The Friday Fillip

“One thing leads to another” again, starting with Hypertextopia, an online writing environment built by Jeremy Ashkenas. The idea is one of a number that have tried to capitalize on the ability of html and the web to allow a network of non-linear linkages. Essentially, you construct a “story” using text or pictures and link either to major elements as your story advances or to “shards” of one sort or another that strike off in parenthetical directions — all of which is better explained, unsurprisingly, in the short movie provided on the site.

Take a wander through the Grand Library of others’ stories to see what can be done, starting, perhaps with Ashkenas’s own “Hypertextopia Manifesto” — but only for a little way, because, for a Friday it gets quite dense in its discussion of literary systems.

And if fractioning things into shards isn’t fissiparous enough for you, there’s a set of “power tools” that will shake things up in odd ways. There’s the Markov Chainsaw, the ClinamEncoder, the 1337/Pager Coder, and the Synesthete.

This last gives you a glimpse of what a form of synesthesia might be like, where, in this case, each letter of the alphabet is seen as having a particular colour. And speaking of synesthesia is neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, thanks to TED. His whole lecture on brain function is interesting, but the bit on his (world first) scientific explanation of synesthesia begins at about minute 18, easily found thanks to the nifty Adobe Flash popup contents bar (once you’re past the annoying intro music). What interests me especially is his linking of synesthesia to the ability to use metaphor.

Which leads me — without too much wrenching — to the Analogical Thesaurus, “a research product of the Creative Language Systems Group in the Computer Science Dept. of University College Dublin.” This online device gives you a variety of ways to get access to a term or idea: alphabetical, frame-related, taxonomic, analogic, and metonymic. This is a complex tool and takes some fooling around with in order to figure out how it works.