Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

Implementation
Monday, 16 Aug 2004 :-:

When I went to Philadelphia on Sunday, I was very excited -- and a bit nervous. Why?

There is a novel in Philadelphia.

I was going to photograph it.

In July, someone got picked up by the police for photographing this novel.

** * **

I saw another sticker on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Unlike most novels, Implementation doesn't exist in a book. Rather, it exists on hundreds of stickers around Philadelphia. Looking for the novel has made my trip to Philadelphia more exciting.

Implementation is very relevant to hypertext writing -- thinking about it helps me think about how I could better create hypertext systems.

Although all the text is written by the two authors, the novel itself is up to three groups of people. The ultimate authors are those who print the stickers and put them up all over the city. They can author whatever experience they want. But even they can't determine the final structure. That is up to the reader. A reader may encounter just one paragraph, or a reader could make a conscious effort to read the entire set of stickers. The novel requires reader interaction in the writing process, for the reader has to find the stickers and construct the connections of meaning between them.

The final authors (deauthors?), I suppose, are the sanitation people who take down the stickers. I do feel a little bad for them -- there's enough residue in the city already.

Is it a good novel? To answer that, I'm going to pull a phrase completely out of context from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The novel...

is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it

This novel isn't something to I'd recommend reading for content, but for the idea -- the Implementation.

update: To be fair, it's not supposed to be contiguous, which is probably part of my discomfort . Many of the labels seem intended just to raise suspicion or challenge accepted ideas -- by themselves. Of course, I might just have seen some of the more risque segments. But it's still a fascinating work.