From bccfb001ad3c250c2fd7c11b92c247abefe8233e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Case Duckworth Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2015 13:59:29 -0700 Subject: Move frontmatter to front-matter; add colophon --- front-matter/abstract.txt | 38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 38 insertions(+) create mode 100644 front-matter/abstract.txt (limited to 'front-matter/abstract.txt') diff --git a/front-matter/abstract.txt b/front-matter/abstract.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..649cdab --- /dev/null +++ b/front-matter/abstract.txt @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +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 -- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81