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.

In which I am a Promiscuous Linker
Saturday, 12 Mar 2005 :-:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about 16th and 17th century women's clothing. The author of textuality.org found such linking to be inspiring and promiscuous.

I must admit, however, that I do somewhat share Mark's mild annoyance that people forget to post their name on their weblog. I suspected that the person, who stated his/her college to be "outside of Philadelphia" had been to Swarthmore, but I had to dig further to find out the identity.

  • sigh* I really don't like having to dig like this. On one hand, I feel like I'm invading someone's privacy. On the other, all the information is publicly available and linked from the person's site. And he did call me a promiscuous linker.

But anyway, Scott Price has posted a hypertextual teaching portfolio and a number of other hypertexts online.

(odd note - my college's past president, Gerhard Spiegler, had a campaign to make Elizabethtown College into "The Swarthmore on the Susquehanna.")

Reading Scott's hypertexts reminded me how much the hatred of frames has affected people who do hypertext. When I set out to write a piece of hypertext, I don't even think about multiple windows or frames. This is odd, since they *are* a tool that is available, even if they do present some problems with control.

Tinderbox, by Eastgate, solves this problem by saving the state of the windows -- which are open, where they are on the screen, etc.. Hmm. I wonder if it would be possible to make a "bookmark" feature similar to the "remember" feature on GNU/Linux desktop systems. In GNOME and KDE, one can, as in Tinderbox, ask the system to remember all of your application windows and reopen them when you log in once more. But in Englightenment, one can store several of these sorts of states and return to them at will.

Right now window locations are stored in the Tinderbox XML entries as an attribute of the item represented in the window:

<attribute name="WindowPlace" >Rect[ 50 50 550 350 ] </attribute>

Building an interface that does bookmarks like this could be handled with a Nelson-like zipper list. It could be very handy for people who work using a large number of open notes and need to switch between sets of open notes.

Although, I must admit, the demand for this sort of feature may be small.