We were talking yesterday (and Bob earlier) about how to better organize content on if:book – how to highlight active discussion threads, or draw attention to our various categories. Something more dynamic than a list of links on the sidebar, or a bunch of hot threads advertised at the top. A significant problem with blogs is the tyranny of the vertical column, where new entries call out for attention on a stack of rapidly forgotten material, much of which might still be worth reading even though it was posted back in the dark ages (i.e. three days ago). Some of the posts that get buried still have active discussions stemming from them. Just today, “ways of seeing, ways of writing” – posted nearly two weeks ago – received another comment. The conversation is still going. (See also Dan’s “blog reading: what’s left behind”.)
This points to another thorny problem, still unsolved nearly 15 years into the world wide web, and several years into the blogging craze: how to visualize asynchronous conversations – that is, conversations in which time lapses between remarks. If the conversation is between only two people, a simple chronological column works fine – it’s a basic back-and-forth. But consider the place where some of the most dynamic multi-person asynchronous conversations are going on: in the comment streams of blog entries. Here you have multiple forking paths, hopping back and forth between earlier and later remarks, people sticking close to the thread, people dropping in and out. But again, you have the tyranny of the vertical column.
We’re using an open source platform called Drupal for our NextText project, which has a blog as its central element but can be expanded with modular units to do much more than we’re able to do here. The way Drupal handles comments is nice. You have the usual column arranged chronologically, with comments streaming downward, but readers have the option of replying to specific comments, not just to the parent post. Replies to specific comments are indented slightly, creating a sort of sub-stream, and the the fork can keep on going indefinitely, indenting rightward.
This handles forks and leaps fairly well, but offers at best only a partial solution. We’re still working with a print paradigm: the outline. Headers, sub-headers, bullet points. These distinguish areas in a linear stream, but they don’t handle the non-linear character of complex conversations. There is always the linear element of time, but this is extremely limiting as an organizing principle. Interesting conversations make loops. They tangle. They soar. They sag. They connect to other conversations.
But the web has so far been dominated by time as an organizing principle, new at the top and old at the bottom (or vice versa), and this is one the most-repeated complaints people have about it. The web favors the new, the hot, the immediate. But we’re dealing with a medium than can also handle space, or at least the perception of space. We need not be bound to lists and outlines, we need not plod along in chronological order. We could be looking at conversations as terrains, as topographies.
The electronic word finds itself in an increasingly social context. We need to design a better way to capture this – something that gives the sense of the whole (the big picture), but allows one to dive directly into the details. This would be a great challenge to drop into a design class. Warren Sack developed a “conversation map” for news groups in the late 90s. From what I can tell, it’s a little overwhelming. I’m talking about something that draws people right in and gets them talking. Let’s look around.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
I have a funny view of on-line presentations. I always assume that they will be inept or simplistic simulations of source modes of communication such as conversation. It is miraculous that screen presentations can simulate so many communication genres, but I always assume that the result will be primitive.
The scroll was an early format for the book. The scroll has a number of presentational features including its characteristic tracking for text, the use of a cursor and a typical functionality as a prompt for recitation.
Screen presentation appears to have adopted this exemplar. The scroll tracking is certainly there, although in the opposite axis to that typical of antiquity. The cursor is also there. The cursor was originally the pointed finger and it proved important in early writing that frequently lacked word separation or punctuation. The cursor is present throughout the manuscript era where it is frequently drawn in the margins. The original cursor is perpetuated to this day in Judaic liturgy by the silver Yad that travels the lines of the scroll. The scroll is also associated with prompting recitation. Both the Torah and the teleprompter are exemplars.
As I said, screen presentation seems to borrow these features of the scroll. In my view, screen based presentation is still light years from the presentational sophistication of the codex with its elegant manipulated navigation, its association with silent reading facilitated by ingenious features of paratext and its functionality as a prompt for writing. Default line length alone incapacitates the screen as a simulation of the codex.
So what about simulation of conversation? In my view, screen based presentation is still light years from compiling the visual and audio prompts of face to face conversation and far from echoing the layers of meaning and web of interaction and participation found in group discussion. How could a screen based simulation of conversation be better designed? Perhaps only by dilution of our expectations and compromise of our need to communicate. But, I suspect that such views are not consistent with expectations.
I do like the activity of listservs such as the one at SHARP (Society for History of Authorship, Reading and Publication). With a listserv a single thread receives most of the attention and always with the same tag. It has the feel of authentic conversation in at least two ways. One is the real time aspect and other is the provocation to a self-selecting discussion sub-group. Of course everything depends on an astute initial provocation. There was a good plug for FotB.org at the SHARP list under a thread on Google and Yahoo print imaging.
Gary, did you take a look at the PDFs I posted in the comments on this thread? Do they approach readibility from your perspective? They’re an attempt to deal with (some of) these using commonly available technology, with some allowances made for the screen: while the text is divided into conveniently sized pages, there aren’t folios, for example, because they’re less useful on an electronic screen of text. Would be curious to know what you think of them. Obviously, you can’t recreate print paratext on the screen – but can the screen have a paratext of its own?
Looking forward to NextText.
Making conversations flow on a screen is always hard. Back in the 1980s a set of tools for conversations – instances being Confer, Caucus, and Picospan – helped people manage a bunch of individual discussions on a single system. Relatively long conversations ensued on relatively slow links.
The blogging format places much more of an emphasis on the author of the original text vs. the many authors of the comments. Some systems make that distinction less visible.
Gary Frost brings things down to the very point: “Of course everything depends on an astute initial provocation.” Conversations tend to flow when there is provocation. However, there are two things to consider; in a “real conversation” the interlocutors jump in and out of a thread inspired or piqued by the other(s). They usually don’t wait until a speaker is done with the whole of his thought, unless he is a fabulously articulate one, or a true raconteur. It almost seems necessary to actually get together, in real time, to be able to actually converse. Isn’t that what “chatting” has come to mean?