Revise abstract & add to index.html

2 files changed, 23 insertions, 19 deletions

@@ -1,34 +1,38 @@
 ---
 title: Autocento of the breakfast table
-subtitle: abstract
+subtitle: _abstract_
 genre: prose
 
 id: abstract
-toc: "_abstract_"
+toc: abstract
 
 project:
     title: Front matter
     class: front-matter
 ...
 
-## Brief Description
+Technology has utterly changed the ways in which we interact with ourselves, society, and nature.
+Ways of thinking and collaborating thought all-but-impossible less than a generation ago have become commonplace, even necessary, in the Internet age.
+_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is an attempt to leverage the power of the Internet to capture the [author][]’s inspiration, composition, and revision processes all at one time, through a linked hypertext.
 
-_Autocento of the breakfast table_ is my Master's thesis, an inter/hypertextual exploration of the workings of inspiration, revision, and obsession.
-I've compiled this work over multiple years, and recently linked it all together to form a (hopefully) more cohesive whole.
-To make this easier than collating everything by hand, I've relied on a process that leverages open-source technologies to publish my work onto a web platform.
+As a website, _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is at first enigmatic.
+The reader is unable to merely consume the text; they must actively interact with it---by clicking links, in this case---in order to create a meaning.
+In doing so, the reader empathetically engages with the author’s published self, journeying with the author or around the author to create a text that is utterly unique to the moment it’s being read.
+In a sense, the reader is not merely a reader, but a user of the text in front of them: they can get as much or as little from it as they are willing.
 
-## Things to notice
+The Internet is the perfect medium for a text like _Autocento of the breakfast table_.
+Scott Rosenberg, in his essay “[Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?][]” on Medium, notes that “originally, the exact purpose of links was” to make “conceptual links” and connect “disparate thoughts” across a democratic space---the Web.
+The Web, envisioned this way, removes the arbitrary structuring of page order, publishing imprints, and temporality that print technology is bounded by.
+With a Web-like platform, ideas can live of themselves, by themselves, and for themselves: instead of ordering ideas by some value system, we can organically link them together by similarities.
 
-Take a look around the site.
-See how it's navigable: there are links within each article to other articles and to the wider web, mapping common images, themes, or inspirations;
-  there's also navigation links at the bottom of each page:
+The ideas that _Autocento of the breakfast table_ works with and links together are the [_hapax legomenon_][], or “something said only once,” and the _cento_, or “patchwork garment.”
+These two ideas are held in a kind of balance when expanded to the scale of a poem: while every word has necessarily been said before, every thought unoriginal, the author can hope to arrange these unoriginal thoughts into their own shapes.
+To put it another way, we’re all making pots out of the same clay, but each one is irrevocably ours.
+The cento of _Autocento of the breakfast table_ is the project itself, in its entirety; I am a composite of everything I’ve done.
 
-- The **φ** shows you the backlinks to each page.
-- The **◊** takes you back to the cover of the project, to start over.
-- The **ξ** takes you to a random article in the project.
-- Some pages also have _previous_ and _next_ links.  These take you to other articles in their original project-order.  It's another way to navigate the page.
+_Case Duckworth_
+_Flagstaff, 2015_
 
-Check out my [process narrative][] for the technical details of putting this site together, or see my [about page][] for an artist's statement.
-
-[process narrative]: process.html
-[about page]: about.html
+[author]: about_author.html
+[Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?]:
+[_hapax legomenon_]: hapax.html
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: How it happened
-genre: 'verse'
+genre: verse
 
 id: howithappened
 toc: "How it happened"