext that
didn't depend on links. Instead, the user invested actual
responses into the piece; this (in theory, at least) would deepen
the user's commitment in the work, and truly tailor the work
around the user's activity. In traditional hypertext, the user
only invests a mouse click; other than that, she remains outside
the work; none of her activity is truly crucial to the work's
manifestation. With the methods used in Anningan, she becomes
immersed in the world of the piece.
This one started like all the others do: with the basic idea of
making an interactive poetic environment. In this case, the
original vision was to create a sonnet via user interaction: one
would be presented with three game interfaces (a fill-in-the-
blank interaction, a drag-and-drop matching interaction, and a
fake chat interaction). Every user response, particularly those
captured during the chat, would be fed into an array; I would
then take slices from each array member to construct the sonnet,
which I would have printed from an invisible frame in the
document...
As time went on, though, I became more interested in the
chat interaction. What if I made the piece like a fake chatroom,
wherein the work "spoke" to the user, and the user's responses to
this determined what the piece said back to the user? So I
deleted all of the work I'd done on the previous interfaces and
began in earnest to concentrate on the chat portion of the piece.
And then the ghost of ye olde hypertext chimed in: "Hey,
dillweed, what if this were a hypertext fictive poetic piece?
Say, one in which the user's responses determined the flow of the
work, as opposed to using ye olde hypertext reference link?"
Thus the piece was born. Or the idea, the skeleton, was
scaffolded over the previous version.
Not too long ago, my beautiful girlfriend took a proficiency
test online. Part of this test was essay-based...and then the
application graded her essay RIGHT THERE ONLINE! This puzzled me,
as my understanding of computers and language was that the
machine couldn't REALLY read user-input text; it couldn't, for
example, understand a sentence you typed into a form; it could
only store that sentence in a variable for future use. So, when
she told me that this had happened, I started digging for methods
that would simulate reading. Ultimately, what the essay-grader
did was search for keywords in certain places in the document.
Once I figured out how to do this in actionscript, I knew that it
was possible to truly simulate interaction with the user. The
user's responses would be scanned for certain keywords; the
piece's output would vary depending on the presence or absence of
these keywords...
In this way, it became possible to write a hypertext that
didn't depend on links. Instead, the user invested actual
responses into the piece; this (in theory, at least) would deepen
the user's commitment in the work, and truly tailor the work
around the user's activity. In traditional hypertext, the user
only invests a mouse click; other than that, she remains outside
the work; none of her activity is truly crucial to the work's
manifestation. With the methods used in Anningan, she becomes
immersed in the world of the piece.
posted by Lewis LaCook at
5:21 AM
