From 96ceefa9c99a45d84af7ac8afb637dccbadc3f87 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Case Duckworth Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 19:43:04 -0700 Subject: Revise abstract & add to index.html --- text/abstract.txt | 40 ++++++++++++++++++++++------------------ 1 file changed, 22 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) (limited to 'text/abstract.txt') diff --git a/text/abstract.txt b/text/abstract.txt index ea30fbb..649cdab 100644 --- a/text/abstract.txt +++ b/text/abstract.txt @@ -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 -- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81