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+---
+title: Autocento of the breakfast table
+subtitle: _abstract_
+genre: prose
+
+id: abstract
+toc: abstract
+
+project:
+    title: Front matter
+    class: front-matter
+...
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+_Case Duckworth_
+_Flagstaff, 2015_
+
+[author]: about_author.html
+[Will Deep Links Ever Truly Be Deep?]:
+[_hapax legomenon_]: hapax.html