Grand Text Auto

Have you been following this whole Harvard student book plagiarism story? I’m sorry that this young girl, pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and, no doubt, by her own ambition, should have fallen into this trap so early in her career. But the fact is that although she has been manipulated and packaged, what has happened to her has very largely been her own fault. The thing is, it’s not conventions of character and plot that Viswanathan is accused of copying, it’s whole sentences of text.

It’s not Tomb Raider, and it’s not Doom – but it is quite an adventure. At least, it’s a few minutes’ worth of an adventure. It’s Tomb of Doom. In Flash, and in claymation style.

The latest version of Chris Crawford’s elusive Erasmatron — renamed the Storytron — is out. Here’s his announcement of the pre-alpha version of their Story World Authoring Tool (Swat):

At last, after years of work and rivers of hype, our first version of Swat is available for download! It’s not even an alpha version — not all the features are in place, and there are plenty of bugs. But it’s good enough for you to start learning about our technology and how it all works. We would very much like to hear your comments on Swat. Yes, it’s far from complete — this is version 0.51, because we figure it’s only half-finished. And if you’re leery of being a lab rat, you might want to wait a month or two for a more complete version. But if you’re the kind of pioneering soul we seek, then you can exert a lot of influence over the development of the technology by getting in at this early stage.

Below, I’ve included three photos from my reading of Ream, taken by Jill Ivey, along with a link to a new digital version of the poem that was done by Jim Carpenter.

Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about: hypertext.

Okay, that’s not exactly the way that Melanie Hundley’s series of questions begins. But Hundley did contact me with a survey she is doing for her dissertation in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. It’s about how authors who have written both for print and hypertext compose their work.

I offered to post the questions and my replies here on Grand Text Auto, so that she could simply continue with her the survey in comments following this post. Others who want to answer some or all of the questions themselves, or to discuss them or my responses, are of course welcome to do so in comments, too. On to the questions and answers…

My poem Ream, discussed before on GTxA, is now – thanks to encouragement from Andrew – available in a Web edition.

Here it is: Digital Ream.