Theoreti.ca – Page 256 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Skins

Ruth Nichols has written a M.Sc. thesis on skins, “A study into the Useful Application of Skins for Information Filtering” (Computer and Software, McMaster University, 2003). She has brought out an interesting area of user interface design and theory that is connected with the work done on Mods in the gaming community – namely Skins.

She writes that “The original idea of skins was developed by Winamp, an MP3 player build by a small company Nullsoft. Winamp was first released in 1997.” (p. 20) Winamp was officialy released in 1998 and was bought by AOL in 1999. Skinning was added in 1998.
Continue reading Skins

Lucky Wander Boy

LUCKY WANDER BOY is a novel about a character obsessed with computer games. Like “Run Lola Run” (the movie) the structure of the novel has game-like features as does the plot. The narrator moves through levels. There are a number of “replay” chapters at the end that play out different endings.
Continue reading Lucky Wander Boy

Affordances and Prospects

Stan Ruecker today successfully defended a thesis on theorizing rich propospect affordances for interpretively-tagged text collections. Two things that are very interesting about the thesis are:

1. He traces the literature on affordances (that show up without a lot of background in UI discussions like Norman) to JJ Gibson and environmental psychology.

2. He proposes prospects (visualizations that have a meaningful representation of all items in a collection) as useful way to interface with medium sized text collections like Orlando.
Continue reading Affordances and Prospects

Beyond Productivity, IT and Creativity

Summary and Recommendations | Beyond Productivity is a report by National Academy of Sciences that looks at the importance of fostering creativity and information technology. The report looks at how creativity emerges and the need to support play.
Continue reading Beyond Productivity, IT and Creativity

Text Toy Language 2

The grammar of TBC (Text by Code) should have:
– Primitives: Paths, Glyphs, Characters, Words, Strings, and Element
– Methods: To get text, parse it into primitives, manipulate it, place it, render it, and make it move.
Continue reading Text Toy Language 2

Valence

valence | ars 2001 | benjamin fry is a work that uses text visualization to explore two German texts by Goethe and Wittgenstein.
Continue reading Valence

Text Toy Language

Text By Numbers. Is it possible to design an interactive text toy development language? Has this been done, or do we have the tools already? Can we do this in the spirit of Design By Numbers or Proce55ing?
Continue reading Text Toy Language

Eunoia

Christian Bˆk Eunoia Toronto: Coach House Books, http://www.chbooks.com/online/eunoia/index.html, 2001 is a book with Oulipian experiments. Eunoia is written with a chapter for each vowel. Each chapter works within constraints, one of which is to use all words that only use that vowel. The chapters also begin with something about writing. There is a Flash version of the Chapter on E online along with the full text of the other chapters.
Continue reading Eunoia

Patterns for Web Usability

ACM Ubiquity Review: A Pattern Language for Web Usability. This review is of a book by Ian Graham (not, I think, the Graham of the HTML books) on applying pattern thinking to web usability. The interesting thing is the way patterns are becoming a form of interdisciplinary theorizing.

http://www.trireme-international.com/Wu/whatis.htm

Radiohead Pictures

H A I L T O T H E T H I E F is a page in the www.radiohead.com site where they have some neat word orientied shows done in Flash. The “89 instances of LA” is a series of found texts that flash by. The last one “No Way out” is intriguing – it is a black box navigating like a car around a Mondrian cityscape while words flash below.