Notebook of Sand: J. Nathan Matias

• Contents

Main | Writings | About the Title
Academic Integrity Posters
English at Cambridge
Leadership Miniblog
Colophon

2004: Earlier | March | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec |

2005: Jan | Feb | March | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec |

2006: Jan | Feb | March | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Now

Flickr TinderboxRSS

• Contact: jnm@rubberpaw.com

• Curriculum Vitae

• Recent Publications

Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections
Hypertext '09
Philadelphia Fullerine: A Case Study
in 3-Dimensional Hypermedia
An Accordion for the World
Review of Tinderbox (2004)
Overview of RSS Readers (2004)
LinuxWorld 2004 (NYC) in review
What is a Wiki? (2003)
Caffeinate Your Hypertext (2003)

• Recent Projects

World University Project
Cambridge Union- Guide '07
Read for the Sky
Philadelphia Fullerine
Elizabethtown College Website
Harbour Coffee Sales

• 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 Dream of the Perfect Hypertext System
Monday, 6 Sep 2004 :-:

I had an odd dream the other day...

After decades of research, we were able to create a technology system that could understand, store, track, and interpret human thought and experience. It was a tremendous effort to bring things to that state. Thousands, tens of thousands of researchers and programmers gave their working lives to the project. It took slow, methodical progress, and the periodic bursts of brilliant leaps in progress forced everyone to go back, re-evaluate, and redesign years of work.

But things worked so well, so smoothly. Annoyances, lags, and errors were removed daily. Each improvement brought more excitement, more joy in the endeavor.

Finally, it was completed. When we finished putting life, the universe, and everything into the computer, everyone logged on and was happy. For it was completed.

I looked over their shoulders and fainted in surprise.

What did I see?

They did a perfect job. All the wholeness of human experience was bound up with the computer. All the pain, the suffering, cruelty, and deceit, the joy, the love, the hopeless despair was there.

** * **

In the latest issue of Tekka, Cathy Marshall takes a stand on The Semantic Web. Is it safe? she asks. (You really ought to subscribe to Tekka, but you can also read the article on Cathy's site)

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